Camelot Unchained's Latest Update: Progress Shown, but Skepticism Remains

Camelot Unchained has clawed its way back into the spotlight after years of near-total silence. Once billed as the spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot, the project first turned heads in 2013 and then promptly became a running joke in MMO circles: a monument to missed deadlines, broken momentum, and crowd-funded frustration. Now, in 2025, we’ve finally seen new gameplay footage. And while we can't say the ship is tacking, at least it seems to be surfacing.

Mark Jacobs and his team are saying all the right things. This is a fresh start, they claim. A reassessment. A focus on actually shipping something. And for the first time in a long while, they’re showing, not just telling.

But let’s be honest: they’ve had to scale way back. The new Camelot Unchained won’t deliver the buffet of zones, classes, and systems that were promised during their crowdfunding. Instead, the focus is on a foundational gameplay loop. To conclude, the team showed a four-minute glimpse of what the MMORPG might eventually become, trimmed and reframed as something “achievable”.

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How We Got Here

For anyone just tuning in, Camelot Unchained began as a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, fronted by Mark Jacobs, the guy behind Dark Age of Camelot. It raised over $2.2 million back then, ballooning to something like $17 million over time thanks to later funding, including Jacobs’ own cash.

The pitch was simple: three realms, drawn from Arthurian, Norse, and Irish mythologies, locked in massive PvP battles for territory and glory. Think siege warfare, keeps changing hands, hundreds of players on the battlefield, and not a lootbox in sight. A title built for those who still talk about DAoC's RvR mechanics in reverent tones.

But even in a genre famous for delays and scope creep, Camelot Unchained’s timeline stands out. It hit Alpha 1 in 2015. Beta 1 followed in 2018. And then? Silence. Not complete radio silence, there were concept art updates and occasional written dev posts, but for half a decade, players never saw moving characters, active zones, or real gameplay.

The reasons are many. Failed tests. A baffling detour into a side project (Final Stand: Ragnarök) that drove away backers. Mounting refund requests. A studio rebrand. New investors. Layoffs... 

What We Actually Saw

On April 30th, Jacobs hosted a short livestream, dropping fresh gameplay footage and delivering a few carefully measured words. He described 2024 as a breaking point, a moment of internal frustration that pushed the team to reassess almost everything. The art style’s been reworked. The engineering approach, refocused. The team, smaller now, claims it's finally moving faster.

The gameplay takes place in a 70-square-kilometer zone, larger than anything we saw in 2018. Jacobs stressed that this wasn’t a vertical slice or cinematic trailer. No smoke, no mirrors. Just raw footage.

That footage includes PvE encounters, though, loot drops won’t be a thing. Gear will come from crafting and trading. There’s a glimpse of fishing. The environments - mountains, forests, wide-open fields - clearly doesn’t try to compete with modern photorealism. Graphics are totally outdated, and probably already were even when the project was first developed. It seems barely functional, with the camera sometimes jerking (even though there are rarely more than a dozen players on screen).

The UI is stripped down: centered health bars and a few option buttons in the corner. No compass. No minimap. If you squint, you can almost imagine playing this in 2004 on a CRT monitor.

The video ends with a large-scale battle that, surprisingly, doesn’t fall apart. That might be the most encouraging part of the whole thing. The custom Unchained Engine was always meant to support hundreds of players on-screen at once, and for the first time, that claim doesn’t sound totally hypothetical.

Unfortunately, in this large-scale portion (the only one), the majority of players appear to be standing absolutely still. Personally, I assume these are bots and not real players. In the end, I'm not even sure we can rely on this footage as a realistic representation of Camelot Unchained’s large scale battles.

Furthermore, the absence of siege equipment is strange. For a RvR MMO centered on fortress warfare, you'd expect to see trebuchets flying or walls coming down. Maybe next time.

Still Waiting

For all the noise around this reveal, the livestream was barely 15 minutes long. No roadmap. No release date. No specific testing timelines. Jacobs did say that external testers would be invited back “soon”, but there’s no telling what that means anymore.

And then there was the moment he called the current game balance “an absolute catastrophe”. It was… honest, maybe. But also a bit worrying. If they’re still that far from balance in April, a 2025 launch feels like wishful thinking.

Also, crafting (supposedly central to the gear economy) was nowhere to be seen in this video. That's a glaring absence for a system that’s supposed to be doing all the heavy lifting in terms of player progression.

I wasn't expecting anything, but I'm still disappointed

After more than a decade since its Kickstarter debut in 2013, the latest Camelot Unchained reveal still feels like a letdown. The new footage finally shows moving characters in a vast 70 km² zone, yet the visuals and animations look like early-alpha leftovers rather than a polished product. Even the much-touted Realm vs Realm battles barely make the cut, just a few seconds at the end with uncoordinated skirmishes that seem more bot-filled tech demo than player-driven warzone.

On the plus side, the studio has reopened its lines of communication and dropped raw gameplay instead of more concept art. Still, the lack of siege weapons, meaningful crafting interfaces, or any real progression systems underscores how unfinished this still feels.