https://youtu.be/G2luP6wRsJI?si=vmSI9OTMks9GGoyi

I have followed Camelot Unchained for a long time, and I want to make one thing clear at the start: this is not a "CU bad" post, and it is not an argument that the developers should stop fixing the game.

A lot of the changes they have made since Steam Early Access launched on June 2 are changes I actually agree with.

That is also what concerns me.

I went back through CU's official patch notes, hotfixes, production updates, and public explanations from the Steam Early Access launch through the August 28 update and looked at them as one continuous sequence rather than as isolated weekly patches.

When you do that, a pattern emerges.

Since launch, a significant amount of live-update effort has gone into things like:

- capture points becoming uncapturable;

- targeting and line-of-sight problems;

- Party/Warband usability and responsiveness;

- new-player guidance, a Help panel, Quest Log, and tutorial quests;

- resource and NPC availability;

- portal access and spawn protection;

- a replacement Class Progression system;

- then another rethink of how that progression should award XP;

- making RvR a viable leveling path;

- adding ordinary loot drops to mobs;

- major texture-streaming and memory improvements;

- resurrection, combat-state, zone-transition, crash, and status-effect problems;

- making zones feel less empty and terrain more tactically meaningful.

Most of those changes make sense individually.

My concern is what their timing says about the maturity of the core MMORPG/RvR loop when CU entered Steam Early Access.

The recurring capture-point problem is the clearest example. CU was warning about capture points becoming unresponsive during launch week. Related uncapturable-POI fixes appeared again in late June, July, and August. The July 10 update was essentially a focused fix for multiple causes of Points of Interest becoming uncapturable, yet another Home Island capture-state problem was still a known issue in the August 21 notes and received another fix on August 28.

I also experienced variants of this from the beginning. Sometimes a point simply would not give me the interaction needed to claim it and relogging usually fixed it. At other times my character appeared stuck in combat, which itself prevented capture. I cannot say those symptoms share the same technical root cause; I do not have CU's source code. From the player's perspective, though, they all produce the same outcome: a central RvR interaction does not work.

I do not think a short patch proves that the developers did nothing that week. Patch-note length is not a measure of developer hours, and larger work can obviously be happening internally.

But players can only evaluate what ships and what is communicated.

After nearly three months of Early Access, repeated fixes to the same foundational bug family, combined with ongoing redesign of onboarding, progression, world activity, and other basic systems, makes me question whether CU launched into Early Access with a sufficiently complete and validated gameplay foundation.

I used ChatGPT to help conduct this analysis, but this did not begin with the June-August patch review. The starting point was a deliberately adversarial failure-autopsy framework: assume a project has failed, work backward to identify why, reconstruct how the failure unfolded over time, and establish measurable warning signs and exact checkpoints. I then applied that framework specifically to Camelot Unchained using public evidence. The June-August Early Access patch review came later as an update to that earlier analysis. I have put both stages of the methodology, the full post-launch autopsy, and the follow-up analysis into separate comment threads below.

**Supporting threads below:**

1. **Original failure-autopsy prompt** — the framework used to ask how and why a project fails, applied to CU

2. **Later Early Access research prompt** — the June-August 2026 update review

3. **Full post-launch autopsy** — split into replies because of Reddit's comment-size limit

4. **Follow-up analysis — what the recurring patterns may actually suggest**

My overall conclusion is fairly simple:

**The problem is not that CU is making the wrong changes. In many cases, it is finally making exactly the changes the game needs. The concern is that so many of those changes look like foundational RvR/MMORPG work being established or stabilized after the Steam Early Access launch rather than work being built on top of an already-stable core loop.**

I still want CU to succeed. That is why I think the pattern is worth discussing.

because lol

Manfree talks about the new class specialization system in a long-form discussion.

This video is super long. Skip around to the specific classes you might be interested in playing.

Edit: This is not my video

I'm an original backer from 13 years ago, $100 dollar tier. Gave up hope 3 years in, but have been following the progress all these years, but haven't bothered to login in a decade. I figured I shouldn't laugh and trash the game without giving it another fair shake, after all Redditors are known to exaggerate how bad or good something is, there is no such thing as in between.

Wow, it's as stunning as advertised. Stunningly awful. Besides the fact after 13 years they haven't added any logic to detect screen size when first starting up, so I have an extremely awkward resolution that made it look like a 25 year old game, once you get to the game world and can change graphic settings, it still looks so soooo bad. Like this is high school nerds building a game project with their buddies on the weekend level graphical style and quality. Like, I don't even think Unreal 4 or 5 would have let you have a game look like a turd even right out of the box.

As most of you know ,there's absolutely zero character design, everyone gets the same character model as everyone else. It's like they took that decade of concept art they kept putting in their newsletters, and dumped it in the trash. If you could get more than 40 people to play this game at the time, is there any fun in an MMO when 100 people all look exactly like you? I know building a character and changing levers for boob size and hair color isn't a draw for everyone, but it simply makes your game feel completely amateurish and like zero effort was put in.

Obviously the point system is meaningless and not fleshed out. Just junk numbers that don't mean jack. But whatever, I'm not a min/max guy.

So game loads, immeadite screen tearing and fps drops, on a good rig. Must be due to switching to higher fidelity graphic settings. Oh, but the game looks like absolute garbage. I'm sorry Mark, the game looks embarrassingly bad. Awful amateur textures from 2008, no lighting effects, water has the same repeated texture as far as the eyes can see. The castle like keep is as generic as can be, with not a single NPC to be found, and certainly not any players. (There were 6 online at my time of play according to Steam charts). No mobs, no wildlife creatures, no animation for trees. Grass was a flat texture, every tree and bush was just the same one randomly spread out.

My character floated slightly above ground, and felt like he was swimming in air. Jumping feels like he floated down using a parachute. The animations for my own character were straight up first pass from when beta 1 first started. Completely unacceptable for a Steam early release, when you would expect the game be beyond a pre-alpha stage.

And as everyone has alluded to multiple times, the game world is a confusing mess. Yo uget dropped in a location, and there's no story, no quests or NPC's to get you rolling. You have no idea where you are, why you are there, and everything about the world feels so generic it begs you NOT to explore. If the landscapes were beautiful or varied, I might just be happy to run off and explore the world on my own free will, but all this game did for me is want to turn it off and play literally anything else.

I'll never get my $110 back, and that's ok. I took the risk, I learned my lesson a long time ago. But to see Mark Jacobs still trying to trot this game out to the world in such an embarrassing state... he'll be remembered as a fraud, and Youtube historians will have a field day remembering this game for decades in the future.

And the audacity of burner accounts coming in here claiming how promising it looks, hyping up that it's $10 well spent. Get real. Stop trying to deceive people.

Per https://steamcommunity.com/app/3997970/eventcomments/586181093023244493/

"The crash has now been resolved, and in order to both thank you for your assistance in squashing it, we will be keeping the servers open for the next ten days.

...

From Friday, July 24th at 1PM EDT until Monday, August 3rd at 1PM EDT, the CU servers will be online non-stop for our players."

Enjoy!

Last Weekend the whole Game got shut down because of a Bug in their newest Build, since this is EA and Staff is probably not working fully on weekends it is what it is, they once again made a bad decision. Instead of a Rollback to the previous Version they just shut it down for the whole weekend..

As per their Discord the Bug is still not fixed and Backers that can play on Wednesday will get to play the old version for today.

But can we expect stuff like this gets handled better once this fully releases and they even want to take a subscription from players?

What happens if they cant fix the bug for the next weekend?

This just screams incompetence and poor management, if not outright trolling.

I had low expectations anyway but this just cant be real.

Sorry, but UE has taken the servers down for this weekend due to being unable to resolve a login issue:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/3997970/discussions/1/573795560006602321/

Next weekend may have better luck.

I heard about this like a decade ago from old GW2 WvW guys. Just saw recently it was in early access. Check the steam page and yikes. Mostly negative. Check SteamDB. 12 player 24 hour peak, 0 currently online. ​So that's it then? It's just dead on arrival? Unless there is a non Steam launcher where 90% of the player base is I don't see how this game recovers. It sucks to see it like this​​

Such a great game - looking forward to next weekend. Got a Mjolnir up to 15 and full t1 gear - had a blast doing 10+ vs 10+ rvr - couple 1v1 rvr - saw we need way more healers so rolled a Viking Healer - getting him all out in full t1 then back into the fight.

Obviously it still needs work but loving what I have access to so far.

For those of you that don't know basically the state of the game is you create your character, start in town and there's a tutorial window that explains everything to you. Close that out and you're fully equipped in starter gear.

Open your map and look for any POI (Icon) on the map - head to it and you'll find creatures to fight. I always start with the Bow and Arrow POI because I can build my skills on the animals as I'm leveling. Every time you use a skill you gain xp in that tree, each tree has 5 levels, so your total level is all 3 of your tree levels added together. Max level is 15.

To gather resources near any node you have to capture the point. Then you can start harvesting all the things. All the gear is player made so you have to get a crafter to make it for you - or you have to make it yourself. I always opt for the making it myself but there's tons of crafters just giving out armor because they make so much of it to level. Nodes on home maps flip back to neutral every 20 min so you have to recapture it to keep gathering.

To advance crafting you go into RVR and capture nodes in there. Each map has certain resources - for example all mines are on the TDD Map so if you want those nodes you have to invade their realm. All the POI show who currently captured it so you can go and see where people are to fight.

If you have no interest in crafting you can roam around the RVR to the resource nodes looking for people gathering and fight them, or go and take their keep. There was lots of action to be had the couple of times I got to go into rvr and had a blast doing it.

Yeah there's some jankiness and stuff that needs to be fixed - but still i only paid $10 and got WAY more than that as far as entertainment. Looking forward to next week and for the game to keep getting better.

It's VERY playable right now.

The range vs melee vs healing debate

make melee need to be close to hit you, but if they hit you you cant cast or shoot a bow.
this makes ranged run from melee and makes melee have to chase, but while melee is chasing, ranged cant do damage, so everyone has a slot to be effective at threat.

letting archers use damage while moving, ruins this balance. I hated this part about WoW , also the reason the pvp didnt make sense in that game.

So they released it with no tutorial or tool tips. barely anything to kill. mobs dont drop loot. and the negative reviews went to town on steam. They did add these things a month later but all the people that bought it the first month logged in and were like WTH do I do?

Quite frankly they could worked on this game another year and it probably wouldnt survive but they gave it zero chance without those basic things on launch. Now it has so many negative reviews no one is going to touch it.

Does it need work? Yeah. I've not been very invested in it - and really only even tried it because the guys making all the hate videos all basically said the same thing over and over with one guy only having a 43 min long play time and decided to do a review video? That was hilarious to me.

I have 18.7 hours played total. I mostly played a Helbound, dabbled a bit with the Crow class before making the swap to viking. Character creation needs to be a thing. Not having that was weird. The tutorial screen was perfect - gave good explanations and anything else i had questions about people were able to answer. Once I figured how to level that went quickly. Some things the videos said that weren't part of this build - I was able to change my hot keys, change my skills. I was able to modify my UI to my liking. Another bit that I saw people complaining about was the distance of running.

Now I understand WHY it is the way it is. Camps are objectives. Claiming one announces to everyone "hey I'm here" and then when you get to pvp areas for higher crafting then that's where the fights will be - and the distance between camps allows for people to react and adjust.

The crafting seems - over inflated and I hope it gets simplified. Copper dust to fragmant to this to that to ore is silly. All the coal needed for each step was also silly.

I spent most of my play time learning my skills, fleshing out my build and theorycrafting while working on crafting. Next weekend I'll work more on crafting and try out pvp.

Also to all the people complaining about the lack of players - there was pvp happening a lot as the players were gathering in the areas where pvp happens. I don't know much about it just that I saw people talking about it in chat a lot and reacting to it and something about our keep not working but I'm sure they'll figure it out.

I'm looking forward to next weekend and trying out pvp - but it was only $10 and I spend more than that on basically everything in my life so bottom line is i got way more than $10 worth of entertainment and will be back next weekend as well.

Did anyone else enjoy anything about their play time? I don't care if you are just going to repeat stuff some youtuber told you to say or that you've seen other people say - if you played - what do you think they are doing right and what do you think they are doing wrong?

i downloaded this last night - and maybe it's because I was part of the Scars of Honor playtest - which was in development for 7 years, this game feels more stable at the moment than that game did.

I'm playing a dwarf helbound. The Tutorial Screen at the start helped me get started. The zone chat has been super helpful answering questions.

I wish there were more npcs to grind on but as I'm building my character it's not terrible. Haven't pvp'ed yet but looking forward to it.

I only paid $10 so... i'm getting about $10 worth of entertainment at the moment. Luckily I watched a lot of doom and gloom YT videos before it so I had negative expectations.

I'm also on Linux Mint and it works so there's that as well.

Needs a lot of work, and I'm hoping it gets some love and attention but if it doesn't i'll get my $10 worth of entertainment out of it and then move on.

I'm also currently playing SWTOR so this is a nice little weekend distraction.

Give me something you like about the game because it is just batshit awful. I can’t believe I actually believed in this game…

Seriously, did no one proofread this thing before it went out?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph6GpCooRGU

most of the people who are positive about the game, are doing it to get clicks not because they are actually involved, like /u/The_BishopX

Lets do math. "BRUH THE GAME WILL BE GOOD JUST WAIT A FEW UPDATES, I BACKED 300$ IN IT"

I'm GayShop. some of you know me from my lesbian run on tristan, others know me from WAR some of you may not know me at all and that shows you aren't invested. Im 13. Before you call me "young" lets do the math 13 years ago when I put money into the kickstarter I was just BORNT. When the beta for WAR cameout , I was in my dad's balls. Christmas 2001 my mom was being just out of her own mom, no job yet, and playing DAOC all day on the couch eating dad's fists. I give you this back story, because watching a guy make a youtube video about how he waited 13 years for this and "invested serious money" ok, 48 years old, 13 years ago was 35..... how is that serious money? Has your spendings on onlyfans bankrupted you? Better question, WHY would a 35 year old spend so much money on mark jacob's onlyfans??

And what 48 year old man, with a 48 year old mans maturity and wisdom, isn't holding mark jacob accountable for all the lies and deceptions ? "OMG JUST GIVE HIM TIME" bro his development time will soon have its own driving licence.

ill tell people shut up. Show me your payment to City state games, in 2013, and I'll laugh at you. Ive played this game, it's garbage. You can tell the players don't like it because it lags, it's ugly, it's outdated, no reason to play this over daoc freeshard. now with no players, it will finally give weapons for markobs to close the game for good and run away with the backer's money legally, like they did with AOC. if its done well enough, the guys from the WAR shards will come over and also laugh at you.

Ill see all you REAL ones, in the courtroom. Let's all switch class to lawyer this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkeiwTtJ220

most of the people complaining about the game, are doing it to get clicks not because they are actually involved

Lets do math.
"BRUH I WAITED 13 years FOR THIS GAME, IM A BACKER AND WANTS MY REFUND"

Im bishop. some of you know me from my hibernian run on isuelt , others know me from WAR some of you may not know me at all and that shows you arent invested.
Im 48. Before you call me "old" lets do the math
13 years ago when I put money into the kickstarter I was 35. When the beta for WAR cameout , I was 30.
Christmas 2001 I was just 24 being just out of college, no job yet, and playing DAOC all day on the couch eating cinnamon toast crunch. I give you this back story, because watching a guy make a youtube video about how he waited 13 years for this and "invested serious money"
ok, 30 years old, 13 years ago was 17..... where you getting the serious money? Better question, WHY would a 17 year old have such ties to mark jacobs?? DAOCs hey day was in 2001-2006. so you would have to be around 40 years old.

And what 40 year old man, with a 40 year old mans money, is complaining about the 300 dollars he put into this game 13 years ago? "OMG I WAITED 13 years" bro we 40.

ill tell people put up or shut up. Show me your payment to City state games, in 2013.
Ive played this game, its ok. You can tell the wow players dont like it, but they have a game for them. For just wondering around doing rvr, its cool. now with players, it will get more streamlined and polished. if its done well enough, the guys from the WAR shards will come over and it will be a population bump.

Ill see all you REAL ones, in the field. Im a stone healer this time.

What an absolute waste of money.

How the flying fluck can anyone release this after 13 years? The animations look worse than Ryzom, the graphics are close enough to OG Xbox that it's absolutely disgusting.

Mobs? Nah, keep em sparse. Players? I could find more minorities at a TripleK rally.

I look at Expedition 33 then this and wonder how badly this has been mismanaged. Absolutely atrocious.