Design chief Mark Jacobs took to a YouTube stream this week to announce Final Stand: Ragnarok (or Ragnarok: Colossus, or simply Colossus), City State’s brand new smash ’em up (cheers, Eurogamer). The DAoC and Warhammer: Online vet is still going for massive battles, but Ragnarok is set to be an entirely PvE affair - slaughtering thousands of AI foes and defending towers on a huge battlefield. From the gameplay shown, it looks rather Smite-y, but with way more mooks to smash. It is also, notably, not Camelot Unchained. (Gameplay demo kicks off at roughly 1:27:00)
In the entire three-hour stream, very little info is given on the long-suffering MMO. Jacobs does occasionally mention how the development of Ragnarok: Colossus - which began last July - has assisted with CU’s matchmaking and server stability. Speaking to MassivelyOP, Jacobs notes that Colossus has been a vital part in keeping Camelot funded. Despite Camelot’s development starting far enough in the past that RPS co-founder and current robot-wrangler Jim Rossignol covered it for us, Jacobs reckons Ragnarok will still hit release before Camelot. It’s still not an MMO, for one, and Jacobs told MassivelyOP that there’s still plenty of work to do on the technical side of Camelot. Namely, converting the entire server back-end to Linux, something Jacobs insists “had to happen”. That’s probably a bummer for folks who’ve been waiting for the DAoC successor for nearly a decade. And, as someone who poured too many hours into Mythic’s ill-fated successor, Warhammer Online, I kinda get it. Those games had a tremendous thing going on - even if it was kinda janky and required ludicrous numbers of players to be online in the same place at the same time. Jacobs seems really sold on the idea of offering an extra game to CU fans, with CSE are offering a free copy of Ragnarok to Camelot backers. But they’re also claiming to refund anyone who’s had enough of this and wants to cut their losses.
