Folks,
My name is Mason. I’m the primary producer for Camelot Unchained at Unchained Entertainment. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before jumping into the latest news. I joined the team about 2 years ago, at the same time that Camelot was about to make a major turn. It’s been my responsibility to take the game Director’s bold vision and make it a reality. The team has put in a lot of work to get where we are today, and we still have much more planned for you all.
Now, on to the news. I’m sure many of you have questions on where we are in development, and what to expect in the future. Currently, we have: six archetypes and eighteen classes for you to play, ways and means to power your characters, and plenty of room to fight your enemies. During Beta and now Early Access we have been listening intently, and rest assured that we read every comment you send us. In order to plan for the future, I coordinate with the directors and team leads about our planned features, bugs, and player feedback. We set priorities based on severity and impact to gameplay, and then generate a roadmap that best represents our goals from there. This is an ongoing and evolving process, as is the nature of game development. That leaves me with the difficult task of making a plan that fits our goals and players’ needs, and adjusting to the winds of change.
With this in mind, we are making a few changes to our Spring Roadmap to better represent our internal priorities as well as what we’ve heard from you in Early Access. These changes were driven by the feedback that we’ve received over the past several weeks, including our own. Our Backers are our most important critics, and we hope to reflect that in the updated Spring Roadmap below and in our communications beyond.
Specifically, we have been focusing on bug fixes, performance improvements, and quality of life adjustments to enhance the core experience.
By the end of April we are committed to delivering the foundations for our new crafting tradeskills, Cooking & Alchemy. The King’s kitchens have perfected a few tasty meals to bolster stats, and alchemists recently discovered formulae for magical elixirs to shore up defenses. Keep an eye out for new recipes at the crafting stations.
We improved our terrain spawning priorities to reduce near popping of assets. This was much more noticeable for those running at full speed with buffs, but you should see improved loading of nearby assets.
We currently have six archetypes across the three Realms, but that’s just the beginning. You can expect to see three new classes under the Devout archetype playable in the near future. Devouts fill the role of a frontline fighter-healer combo, serving as durable, threatening melee fighters with strong buffs and healing capabilities.
We’re aware that our animation has had some rough edges, so we’ve updated the compression to remove most of the jitter, and added looping to longer cast abilities for smoother visuals.
Our lighting was crushing our colors and not allowing our art team’s work to shine, so we updated our lighting formulas to hammer down the harshness and to bring out CU’s true vibrancy.
Finally, we know that our chat system needs channels. You need to be able to talk the way you want, where you want, to who you want, or maybe not at all if you choose to. We are prioritizing evolving our existing chat system to make sure the global channel doesn’t have to be your one stop shop for every conversation. Additionally, we’ve heard that our text can be hard to read. We are coming up with a plan to improve it and will share more details when we’re ready.
We know these are not all the issues that you have reported or given us feedback on. We are aware that many of you would like the early progression to be faster, requests for additional tools to gear up quickly on War Wednesdays, getting to the fights faster, flexibility on realm restrictions, line of sight errors, and ongoing issues around hotkeys. We are keeping these close in mind and are already investigating fixes and solutions to improve your time in CU.
With all that being said, you will see that a few items have been shifted so that we could focus on those updates. Our Mail system and water interactions were pushed back to May. To ensure we can deliver on our goals for May, we moved Tradeskill Specializations to June. We don’t like pushing things back, but we only do so when we believe it’s important to shift focus to higher priority feedback. We value transparency and we’ll continue to provide you with updates whenever they are made. The roadmap below is only a snapshot of our near future, but our plans reach far beyond the end of Spring. We hope to share more with you later this year!
If you’re a Backer looking for news about Early Access, be sure to check our Discord, where we post regular updates.
Mason, Producer on Camelot Unchained