Camelot Unchained pre-alpha goes well, has pictures
Servers remain robust, handle large fights.
Crowd-funded 'fight each other not monsters' MMO Camelot Unchained opened for pre-alpha testing earlier this week and the results are encouraging.
The focus was the game's engine and the servers handling tens - hundreds - of people fighting in the same area. When too many people descend on an area in most other MMOs, things grind to a halt and even prompt a server crash.
Ensuring this doesn't happen in Camelot Unchained, which bases its entire concept on large realm versus realm battles, is priority number one.
Servers held up without a crash, though, and saw 150 people fight in a small area "without any system-wide slowdowns".
"What was especially cool, given the size of the battleground and all the magic flying around the space, [was that] players fought happily in a generally lag and latency-free war, even when people were connecting to our AWS servers from all over the world," wrote Mark Jacobs, the boss.
Developer City State Entertainment created a special 'capture the duck' mini-game in a small area for the occasion, and threw in plenty of widely varying abilities - and then messed with their values - to ensure it was fun, and rigorous for the servers.
"The biggest objections from the players were things like slower movement speed than they expected, longer cast times, liberal use of cooldowns, no cast bar, and some other things that they thought were final game-design choices," added Jacobs. "As we stated in the FAQ, this pre-alpha test is for testing the engine, not for testing the game design of Camelot Unchained.
"Now that we have a nice, stable build up for our pre-alpha folks, our team will go back to building and breaking new stuff."
