[KS Update] Evening Update April 9, 2013
Folks,
So, another good day here at CSE and with our Kickstarter. I’m truly sorry I’ve been a bit pre-occupied the last two days but I’m almost through the interview cycle. I hope that by tomorrow night, I will have talked/emailed with everybody who wants to talk to us (and then we can give their ducks back to them!) and I can focus on our Kickstarter again full-time. In the meantime, I’ve got three bits of info for you all.
1) Tomorrow afternoon we will have another video update from Andrew. As you know he is building the engine that we will need for Camelot Unchained. He has continued to work on it and his next, but not final update, will show you something almost everybody has asked us for since this first tech update. The update is pretty sweet but focused not on the pretty but on the speed and scalability of the engine.
2) I’ve included a grab bag of goodness based on questions that I have been asked a lot in comments and via email.
3) I’ve got my Aloha shirt all ready to go for tomorrow! ☺
-Mark
Top Ten Questions: Grab bag of goodness
1) Do you own any other shirt than the same black one you’ve been wearing?
Lots and most of them are black. I hope that when I lose some more weight I can go back to something a little more colorful on a full-time basis.
2) While there be a Linux or Mac version of this game?
Maybe. Because we are growing the engine in house, by the time it reaches adulthood it might not be an easy port to those operating systems. Andrew is going to dig deep down (he’s threatened to write assembly code again) to get us every ounce of speed he can get. That might prevent us from a quick and easy port. OTOH, we won’t know until we are much further along with the engine.
3) How do you feel about Bufbots?
They don’t belong in Camelot Unchained and we will do our best to make their use a lot more difficult here. There is no way to prevent somebody from having a couple of accounts (unless we want to ban families, spouses, etc. which we aren’t going to do) and running two characters but we are going to go overboard design-wise so you can’t simply park a BB inside a structure and spam heals, buffs, etc.
4) Why have you chosen a subscription-model? Are you insane? Everything is FTP and should be now and forever!
a) Because I don’t want to have to support 95% of the server population free of charge, pray that 5% spend a lot of money and then find ways to get a small % of the 95% to spend something; b) Maybe, but I think it is the good kind of insane; c) Check back with me in about 3-5 years. There’s a major storm coming in the FTP space whether people/publishers want to hear it or not (well, it’s not of course). Besides, we will get a tighter community with fewer people who actually really want to play and stick with our game as opposed to a large number of people who are playing until they have to pay or they find a different FTP that interests them. I’ll take lower profits, fewer players, tighter community any day of the week. FYI, I said this same thing before, back when networks like GEnie, AOL, etc. were charging for games and the first “Adver-model games” were supposed to take over the world.
5) I think you need to give more to the $5 tiers, we’d get so many more people! Why don’t you do that?
The $5 tier generally does not get a lot of support in any of the game-based Kickstarters that I have looked at (please check out Torment, SoTA, etc.). Even if I was to give them something good (like Beta 3 access) and we did get some additional pledgers, that really wouldn’t help us meet our goals.
6) Will there be no PvE in the game at all? No NPCs, really?
There will be NPCs of course (as I’ve stated before) since towns need citizens, structures need guards, crafters need leather, etc. The world won’t be empty but NPCs will not be dropping tokens, items, etc. However, you will be able to scavenge/skin/etc. materials from them of course but again, not items, tokens, etc. There is also a difference between PvE-NPCs (cows) and RvR-NPCs (guards, human or otherwise) but no item or token drops. I also promise that there will not be PvE expansions with new tiers of gear drops that become required to complete. This game is a RvR-focused MMORPG and will remain such.
7) What’s the death penalty going to be like in Camelot Unchained?
For battles to be meaningful, I believe that Camelot Unchained needs to have a death penalty that stings a little bit. No perma-death, no corpse looting (there are rewards but that is complicated) but also – no instant rez (rez takes time), no self-rez (even for healers), dead = dead, when dead your body can be burned/magically attacked by the enemy (takes time) or you can release, no item decay on death (use/enemy attack based only), limited bind points (there is a healer + crafter mechanic that can come into play), “rez sickness” like mechanic and last but not least divine intervention.
8) When will you release the stretch goals for Camelot Unchained?
Hopefully Friday. This is a very important part of the campaign and we want to get it right before we talk about it. The obvious goals are well, obvious but the most important short-term stretch goal needs a little more massaging for its presentation.
9) I can’t find the backer’s forums. Where are they?
They won’t be opened until after the Kickstarter funds and we can survey our users to get their email addresses. The developer forums are closed to non-backers so email addresses are kind of important in order to give access.
10) Will there be crowd control in Camelot Unchained?
Yes, there will definitely be CC in Camelot Unchained and it will play an important role in the game. However, there will also be resists and I’m not looking to implement a system where you can CC a player for a year and a day. There also will be another important part of CC that I’ll discuss in detail in a future update. Like the idea we are kicking around for stealth, it is a little BSC. There will also be a limit on the number of buffs/debuffs on a player as per other postings.
11) Will there be a hard interrupt system in Camelot Unchained? (bonus question)
Yes, hard interrupts are confirmed but it won’t be binary. We should apply some common sense to how they are implemented.