Thank you for all of your support of BSC Days 07/14/14-07/17/14


The BSC (stands for Bat-Shit Crazy) Days were an event with a set of video and text presentations, updates, and reveals held by City State Entertainment on 7/14/-7/17/2014. For Camelot Unchained, BSC is often used by City State Entertainment to refer to the slightly off-the-wall, maybe a little "crazy" ideas of Mark Jacobs and the City State Entertainment team about our own game mechanics. The BSC Days event was a major early content and gameplay reveal for Camelot Unchained.

The Guiding Principles

  • Combat, including magical combat, should be innovative and fun. The world has enough MMORPGs with combat systems that are the same or strikingly similar to other MMORPGs
  • We are not trying to cater to a mass-market crowd: Our combat system is specifically designed with experienced players (or players who want a greater challenge) in mind
  • We should be willing to take chances with any of the game’s systems where it makes sense to do so
    • Change, just for change’s sake, is not a good idea. Changing things in order to make a better system or mechanic is a great idea
  • Combat, especially magical combat, has gotten very stale, with a heavy reliance on visual effects, rather than a focus on strategy and tactics by the player
    • More often than not, MMORPGs have simple “push button” spells and abilities
      • Old school concepts such as reactionaries and positionals play a much smaller role, if any, in MOST MMORPGS

Ben Pielstick’s Challenge

  • Mark Jacobs challenged Ben to try to take the magical component system from our game and apply it to melee combat
  • Ben was told to pick a game he knew well, and try to recreate one of the classes using a simplified version of our magic system
  • He used a class which won’t be in our game to craft a Camelot Unchained equivalent
    • The class he created worked quite well
    • As a result, the magic component system was approved as the core combat system that will be used for every form of combat in the game

Component Combat System

  • Uses a variant on our component magic system
  • All abilities are created by the player, in the same way that magical spells are created by the player
  • The power of each ability is limited by a “value rating” limit which represents how strong an ability can be after modification by the player
  • With each new component added to an ability, the value rating goes up. It cannot surpass the value rating limit of the ability
  • Many components also has a range of adjustments that can be made, once again raising the VR
    • Players have precise control over the VR and all the adjustments made to it

Ability Components

  • Four basic types of ability components
    • Primary – The thing that the player wants the ability to use, such as a sword
    • Secondary – The way in which a player wants to use the primary component. For example, if the PC was a sword, an SC could be a slash. Sword + Slash = Sword slash attack
    • Modifiers – Optional add-ons, which a player can use to further tweak their abilities to suit a desired playstyle. These are the largest set of components, and cover things such as adding range to an attack, width to an AOE attack, or directing an attack to a specific body area
    • Modal Components – These change the state of the character in some way, such as an offensive or defensive stance
  • All abilities require at least one Primary and one Secondary component
    • Can have multiples of both, such as when attacking with multiple weapons
  • All components must be learned and practiced to increase their effectiveness
    • A small percentage of gain can come from practice against dummy targets, and possibly against a trainer or other members of your Realm
    • Not all components are compatible with each other
    • No class has access to all components, and many components are class- or Realm-locked to prevent mirrored classes

Combat

  • Each part of a character’s body is protected only by its own piece of armor
    • Unlike the way of most games, armor only protects the part of the body that it covers. Your helm doesn’t help you when you are struck on the leg!
  • Body parts take damage individually, and each part has its own pool of health and injury effects
    • A shoulder wound could reduce how fast you can swing a sword, but it won’t stop you from running away
  • Player-created abilities can add a modular component to target a specific region of the body
    • Paying careful attention can give the attacker an advantage, but if you target an area that the defender is guarding or quickly moves to protect, the advantage could shift
      • Certain components will also allow a defender, after a successful defense, to perform a special counter-attack on the attacker
  • Abilities always trigger cooldowns once started, and cost resources whether they complete successfully or not
  • Abilities also have a “Disruption Value” which is damaged by “Disruption Damage” from hostile abilities
    • If an ability takes too much disruption damage, it is interrupted. Too much DD can result in a very negative effect on the player whose ability was disrupted
      • The more powerful the ability disrupted, the more likely the backlash from the ability will hurt the user of the ability

Summary

  • The combat system of Camelot Unchained is one of the most unique systems in any MMORPG to date
  • Players literally craft all their own abilities: nothing except the core components of an ability are premade. Epitome of “choices matter”
  • Four different categories of components, many with their own customization, yields huge number of possible combinations
  • Players can create abilities to match their preferred playstyle, not just play the classes that we create for them
  • System supports hard interrupts, positionals, reactionaries, and other staples of hard-core combat systems