I couldn’t think of a clever title. Anyway, Mark Jacobs and City State Entertainment need a cool $2 million to jump start a counter-revolutionary MMO. Camelot Unchained hearkens back to those glorious days when Dark Ages of Camelot was the place to be for brutal PvP.
I’ve already said this, but I have to say it again. This might be the first Chipotle MMO. Every mechanic is made to feed the beast that is Realm vs. Realm combat. This means fighting other players, fighting against (NPC-defended) objectives, and crafting to help the realm’s war machine. There will be no fat to appease players that don’t want to RvR.
I find it kind of ironic that the possible funding of Camelot Unchained could mean that the MMO genre is more than capable of birthing this niche MMO. The irony lies largely in that Mark Jacobs’ Â blog is “Online Games Are a Niche Market.” $2,000,000 for a niche of a niche? I like to think that perhaps online games have outgrown their niche status.
Back to the kickstarter. There are a lot of reward tiers for Camelot Unchained. $5 for people that don’t like RvR but want to see more focused MMOs. $25 gets backers the game at the bleached bones reward level, and it goes up from there. The estimated launch for Camelot Unchained seems to be about 2015. If they don’t reach $2 million, it looks like there might be no Camelot Unchained.
I am betting that there will be plenty of Camelot Unchained features and interviews this month to keep the kickstarter in the limelight. I hope it succeeds. The more niches in our niche the better.
–Ravious
The estimated launch they have listed is December 2015, which is “about” 2016 if you want to be snarky.
Two million is going to be some work. In a way, I like the “just give me a number and not a bunch of stretch goals” aspect. But it is all or nothing on that number. This campaign is as much a test of niche size as it is a funding effort.
I am definitely going to back this, and back it as high as I feel I can comfortably afford.
DAoC is still my all time favorite MMO and I love the direction behind CU’s design.
I think they will exceed the $2m and I am also glad that its just “here’s what we are doing” rather than a bunch of stretch goals.
Also, I like that Jacobs has a history of FINISHING and PUBLISHING games.
A lot of the $1m+ kickstarters have been from people who worked on published games, but were never the real leaders who made the games get completed. Being the person at the top who makes sure the game actually ships – and ships well – is an underrated but hugely important (and rare) skill.
The paragraph about his blog title:
He started that blog right around WAR launching, fully expecting WAR to be a WoW-killer and a mass-market game. He picked that title because a few years before, someone told him MMOs were a niche market, and here he was with WAR going all mainstream. Ha to them!
We know how WAR turned out. We know how every MMO not called WoW has turned out. The MMO genre is very much a niche market.
The extra irony today is that Jacobs is trying to fund a super-niche MMO in a niche genre. $2m bucks for a game is peanuts. Shilling spent that in a month!
“$2m bucks for a game is peanuts”
Well, if we want to get technical… and we always want to get technical… the cost will be what has been spent so far, plus the Kickstarter take, plus another $2 million put in by Mark Jacobs if the KS funds successfully, plus the extra they are going to have to scrape up when all that falls short, because it always falls short.
Still, that is far south of anything comparable and certainly a lot less than 38 Studios took from the taxpayers of Rhode Island.
Mark had people over him. He wasn’t deciding on everything when he created WAR. He had orders to do it for everyone. If it wasn’t of everyone it wouldn’t get cash. Big companies like EA want just cash. They don’t care at all how the game will look. They want effect in cash and that’s the problem.
CU will be different. He is independent now.
I’m not 100% sold on how different it will be.
Sure, MJ likely had to do a few things he disagree with in WAR, but to what extent? There was a LOT wrong with WAR, and I have a tough time believe MJ did not have a hand in ANY of it.
Well, people can love Mark or hate Mark, but it is difficulty to deny his passion, enthusiasm, and lengths he goes to interact with his fans. He admits his mistakes, he moves on, he tries again.
I admire the game he is trying to achieve, and I admire him as a developer. I am in for $220 and hope the game gets funded. It is years off, but it is the only MMORPG I am looking forward to, because it is the only one going back to the roots of what made this genre great – community, player-driven content and stories, and no hand-holding trips through flower patches all the way to level cap.
See you on the killing fields.