Camelot Unchained 'Officially Enters Early Access' Allowing All Backers to Play on Weekends

After more than a decade of development, Camelot Unchained has officially entered Early Access. City State Entertainment founder Mark Jacobs made the announcement via livestream (and again on the official site), confirming that current backers can now log in and play every weekend, with servers scheduled to run from Friday evening through Monday afternoon.

For those wanting to jump into the game now, this Early Access launch is backer-exclusive for now, meaning you won't find it on Steam yet. Jacobs was direct about that in the stream: the team wants feedback from people who've been with the project since the Kickstarter days before opening things up to a wider audience.

A new store opening is coming to let additional players in, but Steam remains a future goal rather than a current one. In a shift to how many Early Access titles work, servers will stay on a weekend schedule until the player population justifies keeping them running during the week, which the team believes makes sense for an RvR game that needs enough bodies on the battlefield to actually function. One would imagine this would coincide with a broader Steam launch, but there is no telling at this time when that might happen.

The game arriving at Early Access is notably fuller than you might expect given the label. Camelot Unchained is boasting handcrafted maps spanning over 60 square kilometers, more than 400 playable abilities across six archetypes and eighteen classes, a full crafting pipeline running from gathering and refining through processing into finished gear, trading and banking systems, a stats overhaul, Royal Quests, guilds, and nearly a hundred new equippable armor models are all in.

Jacobs also noted in the livestream that the team believes they've tracked down the last remaining hitching bug that had been plaguing large-scale combat, which was apparently hiding between frames. However, it sounds as though the game is still not working at a consistent scale that would depict the constant large scale battles we're hoping for, so no doubt there will be more optimization as the population increases.

In the stream, Jacobs also offered some candid backstory about how the game got to this point. He described a period several years ago when progress had stalled badly enough that he was genuinely demoralized, crediting a mysterious collaborator he called "Shane" for coming in and turning things around. Jacobs declined to reveal Shane's real name as part of their agreement, but was effusive about his impact, saying the project simply wouldn't have made it to Early Access without him. Whether you read that as endearing transparency or a very long teaser for someone, it's a rare moment of directness from a developer about how close to the edge a project came, although at times those struggles couldn't be hidden from the community.

A roadmap covering the next three months is also out now, with plans for new trade skills, map expansion into the Forest Savage, a new class type, improved chat systems, and a series of visual passes on water, foliage, fog, and atmospheric lighting. The roadmap doesn't cover everything in the pipeline, but it gives backers a clearer picture of what to expect during the initial Early Access period.

While it seems there's still a ways to go before the game hits a proper launch, or even Steam Early Access, Unchained Entertainment has still hit a major milestone. A milestone that, even Jacobs himself at one time, may not have felt they would get to. But here we are, a decade later, and Camelot Unchained is on the cusp of a more widespread release. Let's hope to see the game open up to everyone soon.