Q&A with Mark Jacobs
Keeping up his unique communication with the community, Mark gave us the opportunity to get some questions answered, so enjoy the read.
It´s nice to see you finally fighting the odds again, Mark. More than a decade ago you convinced everyone that a low-budget game with a setting around Camelot and a tri-realm-system could be a success and you proved us right. Now, being back in the game, some might see you as the next messiah bringing back the old days. Do you think Camelot Unchained will be a glimpse of the past or is focusing on nichegames with specific key-aspects actually the new way to go?
LOL, if people are thinking of me as a messiah, they are going to be sorely disappointed as I’m just a fellow gaming geek who wants to make a very unique game for a niche audience. While I do think that the gaming industry as a whole is in desperate need of a shake-up, I’m not looking to do that with CU. What I hope will happen with CU and other niche MMORPGS such as Pathfinder Online is that developers can create games with a smaller player demographic than most high-budget MMORPGs have targeted ever since WoW shook up the industry in 2004 and find success with them. I’m also looking forward to playing games such as Jake Song’s ArcheAge.
As it seems up to now, you are investing a lot of time into communicating with the player base and you are doing that in an honest and direct way. Of course a successful Kickstarter and starting the development would limit your time furthermore, but do you plan on keeping up this unique and refreshing kind of communication?
I have never intentionally lied to the players and I never will, regardless of the consequences for telling the truth. One of the best things about being independent again is that I have surrounded myself with a group of refreshingly honest and straightforward human beings who are not the least bit afraid to speak their minds about anything and everything. If our Kickstarter funds, we will open up “Backers Forums” where backers and CSE will communicate even more directly than we do now. Our backers will be involved in helping to bring CU to life than they probably expect to be. Game development shouldn’t be done by committee, as that usually ends in tears, but I need and want our backers’ feedback and thoughts on a whole host of things including the best way to implement/not implement stealth. While we have some interesting ideas about stealth and other game systems, I want to hear from our backers what they think.
We have read a lot of concerns from players regarding the Kickstarter. Actually many are afraid they will lose money, if we cannot reach the $2.000.000 and the Kickstarter doesn´t fund. It might be a good idea to assure those fans out there, that CSE isn´t going to take their money anyway and just buy a nice beachfront house instead.
Well, the beauty of Kickstarter for the backers is that if the game does not fully fund, then no money is exchanged between backers and CSE. Therefore, even if we raised 1.99M, we would not see a single dime of that money. According to Kickstarter’s rules, it is all or nothing and that is a good thing as far as I am concerned as well. As far as what we are going to do with the money, well, I am putting in at least 2M myself so if I wanted to buy that beach house, I could do so already.
As anyone who worked with me at Mythic knows, I hate wasting money. While I was the CEO/GM of Mythic Entertainment, we never had pool tables, indoor volleyball courts, Starbucks, private jets, etc. at our offices or reserved for upper level management, including myself. I hate that kind of wasteful spending. Even though Mythic could certainly have afforded some of those things at our peak, my belief was that it was better to give that money back to our studio’s employees as part of our royalty-sharing plan rather than feed my own ego by having access to a private jet or even just an expensive office build-out. For example, after Dark Age of Camelot was a hit we could have afforded any office space in Virginia but instead of engaging “Developer Egoism Speed” and get the fanciest offices we could find, I spent time looking for a nice cheap sublet space and when we found one that also included furniture, we moved in and I also did the same thing with our current space. Heck, even Warhammer’s launch party was quite sedate and inexpensive compared to so many others in the industry, even after a three-year development cycle and having awesome pre-order numbers. So it is quite safe to say that if I was not going to waste money back in the Mythic/EA days, I am not going to do that now that I am independent again.
You already talked about crafters being able to build structures. Even though this is an early state and you haven´t started the development yet, could you say a few things about how these structures are going to be made? Are we going to have like twenty structure templates we can choose from or do you plan to let people build their structures more flexible?
The only thing I am prepared to say now that is it is not going to be simply a pick the structure and then the game automatically builds for you. We need some of our crafters to be involved in more than just making items in town if this game is really going to succeed.
How about realism and interdependency when it comes to siege weapons? Siege weapons are an important part of realistic warfare and nothing is more annoying, than to see everyone being able to carry tons of stuff and build several siege weapons with that. Do you plan to include some tactical necessities, while using siege weapons? For example, you could limit the movement speed and let the construction take some time, so the defendants could launch a counterattack. Another handy thing would be to force several people to carry the load. That way you could cripple the construction process by killing some of the carriers.
We are definitely going for a more realistic system but we also know that we can’t go too realistic otherwise sieges would takes months to successfully complete and I don’t want this game to be that old school.
Last but not least, anything you might want to share with us here and now? You are so passionate about this vision of yours, so of course every time you are willing to do an interview, we hope for some new, exciting facts, that hasn´t been mentioned before.
Hmm, new and exciting facts besides the one I threw in already about stealth. Okay, here’s another one. We will be announcing some of our reward tiers ahead of the Kickstarter so we can get feedback from our supporters before we launch. I hope the willingness to do so as well as the reward tiers themselves will show our supporters how serious we are about getting feedback from them both now and in the future as well as how we intend to treat them as both backers and future customers.
Thank you very much for the answers, Mark. It`s really good to see you coming back and pissing off people, like you said yourself. After all - people should stick to what they do best and luckily for us, that gives us a good chance of getting another great game from you and your team.
Thanks! Good to be back but I do also enjoy creating smaller games too. It is just that MMORPGs do have a special place in my heart.
08/03/2013, 02h57
