Camelot Unchained, the realm-versus-realm follow-up to the well-remembered but now deceased MMO Dark Age of Camelot, is 26 hours from its Kickstarter deadline – and it’s going to be tight.
The Kickstarter campaign launched with one of the largest targets yet assigned to a game project – $2 million, narrowly edging out David Braben’s call for £1.25m / $1.95m to fund an Elite sequel.
Though the right name was attached – Mark Jacobs, co-creator of Dark Age of Camelot and now head of Unchained developers City State Entertainment – it nevertheless seemed a big ask for a self-described niche MMO focused solely on organised PvP. But a strong start saw more than $500,000 raised in the first day, and a month of steady pledges since has ensured the campaign is now nearing its goal.
However, the project suffered a setback yesterday as Amazon Payments’ server farm went temporarily bust.
“During one of our busiest times and best runs of this campaign, the vast majority of backers weren’t able to pledge for our, or any other, game on Kickstarter,” said Jacobs in an update. “While they finally did come back online, it did set our campaign back a bit. I’ve been in touch with both Kickstarter and Amazon (as I suspect every other KS did) and we’ll see if this leads anywhere.
“While we will make it, the loss of those four hours and possible additional momentum (we had a promotion with XFire kicking off at the same time) hurts a bit, especially with the KS stretch goals.”
Stretch goals would have included development for other platforms, likely including Linux and Mac.
Like Dark Age of Camelot, Camelot Unchained will have players join one of three warring factions – the Arthurians (England), Vikings (Scandinavians) or Tuatha Dé Danann (Ireland). Each realm will feature five unique classes – variants on tanks, healers, DPS, hybrids and crafters – which will interact on the battlefield in rock, paper, scissors fashion.
There’ll be no PvE and no looting, which also makes the crafting-only class an essential for continued battlefield survival. “Everything you can hope to use in the game will be made by a crafter,” said Jacobs.
Crafters will be best-qualified to build the houses, forts, turrets, traps and base defences that will steer the course of player interaction both in and out of battle – though all classes will possess some degree of construction ability.
The plan is for Camelot Unchained to release in December 2015 on PC, with a monthly subscription of around £9. It’ll launch with support for English, French and German languages.
Have you pledged your name and dosh to Camelot?