To the point and on the nose, the title says it all. After 13 years, Camelot Unchained has finally become a game that anyone can access and (even more importantly) discuss at large without the threat of an NDA. To say it’s had a long and harried history would be an understatement. Many of you kind readers likely have been following the game’s development since Kickstarter along with us at MOP. And even if you haven’t paid close attention to the ins-and-outs and don’t have an opinion one way or another on its development, you’ve probably at least taken note of MOP’s reporting over the years.
Now, I’m not here to rehash any of that history. We’ve reported on the early access release and on the many stages of development as news has arisen. If you really want a detailed look through time, we have posts upon posts (and endless comment threads) to keep you up at night.
Instead, I want to give you my honest take as I’ve joined all the other new players buying into the Steam early access release and playing the game for the first time. I never played Dark Age of Camelot, so I can’t say I have a bone to pick or much in the way of experience with this particular title’s history. I did play and enjoy Warhammer Online for several months when it launched almost 18 years ago. Class balance aside, that was a really fun experience, and knowing that we have some of the same RvR style gameplay loops in effect here, I thought there might be some potential.
As anyone who’s familiar with RvR style games knows, in CU we have the standard three factions to choose from. Each has a sliver of lore to go with it as well. I chose the elf-looking one because I’m an elf-y boy. You could have also chosen the Arthurians or the Vikings, too, if you’re boring.
And while each faction has its own unique take on every class, ultimately you have about the same choices between them each. Of course, I haven’t had the time to delve into all of them yet, and I do really like the idea that each faction’s version of a warrior has its own twist on the concept. I will never forget how annoyed I was with the balance of classes in Warhammer Online. I strongly believe Mythic favored the Destruction side. In which case, I end up falling back to the idea that I’d prefer proper balance with equivalent skills across factions over the unique flavor from one faction’s classes having some skills that the others do not.
So in terms of options for creating your hero, you really have a nice breadth of choices to select from. Lots of unique classes with lots of unique skills. Visually, you do not have a lot to work with, though. You have a few races to choose from and either a more masculine or feminine option. There’s no different hair styles or faces or really any of the customization that’s so common in most MMOs, not in the current early access, anyway. That’s a bit of a bummer since our characters often are an extension of ourselves. I know I tend to spend an hour in some games just in the character creator. Not here of course, since the options are so thin, but in lots of games I do. We’ll have to stay tuned for that.
That’s just the beginning. After that, you have to get into the game properly.
Camelot Unchained really wants players to join in and focus on the RvR combat. It’s truly not trying to be a themepark in any sense of the genre, and that’s been true for the last 13 years of development. The aim and overall goal is to go over there and fight those people because they’re bad – but not us, we’re totally the good guys.
That isn’t to say there aren’t other activities and things to do in the game; there are! You’ve got the typical charcuterie of MMO side skills to spend time building, working, and leveling up, like gathering skills – logging, hunting, mining, and fishing. There’s no doubt some amount of crafting will take it away from there too. And yes, I did call those side activities. I’m here for the combat! I want my blood flowing and the adrenaline pumping.
Beyond that, though, you really are chiefly participating in the land conquest: claiming land and zones to increase your faction’s ownership.
Combat goes into a more tab targeting style of gameplay. Camelot Unchained’s skills use your classic MMO fashioned hotbar. You have your rows of abilities 1 through = (equal sign) for performing your attack actions and fishing. Why does fishing get its own action but harvesting pork from the piggy I hunted doesn’t? Go figure. You’ll likely add more bars and rows of skills as you level up and gain more abilities.
Now, whether you want to hunt and gather resources or begin your legend of conquest, you need to go to a resource node. In other words, pop open the map, look for an icon that indicates you can gather that particular material there, and then go get your mats. Perhaps not the most natural experience, but at least there’s no question about where to go find things.
I mentioned there’s no semblance of a themepark here, and that’s no joke. From what I’ve seen, everything I described is just about all there is to do in the game. You’re fighting, gathering, and crafting. I’d like to think there’s more nuance in each of those activities, but those are the activities. There’s truly no questing or NPCs asking you to kill ten rats, so if you go in expecting that, you’re not just in the wrong game but the wrong subgenre.
As a new player joining the world for the first time after character creation, I have to admit to being a bit more than just lost. I understand Camelot Unchained wants to skip NPCs and quests, but there needs to be some sort of tutorial or explanation on where to go and what to do. As it is, I literally just spawned in the middle of a massive keep with a skill bar full of abilities and no actual direction at all.
There’s no popups, no hints indicating that I should go seek out these nodes to level up abilities and skills. There’s nothing. So I just ran. I ran and ran and ran until I arrived at a boat and found a portal. After I walked into the portal, I found myself in a new zone with a few NPC guards milling about, but still no direction or indication for what I should be doing. So, I did the only thing I really could think of, which was to pop into map chat and see if there were any helpful individuals online.
Fortunately, there was one player who basically told me to find the bow and arrow icon on the map and farm monsters to level up my skills. So I did. It worked. I killed my fair share of pigs and leveled up a few skills and harvested some pork. But to what end, I’m not really sure. I decided to move on from this activity to find a node that wasn’t controlled by any faction (the map indicates when a node is unowned by a faction) and see what I could do to help claim it.
Doing this was somewhat more entertaining. There were some NPC guards to slap around. They weren’t particularly sophisticated, but I was able to level up some of my skills and learn a few new ones. It doesn’t appear that there are any skill trees or ability to choose a class direction directly in this build. It may have been that my weapons and class were the only factors that determined what new skills I was gaining. Combat was a bit choppy, and I didn’t really like the feedback I got as I was fighting. I really wanted some kind of auto attack or click to attack because what I ended up doing was just watching my hotbar and tapping whatever skill wasn’t currently on cooldown.
Now, I know these were braindead NPCs, and later on when I was looking through some of my skill text to learn a bit more about the effects of using each of them, it read as if there should be some smart ways to play, like hitting a baddie from afar with a rooting skill, then stunning them, and battering away at them from there. So I don’t mean to say that the skills themselves don’t have some interesting interactions with each other. But the actual act of using a skill and moving around to launch another attack wasn’t really smooth. Not as much as I’d like for it to be, at least.
I’ve seen a lot of chatter about the state of the servers and how well the game is or isn’t optimized for play. My experience is pretty mixed in that department too. I’ve written before about how my latest PC build is a Manjaro Linux box. When it works, it works so smoothly. And when I first tried to play Camelot Unchained on launch night, I was less than pleased.
I downloaded and launched it on my machine. The game didn’t crash, but it wouldn’t open either. Straight from a Play button in Steam to a Stop and right back to Play again without ever actually opening or closing. It felt like it was intentional, almost like it wasn’t that it couldn’t play on my system, but that it wouldn’t. I tried every type of Proton version I could hoping one of them would click, but alas it was for naught. So I went back to my old potato Windows PC only to find that the game ran badly there too. It also looked pretty bad too as I had to reduce every setting down to the basics. And that’s why a bunch of my screenshots throughout this post might look really angular. It looked like a game from 2000.
But I’m happy to report that the next day or so, I saw an update in Steam and decided to give it another shot on the Manjaro build. And whatever the devs did, suddenly it worked. CU seems to need to be restarted after you’ve adjusted the graphical settings in game, and Proton 10 worked best for me, but after that point it ran extremely smoothly. It even looked really good. It was night and day from a performance perspective. Combat was still a bit choppy, but movement and animations were good.
So with my tech situation sorted, let me wrap this up for today with my honest take.
For my part, it’s thin. Like really thin. You have this fairly big, massive amount of area and land to roam around on, and simply little to nothing to do with it. It’s just there to spread out and make the world feel bigger without really having much purpose. I know that Mark Jacobs has addressed a number of the exact issues I’ve been discussing, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that right now, this is how the experience plays.
The vast number and types of skills and abilities seems kind of cool, but I’m not sure about the motivtional drive to build those up. For me, I think I’m looking for something with a bit more of a gameplay loop beyond just the grinding out skills to grind out and compete over areas that I don’t really have much of a purpose to fight over.
In some ways it reminded me of Mortal Online 2 where I can keep on leveling up some skills, but… why. I could never quite find a good reason to keep going in Mortal Online. And that’s kind of what I felt like here. I haven’t fully decided whether I want to take a pass on CU or I want to keep playing and leveling up my skills to see what I can accomplish from a combat perspective. It has some potential, but it seems a long way from fulfilling it.
If you’ve been waiting for a chance to play, then perhaps you should give it a shot while it’s only 10 bucks with no sub. There is a gameplay loop here, albeit a thin one from my perspective. I just have to ask myself, what are am I really able to gain from playing here that I can’t already obtain in other games – like Mythic’s earlier RvR MMORPGs, both of which still exist? That’s a question that I don’t think Camelot Unchained has answered for me yet.
