Camelot Unchained Interview

The team at MMORPG.com caught up with City State Entertainment’s Mark Jacobs for a two-page Q&A about their massively multiplayer title Camelot Unchained, how the game’s alpha testing went, the crunch that is their Beta 1 launch, and more. A sampling:

MMORPG: Would you like to take a moment (because I’m sure you have so much time right now) to once again clarify what a traditional Beta 1 is and/or what backers can expect?

MJ: Like our Alpha, our Beta 1 is not like people have come to expect in modern MMORPGs. Our Beta 1 Backers will start with three classes per Realm (fighter, archer and healer) and a pretty bare-bones world. Each of these three classes (nine total), have to be different from each other, as we are sticking to our non-mirrored class promise. When we believe that these nine are fun (not balanced, just fun), we will then introduce other classes.

The servers will not be available 24×7, but we will have lots of scheduled and impromptu Beta tests on a weekly basis. The basic crafting system will be in, but it is truly basic, in every aspect. It will also be sped up considerably: pretty much instantaneous, though players will see the time it would normally take to purify (refine) ore, make an item, etc.

Part of Beta 1 testing will also be (break the build) tests, as we will continually try to make the engine crash, or at least beg for mercy. Players will be able to build their buildings in safe islands as well in the contested islands. The safe island building is intended to help stress the systems, by having lots of players build and change their buildings without worrying about them being destroyed. We want to see lots of elaborate, unusual, and even strange buildings, in order to test everything from our building stability to our rendering system. We’ll have version 0.1 of our plot ownership and permission system in, so people will be able to take and hold their own plots.

I’d love to say that players will see a very stable build all the time, and while our Alpha has had the fewest crashes that I’ve seen with any MMORPG, things get much more complicated in Beta, so anything is possible, including more crashes. There’s a lot more of course, but that’s an overview look at Beta 1.