Camelot unchained factions update#
Camelot unchained factions free#

'I won't try to tell DAOC players that our new project will meet all their desires in this regard. 'I'd like it to be very clear that we are not making a sequel,' Jacobs told Massively. The similarities between Camelot Unchained and Dark Age of Camelot are striking, then, but Jacobs doesn't consider it a sequel. That's almost exactly the same as Dark Age of Camelot, which was split into Albion (Arthurian mythology), Hibernia (Irish mythology) and Midgard (Norse mythology). It's being made by City State Entertainment and the project is led by Mark Jacobs, one of the founders of Mythic Entertainment and one of the leaders of the Dark Age of Camelot MMO project.Ĭamelot Unchained features three factions/realms fighting each other: an Arthurian English realm, an Irish Tuatha Dé Danann realm and a Viking Scandinavian realm. Of course we still don’t know if Camelot Unchained will be successful, since there are still a lot of things that could go wrong during development and after release (and Mark Jacobs sure knows this pitfall well, having experienced the effects of a loss of focus with Dark Age of Camelot‘s expansion Trials of Atlantis), but the simple idea of focusing on a small and specific niche puts the game in the advantageous condition where the fat is trimmed while still retaining a core community that will support it, as the success on Kickstarter clearly demonstrates.Camelot Unchained is a sequel to Dark Age of Camelot in all but name - and even that's quite close. Remove one of the two “Pv” from the equation, and you clean a large percentage of the balancing problems off the chess board. Balancing the same abilities for PvP and PvE is a development nightmare, and almost always results in one having to take a back seat to the other, creating quite a lot of unhappy people within the community. The obvious and rather sad result is that the bleeding normally slows down, and in some cases it even stops, but the quality of the experience lowers for everyone involved.Ī further perk comes in the realm of balancing, which is arguably one of the biggest problems a MMORPG studio has to face. A lot of resources need to be moved away from keeping everyone happy and engaged, and diverted into enticing players to spend as much as possible in the cash shop. It also comes at the price of a rather massive shift in development philosophy.

It’s a placebo solution, as they don’t raise the level of satisfaction of their players, but they simply lower the level of satisfaction needed to actually keep them around and to entice new ones to replace those that leave.

Camelot unchained factions free#

When they discover that their ability to make everyone happy simply isn’t up to par, the only way they have to address the almost unstoppable bleed of subscribers (and money) is to go free to play (or more precisely hybrid) and lower the entry barrier in order to keep their numbers up.

Pay to Play MMORPG developers are simply trying too hard to make everyone happy, and in most cases they’re failing.

Camelot unchained factions update#

How many times you’ve seen the masses unleash the rage on a MMORPG’s official forums because the next big update doesn’t involve what each and every one of them would like to see? When you have to make everyone and his sister happy with every patch, you end up making no one truly happy, as the development efforts are excessively diluted between PvP, PvE, coffee, tea and cappuccino. Post-release updates are also part of the problem. Alternatively, when the development pace starts to slow down players simply go back to World of Warcraft: it may be old and cranky by now, but it still offers a comparable experience and a lot more content built over the years, paired with a large community that offers more chances for social interaction (and in the meanwhile the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter counter just reached $1,900,005 ). That’s why, when the next big AAA title drops on the shelves, many simply migrate to it in order to find a similar experience with a fresh backdrop and shinier graphics.