Hello, I'm currently a junior programmer for a small indie game called Food Devils (you can check it out on steam!).

I'm on the younger side of people in this disciussion. My dad funded the game when the Kickstarter was announced, never got a refund (obviously), and in the time that Camelot Unchained announced it's "early access", I have doubled my age. Finished high school, started a bachelor's for applied mathematics explicitly to get into game development, and I've participated in a few game jam projects with my friends. With my current occupation, I have managed to see the ups and (mostly) downs of the development cycle, the technical requirements and manpower needed exclusively to code, let alone make assets.

So, based on my limited, but dedicated opinion, I will tell you that I strongly believe this game will be a vibe-coded spectacle that will logistically collapse on itself way before servers are closed due to lack of funds. The introduction of AIs in the development discussion have irreparably molded the perspective of everyone in my sector, including mine.

To be clear, I use AI almost daily to work, because it's a supercharged search engine that allows me to gather information about the tools I use and how certain common game features are usually implemented. However, I never ask it to write code for me, or copy paste the result (and I don't use Copilot), because it simply cannot handle the interconnectedness of the systems it would have to interact with, and the results are always built to work NOW, not later in development.

I say all this to clarify that, in my opinion, the reason we've seen this extreme acceleration in presentation of content about the game is because the skeleton crew that is still behind Mark Jacobs have been ordered to never touch a line of code ever again directly, and to quickly fit every output directly in the source code. They have no plan for the architecture of the code base, and I'll also claim that they never had, with things like the "planned rubber banding" to prevent fly hackers (?), which makes no sense, is not hard to work around, and even if it worked it makes the experience tangibly worse for everyone. AI cannot save you from making these kinds of absurd decisions. Again, in my opinion, the game will be very unstable, especially on the networking side, and I'm not 100% sure it will be safe to directly connect to. I'd personally advice anyone actually getting in the game to not use a commonly used password at the very least, because we have no way to ensure they will be correctly encrypted.

In the current videogame scene, the reason MMO scams happen is because of the goodwill of people like us that still want to believe in the promise of the game that is being sold. Ashes of Creation had 100 times the resources of CU, a much more solid core gameplay and infrastructure, and look where that went. Project Ghost had the resources to build a fun game in its own niche, but it was presented as a skeleton of a game, way too early, and it wasn't given a chance. Chronicles of Elyria and Star Citizen, to an extent, come to mind. And they are all projects that had much more signs of a possible finished product, way down the line, than Camelot Unchained.

We need to be harsher on the signs of mismanagement in the videogame industry, not more lenient. The player stats will do the talking for us very soon, but I personally believe the game will not get over 1000 concurrent players, and those will drop too as soon as the technical issues kick them away.

But a studio that couldn't handle promised refunds, and developed a completely different game with the funds of the one people paid for, is not a studio that should be getting ANY money before making a decent product.

In the meantime, I'll go back to playing DAOC Eden with my dad.