Camelot Unchained, FS:R, let the death watch begin?

Kyleran · July 2022

It's July 17th, no monthly newletter yet, nor any Livestream from MJ either despite alleged promises on Discord both would happen shortly after the holiday.

I noticed the last Final Stand Ragnarok newsletter in my email was issue 10 back in May.

Usually a bad sign when communications slow way down and especially if a studio goes dark.

Could be everyone is just on vacation, or maybe MJ invested all of their remaining funding into Cryptocurrency and took a beating in the recent winter, who can say?

I saw some unsanctioned, allegedly recent screenshots from CU and the game world was looking unexpectedly terrible.

All of the buildings appeared to be placeholder art and the landscape not much better. DAOC has better graphics right now IMO, no exaggeration.

If it's not dying, it's clearly years away from completion and I can't see the chirade continuing for much longer.

Time to polish up my grave dancing shoes.

Scot · July 2022

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

Shaigh · July 2022

The most expensive package for camelot unchained cost $5000. If you instead had bought $5000 worth of bitcoins at that time, it would now be worth $400.000.

If you buy $400.000 worth of bitcoin now, its likely to drop below $5000 before this project is cancelled.

AlBQuirky · July 2022

I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

PurplePepe · July 2022

I am all out of Copium Cola for this project.

Slapshot1188 · July 2022

As I have posted many times... Mark has not posted on his own forum since November and has not even LOGGED IN since January.

user298 · July 2022

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".

Scot · July 2022

AlBQuirky said:

I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

user298 said:

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".

With us really only having Albion Online as a CF MMO that has made a name for itself, the track record is poor. But where else are we going to get MMOs using templates which are not just WoW (ish)? AAA has all but abandoned MMORPGs, and NW proves that a lot of dosh does not give sure fire success anyway. Smaller self funded indie is a possibility, but how many well known titles have come from that over the last ten years?

I just don't see MMORPG's branching out more without CFing. What I see is them going down the route of gambling "gameplay", collector (NFT) "gameplay" and currency speculation "gameplay".

TheDalaiBomba · July 2022

Scot said:

AlBQuirky said:

I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

user298 said:

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".

With us really only having Albion Online as a CF MMO that has made a name for itself, the track record is poor. But where else are we going to get MMOs using templates which are not just WoW (ish)? AAA has all but abandoned MMORPGs, and NW proves that a lot of dosh does not give sure fire success anyway. Smaller self funded indie is a possibility, but how many well known titles have come from that over the last ten years?

I just don't see MMORPG's branching out more without CFing. What I see is them going down the route of gambling "gameplay", collector (NFT) "gameplay" and currency speculation "gameplay".

I am not sure Crowdfunding is benefitting us enough to warrant the amounts of money it's sucking up from the market directly from consumers.

olepi · July 2022

The problem is that MMORPG's take a ton of money and time to develop. And their track record isn't that good if you are an investor. How many MMORPG's make the kind of money that WoW does? How many were developed, released, and then failed without making a ton of money?

Investors don't want to wait for years to get a return, and with MMORPG's the chance of a good return is not that big.

And now here comes some developers saying that crypto/nft/blockchain is the money move of the future. Just invest now and you'll get a return soon. Developing those games is easy and fast.

CF efforts have no real investors, so that sounds good. Except, it also means they have no real incentive to release anything, no deadlines to meet or financial obligations. That leads to open ended development with no release or end point, like Star Citizen.

TheDalaiBomba · July 2022

olepi said:

The problem is that MMORPG's take a ton of money and time to develop. And their track record isn't that good if you are an investor. How many MMORPG's make the kind of money that WoW does? How many were developed, released, and then failed without making a ton of money?

Investors don't want to wait for years to get a return, and with MMORPG's the chance of a good return is not that big.

And now here comes some developers saying that crypto/nft/blockchain is the money move of the future. Just invest now and you'll get a return soon. Developing those games is easy and fast.

CF efforts have no real investors, so that sounds good. Except, it also means they have no real incentive to release anything, no deadlines to meet or financial obligations. That leads to open ended development with no release or end point, like Star Citizen.

That last part: Star Citizen has removed half a billion dollars from the industry over the past decade.

That's money not being returned to investors, so it doesn't attract investors to rhe industry. Removing consumer cash from the market like that is a net loss for the market unless the projects succeed.

user298 · July 2022

Scot said:
AlBQuirky said:
I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:
I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.
Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?
user298 said:
Scot said:
I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.
You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".
With us really only having Albion Online as a CF MMO that has made a name for itself, the track record is poor. But where else are we going to get MMOs using templates which are not just WoW (ish)? AAA has all but abandoned MMORPGs, and NW proves that a lot of dosh does not give sure fire success anyway. Smaller self funded indie is a possibility, but how many well known titles have come from that over the last ten years?

I just don't see MMORPG's branching out more without CFing. What I see is them going down the route of gambling "gameplay", collector (NFT) "gameplay" and currency speculation "gameplay".

Nobody "abandoned" MMOs, plenty of large studios continue to make new ones (Riot develops one, so do many other Tencent subsidiaries such as Digital Extremes, or companies like Bethesda who are making new one not related to ESO), or will continue to make replacements for existing ones in same universe. Sure, the "innovation" is pretty slow with them in terms of giving players more gameplay variety in same game, but I'd still much rather trust them than waste any money on some financially irresponsible, dishonest "indie" developer. Especially seeing most of these "indie" devs just trying to produce same derivative, EXTEMELY LIMITED (in terms of gameplay variety) games like "Pantheon", "Embers Adrift" or even this "Camelot Unchained" stuff.

Ungood · July 2022

AlBQuirky said:
Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

Well, long and short answer would be, We don't NEED anything.

The thing is, what players today want, is for an MMO to come out and be what WoW was to EQ.

Now the thought is that what made WoW so much batter, was that the Devs that made the game, also played the game, and they not only played WoW, they also played EQ, and UO, so they had a ground view of what players really wanted, and this addressed their issues and gripes with the previous gen of games they were playing, in a better, updated package.

Now, the main consensus among gamers is, that this kind of event will not happen again as long as suits run the show, so the only way for some genre changing event like that to happen again, is if the next gen game is designed and built by gamers that not only have that, ground level view with other gamers, but are also passionate about their game being the next tier up, something they would want to play.

Which is ideally where the fun factor comes in, you really can't tell what is fun to a gamer, if you are not one. Just like you cannot tell what would make fishing more fun, if you don't fish.

This is why the idea of "By the People that do this, For the People that Do this" actually works, as long as it is the case, and not some bullshit catchphrase.

lotharic · July 2022

I noticed that this past weekend 's CU build was identical to the previous week.

And the work done in the previous week probably took an hour or two.

This game is never gonna release at this pace, so I guess they are just collecting salaries until the end.

mklinic · July 2022

Well, you know how to get results/They must be reading your threads! (take your pick..or both)

Just got an email about a livestream today to cover May/June. Also promised:

"The June Top Tenish and Newsletter will go out tonight."

Not to say there's no trouble in paradise now. Just thought it a funny coincidence on the timing.

Sovrath · July 2022

It seems they are going to do a livestream today.

"Hi folks,

Hope you're doing well. I just wanted to let you know that Terry is excited to be doing the livestream today at 4PM EDT on our Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/citystategames).

The June Top Tenish and Newsletter will go out tonight.

Thanks!

Brian"

Slapshot1188 · July 2022

Yeah but notice it’s not Mark

Scot · July 2022

user298 said:

Scot said:
AlBQuirky said:
I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:
I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.
Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?
user298 said:
Scot said:
I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.
You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".
With us really only having Albion Online as a CF MMO that has made a name for itself, the track record is poor. But where else are we going to get MMOs using templates which are not just WoW (ish)? AAA has all but abandoned MMORPGs, and NW proves that a lot of dosh does not give sure fire success anyway. Smaller self funded indie is a possibility, but how many well known titles have come from that over the last ten years?

I just don't see MMORPG's branching out more without CFing. What I see is them going down the route of gambling "gameplay", collector (NFT) "gameplay" and currency speculation "gameplay".

Nobody "abandoned" MMOs, plenty of large studios continue to make new ones (Riot develops one, so do many other Tencent subsidiaries such as Digital Extremes, or companies like Bethesda who are making new one not related to ESO), or will continue to make replacements for existing ones in same universe. Sure, the "innovation" is pretty slow with them in terms of giving players more gameplay variety in same game, but I'd still much rather trust them than waste any money on some financially irresponsible, dishonest "indie" developer. Especially seeing most of these "indie" devs just trying to produce same derivative, EXTEMELY LIMITED (in terms of gameplay variety) games like "Pantheon", "Embers Adrift" or even this "Camelot Unchained" stuff.

The history of MMORPGs shows they have been left behind by other genres, the "WoW rush" was the heyday, after that a slow decline in new quality titles set in. Not saying they aren't getting produced, if anything we have far more, but AAA is rare now it used to be the norm. Meanwhile new genres like MOBA and MMOFPS took of, MMOs struggles to keep up with that.

I do put more of my faith in the big studios, but they are doing so few now that they don't get that many "tries" for a success. NW shows how problematic making a new AAA can be.

I am not advocating you put money in btw, I never have, but then I don't pre-order titles or do EA either.

mklinic · July 2022

Slapshot1188 said:

Yeah but notice it’s not Mark

Just looking back as far as December, everything is signed by "Brian", so doesn't seem too out of the ordinary. Didn't bother to go back further so not sure exactly when it started.

Just to be Devil's Advocate though;

What's wrong with him delegating comms out to someone else? Any time his name is attached to something, it seems there is plenty of criticism (deserved or not) and he's seemed more then willing to engage, usually to his own detriment PR-wise. Pretty sure people here have recommend he not take the bait and let someone else handle socialization/communication of info. So it seems like a bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Slapshot1188 · July 2022

mklinic said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Yeah but notice it’s not Mark

Just looking back as far as December, everything is signed by "Brian", so doesn't seem too out of the ordinary. Didn't bother to go back further so not sure exactly when it started.

Just to be Devil's Advocate though;

What's wrong with him delegating comms out to someone else? Any time his name is attached to something, it seems there is plenty of criticism (deserved or not) and he's seemed more then willing to engage, usually to his own detriment PR-wise. Pretty sure people here have recommend he not take the bait and let someone else handle socialization/communication of info. So it seems like a bit of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

It goes hand in hand with what I posted earlier. Mark has not posted on his own forum since November 2021... and hasn't even logged into it since January.

It's not like he is using him time to... oh... catch up on those refunds which I hear are still years behind....

Look... I'm a fan. I never refunded and won't... but the fact that Mark is pretty much MIA all this time should send big red alarm bells off in everyone's heads...

If you have access to the game. Login and see how many people are even on it during primetime (it's still only up on weekends as far as I know. I think you would understand the concern.

mklinic · July 2022

Slapshot1188 said:
It goes hand in hand with what I posted earlier. Mark has not posted on his own forum since November 2021... and hasn't even logged into it since January.

It's not like he is using him time to... oh... catch up on those refunds which I hear are still years behind....

Look... I'm a fan. I never refunded and won't... but the fact that Mark is pretty much MIA all this time should send big red alarm bells off in everyone's heads...

If you have access to the game. Login and see how many people are even on it during primetime (it's still only up on weekends as far as I know. I think you would understand the concern.

I get where you're coming from and not trying to be an apologist for the man. I was just giving another thought regarding his participation in the comms. Maybe he'll pull a Garriott and drop the project on the team members....Maybe he's busy doing [important thing here]...who knows... Not putting money and getting clarity during the live stream though.

Kyleran · July 2022

Ungood said:

AlBQuirky said:
Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

Well, long and short answer would be, We don't NEED anything.

The thing is, what players today want, is for an MMO to come out and be what WoW was to EQ.

Now the thought is that what made WoW so much batter, was that the Devs that made the game, also played the game, and they not only played WoW, they also played EQ, and UO, so they had a ground view of what players really wanted, and this addressed their issues and gripes with the previous gen of games they were playing, in a better, updated package.

Now, the main consensus among gamers is, that this kind of event will not happen again as long as suits run the show, so the only way for some genre changing event like that to happen again, is if the next gen game is designed and built by gamers that not only have that, ground level view with other gamers, but are also passionate about their game being the next tier up, something they would want to play.

Which is ideally where the fun factor comes in, you really can't tell what is fun to a gamer, if you are not one. Just like you cannot tell what would make fishing more fun, if you don't fish.

This is why the idea of "By the People that do this, For the People that Do this" actually works, as long as it is the case, and not some bullshit catchphrase.

Beer definitely makes fishing more fun from back in the days when used I used to do it, I imagine that hasn't changed much.

But I suppose beer makes most things more fun.

The_Korrigan · July 2022

Beer makes everything more fun. Including your liver cancer

Kyleran · July 2022

mklinic said:

Slapshot1188 said:
It goes hand in hand with what I posted earlier. Mark has not posted on his own forum since November 2021... and hasn't even logged into it since January.

It's not like he is using him time to... oh... catch up on those refunds which I hear are still years behind....

Look... I'm a fan. I never refunded and won't... but the fact that Mark is pretty much MIA all this time should send big red alarm bells off in everyone's heads...

If you have access to the game. Login and see how many people are even on it during primetime (it's still only up on weekends as far as I know. I think you would understand the concern.

I get where you're coming from and not trying to be an apologist for the man. I was just giving another thought regarding his participation in the comms. Maybe he'll pull a Garriott and drop the project on the team members....Maybe he's busy doing [important thing here]...who knows... Not putting money and getting clarity during the live stream though.

Well, as I suspected they probably all took a couple of weeks vacation, you know, for all their "hard work" clearly.

user298 · July 2022

Sovrath said:

It seems they are going to do a livestream today.

"Hi folks,

Hope you're doing well. I just wanted to let you know that Terry is excited to be doing the livestream today at 4PM EDT on our Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/citystategames).

The June Top Tenish and Newsletter will go out tonight.

Thanks!

Brian"

There is a livestream now, actually. They finally forced poor Terry to keep telling bullshit over livestream for an hour, obviously without showing anything meaningful or without letting him answer any inconvenient questions which plenty of people are posting in the stream chat. I am watching it now and it's as sad as all previous streams.

It's like watching a video with "Baghdad Bob" (people who watched TV during Invasion of Iraq will know what I mean).

YashaX · July 2022

Scot said:

AlBQuirky said:

I don't follow this one. That's sad to hear, but not unexpected.

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

Why do "we need" crowd funded MMOs?

user298 said:

Scot said:

I know some posters will think it is what we need, but if CU goes down, CF MMO's will hardly be a contender any more. Even with all the negatives against it, CF MMOs offer a chance at diversity of gameplay and theme in the MMO market which is badly needed.

You mean something like Star Citizen, which was crowdfunded with like $400 million, been in development since 2011 and is still far from being finished?

Yes, yes, we definitely NEED more things like these

All jokes aside, while crowdfunding may theoretically lead to good MMO games - it has more chances of making yet another failure because there's no financial responsibility and developers will keep thinking that "I should definitely try to kickstart my unimaginative garbage even though I have 0 experience with managing my own company all by myself and/or developing my own complex game engine needed for the complex project, the worst thing that will happen is I will have to close down and make few people on interwebs disappointed, with no legal obligations to those people, which is not a big deal, I can always try again later once enough people will forget about my previous failure".

With us really only having Albion Online as a CF MMO that has made a name for itself, the track record is poor. But where else are we going to get MMOs using templates which are not just WoW (ish)? AAA has all but abandoned MMORPGs, and NW proves that a lot of dosh does not give sure fire success anyway. Smaller self funded indie is a possibility, but how many well known titles have come from that over the last ten years?

I just don't see MMORPG's branching out more without CFing. What I see is them going down the route of gambling "gameplay", collector (NFT) "gameplay" and currency speculation "gameplay".

I don't see much or any evidence that CF mmos will help the genre move forward in any constructive way. I also think the titles that have come out to date from "normal" studios have actually brought a lot of interesting new ideas and mechanics along with them.

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Camelot Unchained, FS:R, let the death watch begin?

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Howdy, Stranger!

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Camelot Unchained, FS:R, let the death watch begin?

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV