Camelot Unchained First of the Kickstarter MMOs??

My inbox has been blowing up lately with news of Camelot Unchained's Kickstarter progress. For those of you that are not that pvp-centric, or regular followers of Mark Jacobs' exploits like myself, CU is Jacobs' bid to develop an mmorpg that is strictly pvp oriented but which promises a brand new mmo experience. So far, to date the project has raised more than $600,000 of its intended $2M goal. We have to wait an entire year and a half to see the fruits of the developer's labors, but the reason this mmo project seems to be getting more press is because it is a big name usually associated with big name developers like Mythic Entertainment going the indie route and funding strictly through crowdfunding methods. Personally, even though Jacob and his team are quick to deny the fact they are trying to make a rehash of Dark Age of Camelot, they have obviously taken the 3-faction pvp model made famous by DAoC and are banking on the nostalgic appeal of that masterpiece to drum up interest in an updated version of that game. 3 factions, Arthurian Scandanavian, and Irish mythological influences, these are some of the features that harken back to the days of Albion, Midgard and Hybernia.

 Personally, anyone who knows me and who follows this blogs knows what a huge fan I was and have always been of Dark Age of Camelot, unlike Warhammer Online, which was a good game but structurally flawed because it wanted to be too much like World of Warcraft, DAoC has always had its own flavor and distinct back story and no other mmo has come close to it in terms of pvp combat, until now? It would be exciting to get into a game from the ground floor, but I for one don't think it is necessary to pledge our souls to City State's project, that is unless you want to for the reasons stated above. I will definitely play Camelot Unchained once it comes out, but I seriously doubt that you can catch lightning in a bottle twice, call it the skeptic in me.

MMORPG Kickstarter projects I would have funded

wow I am back blogging on my original blog after nearly a year of being AWOL!

Well, it has been a while but I think the reason I decided to get back into blogging about mmorpgs here at my original blog is mainly because I already have a built in audience on blogger and I want to take advantage. So for my return post I decided to follow up on a blogging project that I have been kicking around in my head for a while, now that I am on spring break from grad school, I decided it might be a good time to work on it. It dawned on me while hanging out with my gaming group this spring that a lot of interesting projects are going the crowdfunding route these days. One phrase I heard a lot was, "I kickstarted so and so, or I really like this game project and I am kickstarting x or y." It got me thinking, What exactly makes for a successful indie project and  conversely, what factors help to make a failed project? I will be exploring this topic in a series of posts with an emphasis on mmorpgs and mmo-related projects.

I ask myself, if these indie projects were available now would I play these games? why or why not? and are they innovative, or more of the same old same old? I started with a successfully funded comic book based on a mmorpg called "Meatspace" A sci-fi comic book by NY based comic book author Josh Gorfain.

As described by Gorfain, this is a cyberpunk story that is one part mega-multiplayer online roleplaying game, one part revenge thriller and one part story about a man re-entering society from his own self-exile partly from his own doing and also from someone bringing him back. Sounds like something I would dig reading and wish I had written myself, and it has been developed into an Amazon Kindle book. Check out the promotional video in the kickstarter campaign which was funded in the fall of 2011. This was supposed to be a 5 part series so is Gorfain working on the second edition? Seems like a long time in between editions, but that is the thing about these indie projects, some take a while to see fruition. More on this later!

I should probably note that this particular project was funded after a first attempt which failed, and the writing and editing team had to modify the specific to make a successful run of it.