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[Column] Camelot Unchained: Impossibly Driven By Hope?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In our latest Social Hub column, we take a look at the KickStarter hopeful, Camelot Unchained. The game, at least in these earliest days, seems to be bent on reviving true community spirit in MMOs. See why we think so before heading to the comments.
Going back to DAoC, it was a funny place for a person like me to get a start in MMOs. I’m admittedly not so great at PvP and am more of an explorer, but that game still captivated me personally with all the possibilities. Turns out that I got caught up often in the world, in PvE content and in working together with others. When it came to sieges and trying to maintain or take keeps, I was never on the front lines or anything, but it always felt good to have a sense of collective purpose. Victories could be for a while after decimating a force that came thinking that we had some holes in our armor. It was exciting. It was massive and sometimes chaotic, and everyone was up and down, winning and losing, rebuilding and guarding.
Read more of Christina Gonzalez's The Social Hub: Impossibly Driven By Hope?
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Comments
The horribly bland , try and make everyone happy games are terrible in the past few years.
If you aren't into RvR , want to play every faction on the same server , don't like PvP overall etc , they aren't making a game for you.
Nor should they.
I'm hoping a sub fee niche style mmorpg becomes more and more common as I personally prefer this type of idea.
Their are plenty of non sub , try and please everyone bland games out there for those who want that kind of game.
So it sounds like you're saying, the old people need to just go to the retirement home and deal with the way things are now? While you try to back off that, that's your general tone of this article.
Guess what? You kids can get off my lawn and you're not getting your ball back.
SWTOR WoW and GW2's awful copying of DAOC rvr are options for you.
it's not hope, it's faith.
there is a difference
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
It is hope - what has MJ done recently? If he was as good of a developer as people think he is, why hasn't he been involved with other games?
Here here! QFEx2
recently?
well for one there was WAR (before the EA "push it" fiasco) which had quite the good ideas.
then there was daoc.
recently enough for someone mid age
also, he is in a communication process with his fanbase, in this forums, on youtube, in his blog, that's sth not alot of developers did in the past.
if it's hope driving the fans, is it despair driving the other side?
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
There is still a lot of niche sub games as well. The issue being they aren't financially viable for the long run unless the niche is big enough. Look at Mortal Online, very niche, never really had a big following (although a big issue was the fact that they had no idea how to actually develop the game). Shadowbane is another example of a game that had a very niche following and ended up biting the bullet. Darkfall Online is still around but with a very small following. Even DAOC which is still around only had 2k people online at a time back when the herald was still around and showed server activity, which wasn't that long ago.
I just have this feeling, the more they try to cater to certain crowds the less game life it will actually have. Unless the amount of subs somehow cover server, GM, content development, and bug fixing costs I can't see them getting very far in the long run. I'm very hopeful since this is actually the type of game I really would like to play, but there are plenty of people who steer clear on purpose from this type of game.
The key is expectations. If you design your game to be the next "WoW killer" shooting for 5 million subs, of course your game is going to fail, in regards to hype and probably the ability to recoup the investment.
@Botrytis - When EA and I parted ways I had a 1 year NCA (Non Competition Agreement). Once that ended I began negotiations with GigaMedia to set up a studio in Singapore. When that deal took too long to close, I walked away and set up a studio with Andrew Meggs in 2011. BY September 2011, most of the studio was staffed and we began work on March on Oz. MoO went up on iOS in the fall of 2012 (we're porting to Android/Ouya and maybe PC) currently.
As to other games, well, Mythic created over 15 games & expansions during the 14 years I was there and prior to DAoC, our budgets for those games were <100K except for Aliens Online which had a total budget of 450K. We were among the few companies who were dedicated online game developers (Kesmai, ENGAGE Games Online, etc.) because we believed in the future of onine games and even though our budgets were tiny (as most were in that part of the industry then) we created a lot of games in a very short period of time.
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment
Yeah I'm not saying that you have to get 5 million subs. You just have to somehow prove yourself to the entire market for your specific niche to actually have it succeed in terms of making a profit. You can't have a game losing money and still running unless whoever is running it has a lot of money to blow (mortal online devs). That's the issue with niche games, there may be a somewhat large following but the amount a game actually costs is increasing so much it's almost not financially viable to make a niche game with what everyone in that niche wants.
The people over at CSE (specifically MJ) have stated since day 1 that CU is meant to be a niche game for a specific mmo fanbase. This means:
EVEN THE DEVELOPERS EXPECT IT TO ONLY HAVE A SMALL'ISH AMOUNT OF PLAYERS!!!!
All this talk about hype and expectations when the game will most likely NOT be played by the majority of players on general gaming sites is nothing but contrived BS made up by the general public.
I cannot fathom why Daoc and RvR fans can't simply talk about the possibility of a game that might interest them without all this "what if" bullshit conjecture.
I can see it now that even if this game gets made and released there will be tons of posts about how the game failed because it wasn't a Wow or GW2 killers. Again, even the DEVELOPERS have said from day one that they expect this game to only have a small and specific audience.
Now if someone tells you something over and over and over again and you still go out of your way to ignore it, it only means one simple thing: you are a complete idiot. It boggles the mind that other popular games do exist completely different than todays watered down and stupified themepark mmos (ie. Eve) that are complex and require a large learning curve yet when a new game comes around saying they want to be different you still have people saying "Nope! Can't be done!". It already has been proven it can be done. It was being done over 10 years ago. Players are screaming for change and want it done.
The game can only prove itself once it is made so talking about if it should be made is asinine. Any game should be allowed to be made. Ideas should be allowed to be nurtured. The players will decide whether or not it is played AFTER release.
You stay sassy!
If the article were written by someone that had played the early years of Ultima Online/Asheron's Call/DAOC/EQ I could take their point of view. The author seems a bit young and has probably been playing or writing about mmo's since WoW came out maybe?
The article to me, comes off as if telling the veteran mmorpg'ers to move on and get with the WoW clone mmo's grind program and deal with it. It seems the author is quite fine with mediocre mmorpg's, we veteran Mmorpg'ers, however, are NOT ok with mediocrity.
What's funny is you can go even now and look at DAOC or Asheron's Call or Ultima Online, even as old as they are, how the worlds feel alive, and there's so much to do in them without having the ! npc quest grinds. There's more content in those games and more innovation than most of today's mmorpg's. The communities in those games were wonderful before the games aged away.
Community and fun is what I seek, and you cannot have that with the larger mmo's these days, they're all WoW clones looking for hundreds of thousands to millions of players. There's no way for people to really get to know each other and enjoy their playtime in mmo's anymore. Today's mmo's feel like a second job when you log in. You log in, do dailies, que up for dungeon dailies with random people, barely even speak the whole time, finish your dailies, and you're done for the day.
I'm looking for community and fun, not a second job.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
i'll admit headstart that i'm one of the biggest fans of CU (i know its not there yet, but you know what i mean).
CU being announced as a niche game is the best and honest move CSE could have made. The hype really comes from the old DAoC players thats for sure, but there is nothing wrong with that either. it just shows that there is quite many people that wants what Christina mentionned, go back to the roots of mmorpgs, where our choices matter, and not just repeating grinding.
a lot of studios try to make their games fun, but mostly focus on a game system that will make you want to stay for years ; better equipment, always higher levels. grinding.
(in my opinion) Old school mmos were more built toward real fun, meaningful actions, pride, sense of accomplishment, sens of community, where your actions could change many things in game. That is what kept us playing...No tricks, No instant gratification, no special effects to blind you away from the fact that a lot of games are lacking actual depth.
I always compare games to movies, in the 1st decade of the 21st century, we witnessed tons of new movies with more and more special effects, vast amount of money spent toward all CG, but lots of them lacked a good deep storyline.
But there are still some people that wants to see good movies, with interesting characters, a good storyline, good punches etc.
of course those movies arent the summers'blockbusters, but there are still people that prefers those "low budget" movies... Less people i admit, but there is still a clientele.
Same goes for CU. It will never reach 10 millions subscribers (granted it funds), and from day it's been said it wasnt the objective.
The game will be for those that wants to play something different than what is offered in general, And the fans and backers are very happy that.
We are VERY happy that someone wants to make a game for us, finally.
This explains very well why the CU forums here is on fire lately. Fans are not only fans, they are believers, they been wanting a game like that for years. on the other side, there are the others, wich CU's descriptions isnt what they want. and even though i've been very "incendiary" at times responding to them, i cannot blame them. because what they like in games is already outthere by the dozens, so they cant be as enthusiastic as we are, because for us,
well, Because CU could be THE ONE we been waiting for.
Bowbow (kob hunter) Infecto (kob cave shammy) and Thurka (troll warrior) on Merlin/Midgard DAoC
Thurka on WAR
There's been no illusions from the get go that this will be a niche market. A lot of people are craving a game like this vehemently, and will be a diehard group of playerse vs the very casual modern mmo market you see elsewhere. The big game publishers/devs to this point haven't tried something as bold as this, BECAUSE they know its a niche. They all have it in their head they have to make these huge budget giant themepark mmos, that leave those of us that want features like this sitting on the side sighing time and time again with reskinned mmo clone after mmo clone come out. Lots of letdowns over the years in that regard. They're thinking revues/profits, and want the biggest playerbases possible (either for more micro transactions in a f2p/b2p model, or more subs in a sub model)
People need to realize, and have the same epiphany we did, that big player numbers doesn't necessarily = good, especially considering the subjective nature of what different players consider good.
Will CU be perfect? No nothing ever is. Will it still be full of people with different opinions that debate how things should be done? of course, we're all human after all, and that's human nature.
They do have the cojones though to flat out challenge some of the modern mmorpg tropes, and flat out say we're going to do something different/sometimes contrary to what all the big game publishers/devs say is the way everyone should do it now.
I think that's the source of a lot of the hate on CU. It's challenging what all these themepark & big money publishers have been trying to establish as the only way to do things. People don't want their worldview challenged.
I do personally feel like these big game publishers/devs have abandoned the players that helped get the mmorpg genre off the ground in the first place in late 90's and early 2000's. They want more players, and don't mind dropping the mmo vets in the dust to get that done. We've been kind of abandoned. Heck I'm playing EVE now, and leaving all the themepark mmo's for the kiddies.
MMO history - EVE GW2 SWTOR RIFT WAR COH/V EQ2 WOW DAOC
Tuktz - http://www.heretic.shivtr.com/
I would like to personally thank the author for letting me that the gaming world has 'moved on'. Yes, I am aware of that. Painfully, excruciatingly all too aware. The MMORPG genre has 'moved on' to:
Bravo! Good post.
The ad hominem is in bad form. [Mod Edit?]
Business model <-> Game Design. It depends.
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Yeah, RvRvR is fun core gameplay - definitely. But what supports it? That is the question that this mmo-rpg needs to be able to address additionally. Secondly the combat if the core really needs to be amazingly fun eg Chivalry viseral fun or otherwise experience a Medieval + supernatural magic melange of blood-splattery?!
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Because Mark Jacobs doesn't deserve my money.
He had his chance with one of the largest IP's in the world. Warhammer. And screwed up beyond any words!
Just like Richard Garriott doesn't deserve my money either.
Both of these over-inflated EGO trippers had a huge studio under their bumbs, plenty of great talent at their finger tips and over 40 million US dollars in funding and more than enough time (5+ years)!
They had all the ingredients they needed to make a great game! (Warhammer Online and Tabula Rasa) and screwed it up BIG TIME!
Same thing with Bioware and SW:TOR! They had the largest budget ever! They had a huge amount of talent at their disposal! They had plenty of time (5+ years)! And screwed up BIG TIME!
Publishers, in this case EA and NCSoft, had nothing to do with these debacles, as they gave them enough money and enough time to deliver the product.
It's not like they had to rush it to market within 2 years, like ATARI forced Cryptic to with CO and STO.
So please explain to me why this time it would be any different with Mr. Jacobs and Mr.Garriott?
I cannot believe how short of memory people have these days.
I know it's always easy to portray publishers as the BIG BAD WOLF these days. And in case of EA it's sadly often true lately!
But for the above, EA and NCSoft were sertainly not to blame. Sorry, but that is just very naive.
Actually, we had three years. We signed the license deal for Warhammer at E3 June 2005, released in September 2008. Plus, the original development timeline for WAR was 2 years and we had two delays and I had to fight to get it to 3 years.
Mark Jacobs
CEO, City State Entertainment