A few months back we published a preview of Camelot Unchained, an upcoming MMORPG from City State Entertainment that will pit players against each other in 3 factions, as they build their world, and then defend it from destruction at the hands of their enemies.  The focus is away from raiding in favor of survival through player driven conquest, building, and crafting as well as a commitment to what a subscription model means to players. In the past few months, the development team has been working to bring the game to its Beta 1 phase. Here are some of the features they’ve been working on as they get ready for the beta.

Animation is being worked on heavily right now, especially the jumping mechanic and how abilities and weapons look and behave. They are using their own engine, so much of what they are doing must be built from scratch and the animations. A lot of work is being done with the game’s physics like gravity and collision and testing for responsiveness and input. Something as basic seeming as jumping actually requires a bit of fine tuning to ensure that it is realistic and not too floaty.

Futhermore, weapons are being refined, both in the stances when players are engaging in combat and also when they are unequipped. Attention is being made to how the weapons behave and look when swung and to ensure the animations are solid. Abilities are also getting this treatment, as the highly customizable ability system will feature a manner of different visual effects, depending on the properties of the ability you’re using.

Siege engines and manual aiming are being tuned together. This is interesting stuff because sieging your enemies and their structures are going to be big parts of the game’s faction based constant war. Players will be building their homes and towns, and these siege engines are going to be primary ways to break some player hearts!

They are also in the middle of some technical refinements under the hood. When it comes to the world and swapping servers, they are working on removing the load screen that happens when you swap a server, to make the transition a lot more seamless. Extending into the range of visuals, the particle rendering is getting upgraded to allow particles to be lit by the world, receive shadows and more. The additions of shaders that affect this is part of their effort to increase the visual beauty of the game. This is also true for the game’s lighting and contrast.

City State Entertainment is really tuning a lot of what this game will be based on player feedback and giving them the ability to customize and sandbox as much as they want within the structure of the mechanics. It’s certainly an ambitious project, as it’s targeting some massive scale battles with hundreds of players at once. Camelot Unchained is set to release sometime later in 2017 and Beta 1 is looking to be right around the corner. We’ll keep monitoring the progress of the game and will keep bringing updates here, so be sure to check back!

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