A few days ago, Unchained Entertainment (previously known as City State Entertainment) re-emerged after a long slumber and revealed that Final Stand: Ragnarok would re-launch on Steam Early Access this Thursday, while Camelot Unchained, the original MMORPG project devised by the studio, would come out in late 2025.
To be honest, fans and Kickstarter backers were almost losing hope at this point. The studio had received over $2 million in funds back in 2013, but the MMORPG seemed still far from completion. The current focus on Final Stand: Ragnarok, which is a very different game, also might have certainly disappointed the original backers. Still, the developers maintain it was important to test the engine that would become the backbone of the MMORPG.
I’ve recently had the chance to try Final Stand: Ragnarok and can honestly say it was more fun than I thought. It’s still fairly barebones in my opinion, and there are some weird omissions like the 60FPS cap, the fixed camera (which is currently way too close to the character), and the lack of any proper parry or dodge move, to name a few. Even with all these caveats, hacking and slashing scores of unread mobs raised by Hel turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable despite the limited move set (Champions only have three active abilities).
The basic mode, Hel’s Reckoning, is extremely simple. You and any potential allies (the game supports up to eight players at once right now, though we were told this number could be easily increased in the future if need be) have to defend various towers from the hordes of enemies sent by Hel for a few minutes. There are five phases in total, each one progressively more difficult. In pure arcade style, players will also find plenty of power-ups to pick up across the battlefield that boost your health and damage. Moreover, there are consumable pickups like bombs, grenades, and barricades that can make a major impact if used at the right time.
Mind you, the graphics aren’t anything to write home about, and I’m still on the fence to see if the thrill of hack-and-slash action will wear off very quickly as it does in other games. I do have to concede to Unchained Entertainment that the engine appears able to support huge battles without much of a hitch. After all, this was the main goal they set for themselves when making Camelot Unchained.
After the hands-on session, I was able to chat with president and CEO Mark Jacobs (former founder and CEO of Mythic Entertainment, the studio behind Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online), about Final Stand: Ragnarok and Camelot Unchained, starting with why it took so long.
The first question has to be about timing. The original Kickstarter campaign for Camelot Unchained happened in 2013. Of course, I’m sure you didn’t plan to take this long to get to market with your first game. Why did it happen, though?
Look, it’s the same thing I’ve said before. We had to build the engine to drive the kind of game we wanted Camelot Unchained to be. We were very clear that we were trying to build something that nobody had built to date, which was an engine that could drive battles of 500 or more people.
And yes, it took longer, and that’s a shame. It sucks. But we’ve continued to work on it. And if you were in the game today, you saw the performance of the engine with tons and tons of NPCs, way more than they’ll be in a Camelot Unchained battle. In the coming weeks or months, you’ll see tests with that many people. That’s number one, it took us longer to build the engine. That’s not an excuse, but it is a reason. It just takes a while and while it’s easy for some people to say, well, it shouldn’t take you as long, the fact is if you look at the number of companies who’ve said the same thing in the last dozen years, none of them have released an engine that can drive the battles we want.
In our Kickstarter, we said we wanted 500, just something on a scale that was awesome. Was it the right choice? I don’t know. But it was the choice we made, and while that’s not the only reason it’s taken us so long, that was the main one. But as you can see from what you saw today and what you’ll see in other videos, the engine is doing its job today and because of that, we are very comfortable doing or saying what we said about Camelot Unchained coming out at the end of next year, assuming we can hire enough engineers.
That was something I was wondering. Was the lack of talent one of the reasons?
It was, oh my God, it was. Again, that was one of the reasons I talked about in the past. We announced Camelot Unchained right at the same time mobile was getting hot. And there was this other thing called VR that everyone thought was gonna take over the world, including 3D technology before then. I couldn’t hire enough people. I always complained about it if you’ve seen any of the old videos with me and we were talking about numbers.
It was really hard because everybody was staffing up and there was a lot of VC money going into things that they probably wish they never went into. But we were left going, hi, we’re still making this MMO; will you join us? It was hard, it was very, very hard. The best thing I can say in our defense is that we never stopped working on Camelot Unchained. Like any team, we have some things that went right and things that went wrong. That’s part of being a developer.
I don’t talk about the team in a negative way. All I’ll say is that things could have gone better. I wish they had, but we’re still working and that’s what really counts.
Is the talent situation any better now that there is remote work available and there have also been many layoffs throughout the industry?
We do remote. Right now, we’re mostly fully remote. We have one office where people sometimes go in to do things. Thanks to the investment we got more than a year ago, we’ve almost doubled the size of the team. We signed three new people this week, so we’re growing. Do I think we’re at the right number? I would like some more, but I’m feeling very comfortable about where we’re getting to. It won’t take much to get us where we need to go.
Can you share a ballpark of the number of employees you have right now at Unchained Entertainment?
Right now, I think we’re at 54, including a couple of contractors. Maybe 55 because we just signed somebody. I believe that is the current count.
Going to Final Stand: Ragnarok, the game first launched in October 2021 on Steam Early Access. Did you have to go back to the drawing board a bit during this time?
No. Steam is binary. It’s either early access or launch, I couldn’t use anything else. So, yes, it launched earlier. But in our documentation and some of the interviews, I kept telling people this is first access. It’s not early access. It is for Steam because there is no other choice.
Believe me, if I could have said first access using Steam, I would have done that. We didn’t go back to the drawing board at all. We just kept adding more stuff. With each sprint, we added a bunch of new things to Final Stand: Ragnarok.
Now we feel we’re at the point where we can say it’s a true early access game, because when you look at the early access games – look at Palworld, for example, it had over 25 million players. There’s a higher standard, I think, for early access than there used to be, and now we can say we’re at that standard. We have multiple arenas, we have lots of NPCs. We’ve got a great performing engine, we’ve got a very updated User Interface. We’re very happy that we’re now in early access and taking it from there.
In the presentation, you said that while the goal is not to take an infinite amount of time in early access, you’re not going to rush to version 1.0, either. It’s a balance, I guess.
Exactly. That’s the thing about early access. You’ve got some games that were in true early access for many years before they actually launched, and it’s gonna be the same with us. Could we launch next year? Absolutely. If we feel we are in the kind of shape I would like us to be, then we can officially come out of early access, but early access isn’t like the old days.
It is a launch, right? Again, you look at all these great games and how many people have been playing them in early access and then you go, wow, it’s no different than a launch because it is commercial. In the old days, it used to be called a commercial launch, right? Because that’s when you got paid. So, you put the game on the store shelves, or you put it on Steam or Epic, but the only difference between early access and commercial launch is that the early access games don’t usually have as much stuff as when they’re launched.
But when you start looking at the whole game as a service thing, then what’s the difference? If you look at Dark Age of Camelot, we launched in 2001. We had our first expansion the next year.
If it was a commercial launch and now we have all this new content and then we have more new content. How is that any different? It really isn’t. Right now it’s just nomenclature.
So, I’m guessing you’re planning to keep developing Final Stand: Ragnarok alongside Camelot Unchained for years, right?
Absolutely.
Beyond Hel’s Reckoning mode, are there going to be other modes available at the early access launch of Final Stand: Ragnarok?
Absolutely. You have the tower, you have the arena. We’re gonna be testing the dungeon maze. That’s probably another two months from being ready. We’ll do these first look Fridays where we’ll give players a peek and let them play it for a little bit and get feedback. And in terms of after that, we’ve got a swamp area that’s already in development, we’ve got more champions in development. By that, I mean actual development, not just on paper. We expect all of this will happen this year.
There’ll also be a lot of tweaking. Once we get a lot of people playing it, we’re gonna get a lot of feedback.
Are there going to be any cosmetic microtransactions in Final Stand: Ragnarok or anything like that?
Yeah, we’re gonna keep it simple, real battle pass stuff. Obviously, there is no Web3 and no things that give you an advantage in the game. It’s all cosmetics right now. You can earn them, you can buy them. It’s gonna be a very standard formula. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here.
Speaking of Camelot Unchained, you said you’re targeting late next year, right? Will that be another early access launch?
I’m not gonna get myself in trouble by saying what I don’t know. We haven’t actually discussed it. In my perfect world, I would probably do an early access launch as long as it’s not a minimum viable product, right? Because the first access for Final Stand: Ragnarok was a minimal viable product. For Camelot Unchained, I would rather wait until we’re further along.
Could we do an early access launch on Steam just like we would do the open betas back in the day or the final betas? Maybe, but we haven’t even thought about that. We’re talking about having a real game by the end of next year.
Are you planning to show more about Camelot Unchained later this year?
Yeah, absolutely. The hope is that in the next two months, as more is done, because we have been working on it, we just haven’t talked about what we’ve been doing. Then we are going to start talking about it.
The Camelot Unchained backers, even the ones who are impatient and I don’t blame them at all for being impatient, have been overall extremely patient. Even the impatient ones have been very patient. It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s actually true. We want people to believe in the path we’re going down and when you look at Final Stand: Ragnarok and you look at what the engine can do and then you see these same things applying to cu and seeing that we’re
making more progress on seeing you all of a sudden, I hope that will cause people to look at us and go, that’s great. Keep going. That’s all I can ask, because we’re not asking them to give us any more money. We’re just asking them to continue to be patient as we work on it.
Do you have any plans to launch the games, perhaps starting with Final Stand: Ragnarok, on consoles as well?
Yes, absolutely. Ragnarok was made for the consoles. Almost everyone on our team has a controller right by their desk. We built it from scratch to be PC first, but console as well, by making sure that everyone had one of these and was playing the game with it as well as the keyboard at times. That makes our life easier when we port because, as you know, a lot of games that are made for the PC and go to the consoles, don’t always have that same success in terms of whether it’s gameplay, UI… We didn’t want to have any of that. We were just like, no, we’re not gonna go down that path. We’re gonna design it right from this beginning to be a game that can be played on the consoles that can be fun on the consoles and won’t take us forever to port it if we decide to port it.
But as of now, we have not ported it. We haven’t begun porting it. We don’t even have anyone on the team assigned to porting it. But at some point, I expect the engine will be ported along with the game to at least one of the console platforms.
Thank you for your time.
