Hey Folks,
The Production team is back for another update on our progress and to give you some insight into this month’s build. We started May with an aggressive plan to get several new rendering updates for our sky, deliver our first new map, the Forest Sauvage, as well a host of new features. However, we made the key decision to focus on addressing your feedback and bug reports. We have been hard at work improving the time to gear acquisition, fixing the bulk of our hotkey bugs, overhauling how we calculate line of sight, and much more. Line of sight improvements are in the final testing phase and will ship soon. Today I’ll go over what’s changed, where we’re at, and what comes next.
What’s New?
An ongoing focus internally is addressing character bugs with existing archetypes and classes. We are delivering classes at breakneck speeds, and we expected to crack a few eggs on the way. Some of those eggs are simple typos and others give some classes an unfair advantage. Derek, our resident Class Designer, has been hard at work fixing bugs and improving balance based on your reports. On top of that, we are taking a holistic look at cooldowns and costs. We want your abilities to have either a resource cost or a cooldown, instead of both. We think this will lead to a more impactful choice between using your resources and giving greater access to some of your abilities. This is just what we are delivering in May. In June we are planning on making some major adjustments to how you level your skill trees that will give you better agency to unlock abilities and understand what you are getting access to. We are really proud of this new system and hope to get it to you soon!
Water in our game is a hazard and an obstacle. Whenever we place water in our game, we think about how it can change character travel and encourage routes or create choke points. Only a few of our existing maps have water hazards, but you can expect to see them more in future maps. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear when you are in water and when you are starting to take damage. So we have added new character states for floating and drowning. When you enter deep water and start to take damage, you’ll see your character struggle and then eventually drown. This is just a first pass, we are nearly ready to deliver some massive updates to our water shaders and underwater effects that we think you will enjoy.
Our worlds are large, but not necessarily dynamic. We are building these zones with RvR combat in mind, but we don’t want them to just be empty battle fields. All of our control points have received a major update to how they are defended. In this build you’ll see more hostile defenders with smaller aggression ranges than before. Now you’ll be able to see the whole threat in front of you, and decide how you want to clear it. Take your time and draw them out one by one, or run through and kill them all at once. Each tactic has its advantages and disadvantages. On top of that, if a PvP battle breaks out, you may see them marked on your map. Choose to avoid them or disrupt their combat. We have plans to keep making changes to the existing world so you have more to do and ways to give your realm the advantage.
Another new element that you will see are ranged units defending key points around contested zones. We know that ranged attacks add a vital layer of complexity when engaging with hostile NPCs, and this is the first iteration that players will be able to experience. For this first round, expect to see ranged guards providing extra defense to each Realm’s Keep. In the future, you’ll see more existing NPCs use ranged attacks to defend their resources and even more defensive structures. We are just getting started.
Tagging on the world topic, we are making several updates to our graphics to make the world more dynamic and visually appealing. Dare I say, you will see a night and day difference in specific settings. Major work has gone in to fix many of the bugs that you have reported with our last update. The sky will have more dynamic sunsets and rises and there will be more atmospheric effects like fog and haze. On top of that, we are working on adding additional weather options. We have been preparing the way for dynamic and dramatic changes to the weather that you should start seeing in the next couple updates.
The last major thing you’ll see in this build is equipment durability. Your equipment is not just something you craft to get stronger, but it’s also something you’ll have to maintain in battle. As you battle your armor and weapons will have a chance to take damage, and as they wear down so will their stats. We intend this to be an attrition point that encourages players to make swift decisive battles and reward those who craft for themselves and their allies. This is a new area where we will be keeping an eye on balance, so give us your feedback as you have it.
What Comes Next?
Your feedback has been critical in our planning. We are excited that we have been able to take the time to address your feedback and we’ll continue to do so. There have been so many changes in this last build that it’s been hard for me to keep our patch notes up to date. Here are some of those things we are still working on delivering.
Soon you will see a whole new zone to conquer and explore, the Forest Sauvage. When you step into this new zone, we want it to feel appropriately distinct from existing zones with different points of interest and terrain to fight in.
We are going to reward those that take time to gather the best materials and level their tradeskills. High skill levels and quality materials will yield the best results, giving you the edge in battle.
Lastly, there is mail. When mail is made available it will initially be a way for us to send you important notifications and rewards for participating in the realm wars. Eventually, we’ll add player to player mail for communication or sending items to offline friends and guild members.
With this build, we are happy to show you the result of the changes we’ve implemented based on your feedback and the new content that we’ve been able to add. The team is ready to keep delivering updates at a consistent cadence, and eager for you to experience what we’ve been working on. We hope you enjoy this build, and we’ll see you out on the battlefield!
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