This week, City State Entertainment introduced a brand new game. The factor is, City State had been kinda supposed to nonetheless be engaged on Camelot Unchained, a reimagining of fort-fightin’ MMORPG Dark Age Of Camelot. It solely rocketed previous its two million dollars crowdfunding target an entire seven years in the past. But with no launch in sight for the long-awaited castle-crasher, CSE is providing its new game to backers without cost, insisting its improvement is an important a part of constructing Camelot’s massively multiplayer maintain.
Design chief Mark Jacobs took to a YouTube stream this week to announce Final Stand: Ragnarok (or Ragnarok: Colossus, or just Colossus), City State’s model new smash ’em up (cheers, Eurogamer). The DAoC and Warhammer: Online vet continues to be going for enormous battles, however Ragnarok is about to be a completely PvE affair – slaughtering hundreds of AI foes and defending towers on an enormous battlefield. From the gameplay proven, it seems relatively Smite-y, however with far more mooks to smash.
It can be, notably, not Camelot Unchained. (Gameplay demo kicks off at roughly 1:27:00)
In all the three-hour stream, little or no data is given on the long-suffering MMO. Jacobs does sometimes point out how the event of Ragnarok: Colossus – which started final July – has assisted with CU’s matchmaking and server stability. Speaking to MassivelyOP, Jacobs notes that Colossus has been an important half in preserving Camelot funded.
“Without the push on Colossus, we wouldn’t have gotten the additional investment in CSE from our investors, which was used, in part, to expand the team significantly. That, in turn, resulted in work that will speed up the remainder of CU’s development, as well as add things that weren’t planned for CU at launch.”
Despite Camelot’s improvement beginning far sufficient prior to now that RPS co-founder and present robot-wrangler Jim Rossignol covered it for us, Jacobs reckons Ragnarok will nonetheless hit launch earlier than Camelot. It’s nonetheless not an MMO, for one, and Jacobs informed MassivelyOP that there’s nonetheless loads of work to do on the technical facet of Camelot. Namely, changing all the server back-end to Linux, one thing Jacobs insists “had to happen”.
“By completing things like Linuxification now, we’re saving [the backers] from having to have patience in CU’s development months from now. As I’ve said to the Backers who have been helping us test, Linuxification had to happen either way, and would it have been better for it to happen when more of the game was developed? I think that most of them would have been more frustrated.”
That’s in all probability a bummer for people who’ve been ready for the DAoC successor for practically a decade. And, as somebody who poured too many hours into Mythic’s ill-fated successor, Warhammer Online, I kinda get it. Those games had an amazing factor occurring – even when it was kinda janky and required ludicrous numbers of gamers to be on-line in the identical place on the identical time.
Jacobs appears actually offered on the concept of providing an additional game to CU followers, with CSE are providing a free copy of Ragnarok to Camelot backers. But they’re additionally claiming to refund anybody who’s had sufficient of this and desires to chop their losses.
