Camelot Unchained Reviews

13 years. $32 million. Camelot Unchained is what happens when nobody is willing to admit a project has failed. The game feels decades behind the industry, years behind its promises, and somehow still years away from being a finished product. What should have been a great MMORPG, and a worthy successor to Mark Jacobs' earlier work, is nothing close. Worse, what exists today looks and feels like a student project. If someone told me this was a college project that had been worked on for six months by one or two people, I'd believe them. The fact that it took thirteen years and roughly $32 million makes it almost unbelievable. At this point, I half expect to learn the project was being managed by the federal government. Massive budgets, endless delays, constant explanations, and very little to show for it. After thirteen years, the most polished part of Camelot Unchained isn't the gameplay, the graphics, or the MMO systems. It's Mark's excuses. What many backers ultimately received wasn't an MMORPG even ready for early access. It feels like we funded the development of a proprietary game engine, with Camelot Unchained serving primarily as a proof of concept that the technology could "sort of" work. After thirteen years, that's simply not good enough. Mark, learn to take criticism, I really hope you can recover from this train wreck, but I doubt it.

Man i'm not sure where to begin. My uncle and i played OG DAOC and were so excited for so many years for this to release. This game is like a powerpoint i didn't do until the night before in high school. There's no depth no playtime nothing. I'm sure the process of creating games is hard but there's just no way they poured their blood sweat and tears in this for 13 years. I keep waiting for them to say they've pranked us and have something so much better but it's cope. - A very sad DAOC fan

Typical MMO launch where the servers keep crashing. Also, this game looks bad even by early 2000's standards. Welcome to Steam Mark.

This HAS to be scam. 13 years in development and looks worse than DAoC right now. Also, runs at ~35fps with the attached speccs. Currently there are no enemies, quests or any explanation for anything.

I am so terribly sorry, but this is a slap in the face. Ok, no PVE, i can understand, but not even a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "info.txt" button with some text as to what you can do. No info on abilities, no info on absolutely anything. And there is even nothing there. No npcs, not even a critter... a mouse or a butterfly... as environment. Just a few gathering nodes where you watch one lousy mining animation and that's it. The world and graphics are so dated that even the predecessor game Dark Age of Camelot looks decades ahead of this. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around ? For the amount of hype this game received, for the amount of money (not steam, the "backers" that payed tens of times more), for the amount of time: 13 years!! I mean, this doesn't even look 13 months (and that maybe only for the textures and background sound!) I wish i thought this could be salvaged, but the engine was dated 13 years ago and the idea peaked with DAOC. My 10 euro are for what you did in DAOC, Mark Jacobs, not for this slop.

Camelot Unchained is truly a masterpiece of patience. After 13 years of development, I can't wait for the upcoming Mob DLC, Lighting DLC, and maybe even the NPC Expansion Pack. It's rare to see a game spend over a decade lowering expectations and still manage to disappoint on release. An unforgettable achievement in crowdfunding history.

In 2013 Camelot Unchained released the official kickstarter for this game. A younger and optimistic me bought in and donated $100 for the hopeful successor to Dark Age of Camelot. Mark(c) Jacobs had us truly believing he was going to make it happen. I was with my wife and didnt have kids. We were promised the "spiritual successor". Fast forward to 2026, now divorced and I have two kids ages 11/10. I cant find the old email I used for the kickstarter so I paid for this "early access" experience. Unfortunately its absolute garbage for 13 years of supposed development. I can run WoW:Midnight flawlessly but this game looks like Guild Wars 1 graphicly and stutters and lags consistently. What you see in game doesnt justify why it has such terrible performance. Dont be fooled by the advertising screenshots either. That is NOT what you're seeing in the actual game. I dont typically leave reviews on games unless they're spectacular, I dont like to be negative. But THIS is $2,200,000 provided by 14,000 kickstarters back in 2013 and what has been provided over the course of (13) THIRTEEN (13) years is just a legal robbery of all that money. Money that most likely has already been spent/utilized on other projects because it certainly did NOT go to the development of this game. Id get a refund if I had that old yahoo email that got hacked all those years ago. But it'll have to just remain a $100 cautionary tale about nostalgia causing impulsive donations to kickstarter.

I expected absolutely nothing. The game considered that a challenge. I waited 13 years for this. The game waited 13 years to disappoint me.

No idea how this took 13 years to get to this point. There are almost no mobs in the world to fight, no tutorial to even tell you the basics of the game. The assets look like unreal asset flips. This genuinely looks like they just started work 6 months ago.

Pre-existing backer via the CSE Store. This negative review is based on continual ongoing misbehavior by CSE. The situation is CSE had a written promise to refund backers on request. In Dec 2019/Jan 2020 outrage over Final Stand: Ragnarök caused a flood of backers to request refunds. I requested a refund myself Feb 2nd, because I no longer believed they would produce a game I'd enjoy. CSE created a "Refund Megathread" on their forum, and said all refund discussions had to be posted there. My 90 day e-mail request for a status update, "Your refund is in queue. We appreciate your patience." My 120 day e-mail request for status update, "We are sorry for the delay. The entire studio is WFH at this time, and Northern Virginia has been hit hard by Covid-19. We will continue processing refunds as soon as we are back in the studio. We appreciate your patience. " CSE has never posted status updates on refund progress in the thread. In June 2020 a comment by Mark Jacobs on massivelyo.com said he was the only one who had access to process refunds, and he hadn't been to the office since March. "Fortunately, I stayed in the office longer in March than I should have (I sent the team home weeks before) so I could process refunds until the last possible day." "if I wanted to do that all I need to do is turn off refunds or just stop working on CU (which means no refunds according to the original KS as well as the Terms and Conditions). The fact that we didn’t do either should be all the indication you need to know that our intentions are good." At one point there was a claim all refunds requested as of the end of Jan 2020 had been processed, with an e-mail and tag to use if yours was unfulfilled (but it wasn't posted in the Refund Megathread!) Meanwhile My 1 year e-mail request for a status update...nothing ghosted. Silence. My 3 year e-mail request for a status update...still silence. My 4 year request for an update, I didn't bother e-mailing CSE Support again. I posted goodbye and good luck to other backers on the Refund Megathread. There had been no CSE activity on the Megathread. No response or status update about progress of refund requests. The written promise to fulfill refund requests remained on the store.camelotunchained.com/faq with the ludicrous claim "Donations generally may take up to ninety (90) days to process, though we do try to do them faster." In fact web.archive.org shows that content and page being online into August 2025. 6 and a half years after I'd requested my refund and subsequentlly been ghosted by CSE Surprise! CU is on Steam Early Access! I check back on the Refund Megathread. No CSE Activity. I e-mail CSE Support requesting a belated 6 year status on my request. An automatic response and a ticket is generated! I made a non-abusive post in the Steam Community Discussion to warn others about how there has been years long silence from CSE about the status of promised refunds, even though the promise remained published on their store for years. Monday they respond to the Steam community discussion post! By deleting it. No denial. No update. No "please e-mail support so we can fix this oversight". A human deleted the post. There hasn't even been any human activity on the auto-generated support ticket. Its status is 'Awaiting Agent', but someone found the time to delete my post. Which leads us to this review. I whole heartedly and legitimately recommend you not buy this game, or anything else CSE produces.