Folks,

It’s time to give you an update on the status of Camelot Unchained’s development: We are pleased and excited to announce that beginning today at 4:00 PM EDT, CU will be entering Early Access!

Over the past several years, the team has been focused on rearchitecting and expanding major portions of Camelot Unchained. From the technology that powers our massive battles to the gameplay systems that drive RvR warfare, we’ve made substantial progress that we’re excited for you to experience firsthand, including:

• Our handcrafted maps, designed for large-scale Realm vs. Realm conflict, with more than 60 square kilometers to explore and fight over.
• More than 400 playable abilities across six archetypes, with eighteen playable classes each boasting three divergent paths to tailor your playstyle.
• Technology capable of supporting large numbers of actors in a single battlefield, enabling the scale of combat CU was built for.
• Major improvements to our lighting and shadow systems, enhancing the look and atmosphere of the world, as well as greatly improving performance.
• A complete rework of the UI visuals, improving clarity, usability, and presentation.
• New gameplay systems, including:
  • Trading – Exchange goods with friends and allies to help prepare them for war. And don’t forget to pay the King his due tax!
  • Crafting – Our crafting system is built around a full production pipeline, allowing players to harvest materials from the world, refine them into usable resources, and ultimately craft their own equipment. In addition to the myriad skills listed below, Cooking, Alchemy, and Enchanting will also be added at a later date.
    • Gathering – Players can collect raw materials throughout the world through activities such as fishing, herbalism, hunting, mining, logging, and prospecting.
    • Refining – Gathered resources can then be processed into crafting materials through refining professions such as gemcutting, sawing, smelting, tanning, and weaving.
    • Processing – These refined materials can be used by dedicated crafters to create equipment and consumables through professions including armorsmithing, artificing, jewelsmithing, leatherworking, tailoring, weaponsmithing, and woodworking.
  • Banking and Currency – Store your items for safekeeping and collect gold to exchange for goods and services throughout the Realms.
  • A comprehensive stats overhaul – every archetype is represented by unique attributes, mechanics, and resources to manage.
  • Royal Quests – Contribute resources, crafted equipment, and participate in battle to earn rewards from your Realm!
  • Guilds – Join forces with other players from your Realm to tackle more difficult content and pool your resources together.
• Overhauled playable races, including seven races that have received major updates and a total of eighteen unique player character models.
• A rework of the patcher flow that brings character creation into the game client – with more updates on that coming soon.
• Nearly a hundred new equippable armor models, and dozens of new and updated weapon models.
• New capture objectives, resources, and combat hotspots designed to expand Realm conflict (RvR) gameplay.
• New sound effects, music, and environmental audio to bring the world to life.
• New visual effects for abilities and character effects, making combat more dynamic and readable.
• New ability and combat animations, as well as improvements to existing animations.
• Content pipeline overhaul reducing downtime and improving download speeds during patches.

As a result of this important milestone, all current Backers of CU will be able to access and participate in playtesting current builds of the game, which will typically be up every weekend, from Friday evening until Monday afternoon.

A few important things to note:

1. This is not Steam Early Access. We do intend to utilize Steam as a platform in the future, but not for this release.
2. This Early Access phase is only available to current Backers of CU as of this writing, but we will be reopening the store again very soon to allow new players to join Early Access.
3. We are also sharing a development roadmap outlining our plans through the Spring, which you can see below!

Not all of what we’re working on is included on this roadmap, and you can be sure that we are actively reviewing your bug reports and feedback from every weekend build to ensure that we are creating the best possible experience.

As laid out in our roadmap, we will be adding a lot of new content, performance improvements, and features over the course of the next quarter and beyond as well as working to correct bugs/balance issues as necessary. Your participation in these builds and the feedback you leave in our testing threads will be genuinely invaluable, so please join us!

Getting CU to Early Access is an achievement that would not have been possible without the patience and support of you – our Backers and audience. We’re excited to share this progress with you and look forward to continuing to build Camelot Unchained together.

If you want to keep up with the latest news about CU, you can check out our website, which has a redesign coming soon. If you’re a Backer looking for news about playtests, be sure to check our Discord, where we post regular updates.