Camelot Unchained Set to Open EU Server for Weekend Testing

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Slapshot1188

Some minor signs of life...

... but I just looked and he still haven't even logged into his own game's website since January and his last post was in 2021.

JeroKane

(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)


Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.

Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.

Kyleran

Only reason they are doing this is they've exhausted the US backers who rarely bother to show up to test anymore.

user298

JeroKane said:

(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)


Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.

Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.

Yes, it is easy to deploy new servers like these, Mark Jacobs most likely just lying, as usual. Or maybe his employees are lying to him, to give an appearance that they "work so hard".

The kind of employees that are too lazy to properly scale the background image on the launcher, so default launcher window size cuts off the top portion of the text of background image (unless you manually maximize the launcher window): 



And the kind of employees that are too lazy to apply basic textures to lazily placed in-game buildings (yes, the game is set to max settings on this screenshot, there's just no textures at all for these buildings):

Viper482

Piece of shit scam, this asshole basically had us fund his new engine demo for him.

user298

Viper482 said:

Piece of shit scam, this asshole basically had us fund his new engine demo for him.

Yeap, it pretty much is a scam. After 9 years of development, you get to use "wonderful" spell effect in game which produces tiny blob of bluish color on the ground with a name "small_flames".



  

Cacolaco

I think the thing that they need to realize is that that this isn't Star Citizen, where they can sell a shiny new ship or 3 and rake in millions of dollars.

If they don't start making serious progress in a hurry, they'll be looking for a big publisher to bail them out, and will end up like every other game that that has happened to when said publisher rushes them to a "finished" product too quickly. Their investors must be getting impatient.

lahnmir

‘Life happens’ stuff.’ Well, I know stuff that most certainly isn’t happening.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

user298

Cacolaco said:

I think the thing that they need to realize is that that this isn't Star Citizen, where they can sell a shiny new ship or 3 and rake in millions of dollars.

If they don't start making serious progress in a hurry, they'll be looking for a big publisher to bail them out, and will end up like every other game that that has happened to when said publisher rushes them to a "finished" product too quickly. Their investors must be getting impatient.

They're probably already actively looking for another company to buy them out since they most likely have very little money left (judging by the fact that they aren't paying refunds anymore, there are posts on official forums of people waiting since 2018 for their refunds, and judging by the fact that they aren't hiring more people anymore) and they know it's not enough to finish the game anymore, especially after the failure of their "Final Stand Ragnarok" game. All their things like "newsletter" or monthly streams (where they just talk about few minor bug fixes and future plans without showing any gameplay) - it's most likely just something to give an appearance of "we are an active developer and the progress being done" to potential purchaser.

As for their current investor - from what I've seen it's the same company which gave Mark money when he started Mythic, and they probably got all their money back (including interest) when Mythic was sold to EA, so I don't think they will be very disappointed if CSE will be bought out by someone else in which case they will also get their money back with all the interest. Of course, if no one will buy out CSE then the investors will be screwed, but hey, that's the risk they were willing to take.

JeroKane

Cacolaco said:

I think the thing that they need to realize is that that this isn't Star Citizen, where they can sell a shiny new ship or 3 and rake in millions of dollars.

If they don't start making serious progress in a hurry, they'll be looking for a big publisher to bail them out, and will end up like every other game that that has happened to when said publisher rushes them to a "finished" product too quickly. Their investors must be getting impatient.

Well, in Start Citizen's defense. They actually have a game by now, not to mention that it looks amazing as well.
Chris Roberts has screwed up a lot too and missed many milestones, but at least they managed to make progress over the years.

Camelot Unchained really is just a scam. Plain and simple. After 9 years development and all they have is a crappy launcher and a crappy looking game full of placeholders still. Not to mention still having trouble to deploy a new game server lol. /facepalm

The above posted screenshots are just shocking to be honest.  Even Ship of Heroes looks better than this piece of crap and that game is developed by amateurs/indie devs.

Angrakhan

Looks like I'm 0/3 on games I chose to back. This, Star Citizen, and Chronicles of Elyria. The only positive I can pull from the whole crowd funding debacle in games is I learned a lesson and didn't get sucked into other games like Crowfall. Future crowd funding efforts can officially kiss my butt for the rest of my life. Call me when you have released the game. I'll be happy to pay full retail.

Kyleran

JeroKane said:

Cacolaco said:

I think the thing that they need to realize is that that this isn't Star Citizen, where they can sell a shiny new ship or 3 and rake in millions of dollars.

If they don't start making serious progress in a hurry, they'll be looking for a big publisher to bail them out, and will end up like every other game that that has happened to when said publisher rushes them to a "finished" product too quickly. Their investors must be getting impatient.

Well, in Start Citizen's defense. They actually have a game by now, not to mention that it looks amazing as well.
Chris Roberts has screwed up a lot too and missed many milestones, but at least they managed to make progress over the years.

Camelot Unchained really is just a scam. Plain and simple. After 9 years development and all they have is a crappy launcher and a crappy looking game full of placeholders still. Not to mention still having trouble to deploy a new game server lol. /facepalm

The above posted screenshots are just shocking to be honest.  Even Ship of Heroes looks better than this piece of crap and that game is developed by amateurs/indie devs.

Even more boggling to think Embers Adrift which while taking about as long is actually in stress testing, and it was actually started by people with absolutely no previous game development experience.

Not saying Embers Adrift is anything to marvel at, but at least they kept their goals within reach of the funding and capabilities.

Things really seemed to start progressing  when a few of the founders moved on, perhaps the same needs to happen over at CSE?

Slapshot1188

Kyleran said:

JeroKane said:

Cacolaco said:

I think the thing that they need to realize is that that this isn't Star Citizen, where they can sell a shiny new ship or 3 and rake in millions of dollars.

If they don't start making serious progress in a hurry, they'll be looking for a big publisher to bail them out, and will end up like every other game that that has happened to when said publisher rushes them to a "finished" product too quickly. Their investors must be getting impatient.

Well, in Start Citizen's defense. They actually have a game by now, not to mention that it looks amazing as well.
Chris Roberts has screwed up a lot too and missed many milestones, but at least they managed to make progress over the years.

Camelot Unchained really is just a scam. Plain and simple. After 9 years development and all they have is a crappy launcher and a crappy looking game full of placeholders still. Not to mention still having trouble to deploy a new game server lol. /facepalm

The above posted screenshots are just shocking to be honest.  Even Ship of Heroes looks better than this piece of crap and that game is developed by amateurs/indie devs.

Even more boggling to think Embers Adrift which while taking about as long is actually in stress testing, and it was actually started by people with absolutely no previous game development experience.

Not saying Embers Adrift is anything to marvel at, but at least they kept their goals within reach of the funding and capabilities.

Things really seemed to start progressing  when a few of the founders moved on, perhaps the same needs to happen over at CSE?

Embers also only raised a small amount via Crowdfunding (I want to say it was under 100k) and was created primarily on "sweat equity". Now... it shows when you play it that this is a passion project without real backing.. but the key part, as you mention.. is that you can PLAY IT!

I still say MJ should just drop the NDA since all you have today is people posting negative, possibly selected screenshots.  I honestly do not believe the PR could get any worse.

user298

Slapshot1188 said:

I still say MJ should just drop the NDA since all you have today is people posting negative, possibly selected screenshots.  I honestly do not believe the PR could get any worse.

They won't drop NDA, for an obvious reason. It would create a huge amount of negative feedback, which will make it harder for CSE to entrap some naive people with false promises of "refunds" and to potentially find some naive buyer for their company.

I mean, imagine how many negative posts there will be when people will start seeing game characters with such "beautiful" facial design:



  

Slapshot1188

user298 said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I still say MJ should just drop the NDA since all you have today is people posting negative, possibly selected screenshots.  I honestly do not believe the PR could get any worse.

They won't drop NDA, for an obvious reason. It would create a huge amount of negative feedback, which will make it harder for CSE to entrap some naive people with false promises of "refunds" and to potentially find some naive buyer for their company.

I mean, imagine how many negative posts there will be when people will start seeing game characters with such "beautiful" facial design:



  

Its 99.999% negative here and everywhere else right now. And honestly, apathy is worse than bad PR.  And right now the vast majority of the gaming population feels nothing for CU but total apathy.  Remember when CF couldn't give away their beta keys?  Yup... apathy... that translated directly into a piss poor launch population and subsequent dismissal from the minds of gamers.

This one is on an even worse track.

Grymmoire

Where is Merlin when we need some darn magic; off fishing with King Arthur?

Quizzical

JeroKane said:

(for a game like CU, it’s not as easy as just dropping the code onto another server)


Well sorry Mark, but that is some shitty coding on your part. Deploying new servers via auto deployment should be coding basics 101.

Especially if you going to launch this game some day in the future and a miracle happens that more than a handful of players are interested in your game (still) and you would need to deploy some extra servers to cope with demand.

It depends.  There are at least two senses in which his comment could be reasonable.

First, for a big project, you could have a lot of libraries and drivers and code versions floating around.  You can often be adding or modifying things, and it's easiest to just put them on a development server manually as you think you might need stuff.  Yes, you go back and clean stuff up later, especially when you realize that some things ended up being unnecessary or not working.  But that's not the priority for every little change you want to make throughout development.

You absolutely don't want to scale to a hundred servers by manually installing everything one at a time independently for each server.  You eventually make a script where you just start the script and it does everything for you.  But while you're in development and not trying to cut stable release versions, trying to keep a full system install script working every step of the way is a whole lot of work for not much benefit.  You may only bother to update that install script for hopefully stable versions that you want to push to multiple other servers.

Second, depending on what you're doing, the hardware needs of your server might be such that some randomly chosen server just can't do what you need.  If you need a lot of memory, a lot of storage, huge amounts of storage I/O, a lot of interconnect bandwidth to connect servers, or quite a few other possibilities, a lot of things that are easy to get in a server you build yourself can be rare to unavailable in off the shelf cloud servers.  The standard cloud server instances as would be offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and so forth are built to handle common, easy situations, which doesn't help you if you have weird needs.  Using some particular hardware accelerator such as a GPU or FPGA can quickly make standard cloud instances completely useless to you.

Raagnarz

Are we sure they're just not going to give us concept art of a new server? I mean because based on he last 10 years of development that seems to be the only thing they're able to deliver.

GrindcoreTHRALL

I was really stoked on this game when it was announced. Sad to see where its at today. Really had high hopes for it. I was going to buy a lifetime sub, glad I didn't now. I hope for the best but this is a game I am definitely waiting to go full release before I try it.

Spiider

Yawn... Another scam just like that space turd that has more money in budget than some smaller countries.

nurso

Slapshot1188 said:

I still say MJ should just drop the NDA since all you have today is people posting negative, possibly selected screenshots.  I honestly do not believe the PR could get any worse.

You should not and cannot negotiate with blackmailers. If you give in to their demands once, they will always come back. Especially if they are disingenuous and portray the well-known technique of greyboxing as incompetence of the developers. 

Slapshot1188

nurso said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I still say MJ should just drop the NDA since all you have today is people posting negative, possibly selected screenshots.  I honestly do not believe the PR could get any worse.

You should not and cannot negotiate with blackmailers. If you give in to their demands once, they will always come back. Especially if they are disingenuous and portray the well-known technique of greyboxing as incompetence of the developers. 

Thats not negotiating with Blackmailers...   if anything.. if what you say is true, then dropping the NDA would reveal these "blackmailers" as frauds.

Win-Win?

nurso

Slapshot1188 said:

Win-Win?

I don't think so. Game development is something you can't easily explain to lay people, let alone show them. People are strongly visual and often take a video or demo of a test environment at face value. And to be honest, I think that's exactly what some people are after.

Ungood

nurso said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Win-Win?

I don't think so. Game development is something you can't easily explain to lay people, let alone show them. People are strongly visual and often take a video or demo of a test environment at face value. And to be honest, I think that's exactly what some people are after.

I tend to agree with this, I think if they let the whiners out, far too many people who boasted about their being in-the=know, would show they have no clue about the concept of what a placeholder or gray block is.

While no joke, 9 years to make a game is, IMHO way too long, 5 years should have been the benchmark, to have something out the door regardless.

In any case, the whiners will cry if the game does not launch, they will cry if the game does launch, they will just cry and shit all over the game and the developers, and then wonder why no one seems to want to buy their founder packs, or even look into the game they backed..  of course, they will blame the devs for this as well, never thinking that their going around pissing and shitting all over the game, may have had an adverse effect on it, of course if the game does fail they will cry about that, and deny any fault on their part, and even go so far as to say they had high hopes for the game and wished it success.

It's pitiful to watch really. I don't think the dev teams were really ready for what players can be like when you give them an ounce of a sense of importance.

Slapshot1188

It’s silly to blame anyone other than the people who underestimated the time and money required for their project by 400% and counting.