Zerg

The Mighty Zerg

The general idea is not to eliminate zergs but rather to give enough worthy playstyle alternatives.^, Some aspects of Camelot Unchained that will strongly influence zergs are:

• Huge world, divided into islands and with limited fast travel & respawn options
• Veilstorms will be triggered by strong concentration of magic, thus being much more likely to appear where the zergs are
• Some forms of crowd control could be suitable for smaller groups fighting the bigger ones
• Death will have consequences, and resurrecting or respawning and returning to combat will not be as easy as it is common in modern games
• Collision detection will encourage using shieldwalls/bottlenecks, team formations and such strategical teamplay
• Losing fort, keep or stabilizer will hurt much more than in some other games, discouraging both zergs and keep trading
• Some of the intended measures for balancing Realm populations can also come into play

Developer Quotes

Mark Jacobs: "Losing a keep will hurt, it has to, especially to discourage keep trading. You will not want to lose a stabilizer/artifact, especially if you are on the numerically superior team."

Q: "In your previous games there has always been a rather big divide between people that liked to run in small groups and “zergs.” Personally, I do enjoy the zerg (that are often despised), because of the leadership and organizational aspect, which I find to be an enjoyable challenge, but I’m well aware that many disagree. What’s going to be your approach to this dilemma for Camelot Unchained?"

Mark Jacobs: "I think that there is a big difference between zerg types. You may want to see some, such as the ones that focus on taking and holding (not trading) keeps. OTOH, there are others you really don’t want to see, like keep traders or wandering kids’ soccer teams (zergs that don’t want to engage other ones).

By default, if we want to have large-scale battles, we need to have some actual large-scale groups, right? So, what we are going to do is make sure we have enough abilities to counter zergs while at the same time laying out the world so the most effective way to succeed isn’t by playing in one. If we can do all of that, while not imposing overly harsh penalties on zerging, we will have a nice, workable balance."

Mark Jacobs: "As I've been saying forever, we are not going to force zerging out by the introduction of specific mechanics but rather by making it a less attractive option for players. If we can do that, the majority of players will choose not to zerg. How will we do this? Well, I've talked about things like transportation across the split world, certain abilities meant to work better against zergs, disparate goals and Places of Power, etc.

As per my quote above, if everybody is zerging in our game then we have failed as a team in developing this game. It is as simple as that."

Q: “One last question, an oldie but a goody. How are you going to break up the zergs that make RvR so much fun!”

Mark Jacobs: "This is a more complicated one and frankly is the perfect example how I’ve told the team we have to approach RvR holistically (don’t even say it, I know what you are thinking) and not look for a silver bullet (or even arrow) to deal with that problem. Since RvR isn’t our endgame, the vast majority of the world’s map (sorry, I still believe in protecting freshly minted characters, so feel free to mock this choice) is going to be open, unlocked and available for your raiding, looting and RvRing pleasure.

But that’s not enough, we will also have very, very limited fast travel options. Moreover, while having lots of extended CC abilities is a tad bit controversial, we will certainly have some CC (as well as resists and ways to clear the CC) so that smaller groups can have a better chance at dealing with larger groups. Having a rather large world map, almost no fast travel, and some CC abilities is a good start but we need even more and we’ll detail that in later blogs.

Oh, and no “Pop goes the Arthurian.” When you die, and you will die; don’t expect to simply pop back up and get right back in the fight. It is going to be a lot more complicated than that. IMO, that gameplay style embodies some of the problems with many modern MMOs, death without consequence, “easy in” and “easy out” RvR, 6-year old kids’ soccer match, etc. RvR combat must be fun, challenging, exciting and losing must hurt a bit or it means nothing."