Game News King Arthur: Knight's Tale now available on Early Access

[Infinitron]

Tags: King Arthur: Knight's Tale; NeocoreGames

Back in October, NeocoreGames unveiled King Arthur: Knight's Tale, a turn-based dark fantasy successor to their original King Arthur series of roleplaying wargames from a decade ago. Darth Roxor was very excited, and the game's Kickstarter eventually raised £155,885 in funding. Apparently it was already pretty far ahead in development, since after a couple of short delays Neocore released it on Early Access today. They put together a fancy new cinematic trailer telling the story of the protagonist Sir Mordred, which I'll post along with the game's Early Access FAQ:

Why Early Access?
Knight's Tale was initially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, and we plan to keep involving the community in the development process. We will take this time to iterate features, balance changes and more, together with our backers and Early Access players, to make sure that they receive a fine-polished product by the time of the final release.

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
We're planning to be in Early Access for around 3-7 months.

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
New features will be added regularly during Early Access, with most of the story campaign becoming available in the final release.

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
The current Early Access version features the first two maps of Chapter One of the story campaign and multiple random maps.

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
Yes, the price of the game will be different after it leaves Early Access.

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
We've built a community during our Kickstarter campaign, and we'd like to further extend this community via Steam Early Access. We'll keep posting regular updates on all our social platforms (Steam, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and our Neocore Community Forums), react to user feedback, answer questions on a daily basis and hold regular Q&A streams on our Twitch channel - similarly how we did during our previous projects. User feedback to particular gameplay elements will play a very important role for content updates and for the final release.
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I'm told Knight's Tale is light on content right now but is otherwise pretty decent. If you'd like to give it a try, the Early Access build is available on Steam now for $35.

 

[jac8awol]

Cool, I just bought this. Loved their previous King Arthur stuff so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
What was that other dark Arthurian game that also came out in early access recently? I think these Neocore guys are gonna beat them to the punch and steal their thunder.

 

[Infinitron]

Cool, I just bought this. Loved their previous King Arthur stuff so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
What was that other dark Arthurian game that also came out in early access recently? I think these Neocore guys are gonna beat them to the punch and steal their thunder.

You might be thinking of Tainted Grail. And there's also The Hand of Merlin from Croteam.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I liked the style of the old ones much better

 

[Sergiu64]

Cool, I just bought this. Loved their previous King Arthur stuff so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
What was that other dark Arthurian game that also came out in early access recently? I think these Neocore guys are gonna beat them to the punch and steal their thunder.

Let us know how it is.

 

[Serious_Business]

Damn, King Arthur, that's a forgotten title if I ever heard one... it was pretty good though, from what I remember

 

[Tyranicon]

I swear, every piece of media centered on the northwest Europe now has a protag with the same generic Viking Lothbrok knockoff look.

At least it's turn-based, I thought it was going the ARPG route at first.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Tyranicon It is much worse than that, this is absolutely "disgusting" CGI

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Backed the Kickstarter, installing atm... will report

 

[Ovplain]

Early Access is a scam. Please don't buy games in Early Access.

 

[Murk]

Some gameplay streams of it going on now. The color palette leaves something to be desired (all gray all day), but who knows, maybe the mechanics are very good.

 

[Darkozric]

Color palette works for me as I'm not interested in another Divinity style aesthetic but a little bit of a camera zoom out will be much appreciated.

 

[Gregz]

I liked the style of the old ones much better

 

[Burning Bridges]

What is that? It looks a far cry from the butt-ugly kitsch the Hungarian hipsters would want to be Arthurian.

 

[Darkforge]

Early Access is a scam. Please don't buy games in Early Access.

This is barely even that, it's more like paying full price for a demo.
Which I did, played, then promptly refunded...

 

[Forest Dweller]

I DON'T FIVE A FUCK!

 

[Mangoose]

The highlight of the King Arthur games were the ink-on-parchment text-based CYOA. The rest was Total War Lite. I actually have not played the second one because I read that the CYOA part sucked ass.

In other words... Don't expect much from the combat mechanics, and hope they emphasize the CYOA. I'll suffer through shitty gameplay for that.

 

[jac8awol]

Early Access is a scam. Please don't buy games in Early Access.

This is barely even that, it's more like paying full price for a demo.
Which I did, played, then promptly refunded...

That's pretty much what early access is, man. You give them your cash for a demo that will become a full game later. I mean I get you asking for a refund if you don't like what's on offer, but asking for a refund because there's not enough content in the early access? Come on...

 

[commie]

Cool, I just bought this. Loved their previous King Arthur stuff so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
What was that other dark Arthurian game that also came out in early access recently? I think these Neocore guys are gonna beat them to the punch and steal their thunder.

Ahh this is the King Arthur TW style devs? Cool.

 

[SerratedBiz]

That's pretty much what early access is, man. You give them your cash for a demo that will become a full game later. I mean I get you asking for a refund if you don't like what's on offer, but asking for a refund because there's not enough content in the early access? Come on...

More like we're paying them for the privilege of doing their QA.

Don't get me wrong, you know what you're getting when you pay for EA, but it's still a shitty trend.

 

[Galdred]

That's pretty much what early access is, man. You give them your cash for a demo that will become a full game later. I mean I get you asking for a refund if you don't like what's on offer, but asking for a refund because there's not enough content in the early access? Come on...

More like we're paying them for the privilege of doing their QA.

Don't get me wrong, you know what you're getting when you pay for EA, but it's still a shitty trend.

It depends. It turned out great for Mount and Blade (also, EA price was much lower than final retail price).
Internal QA will always result in a very limited pool of testers, or worse, testers who are not particularly interested in the genre of the game.
I think some complex games (like Phantom Doctrine, or the Slitherine 40K games) would have benefited a lot from early access.

I took part in several Slitherine beta tests, and you don't get as much feedback (we were like 3-4 to really post for Armageddon and Sanctus Reach).


I have played the current build a bit (5h or so):
There is almost no COYA part, and it seems to boil down to:
- pick the evil option for evil alignment points, or the good option for good alignment points
- same for Christian/Old Faith
It is quite a downgrade from King Arthur: the roleplaying wargame in the COYA department.

Combat is enjoyable, but the classes are not balanced at all, and the strongest one is the archer, which doesn't really works with Arthurian legends. But that is a trend that already existed in the older King Arthur games!
Poor Sir Yvain has become an archer, and Sir Hector is now a mage ("lawful Christian knights" using poisoned arrows is also a bit of an issue). It is a shame, because all of it would have worked better in a Robin Hood game than an Arthurian one.

I think it was done a bit better in KA: the RPGW, but there were also weird class mismatch iirc.

There is no to hit roll, but damage is randomized. A quest is made of several encounters, with limited options to heal or repair your armor between them.
Armor works a bit like in late Battle Brothers: it absorbs hits, but you lose some armor for each hit absorbed, but some skills/artifacts allow it to be repaired during battles.

Exploration during quest is boring. It is basically trying to explore the whole map to find treasure chests hidden by the camera, and combat encounters (most quests feature a combat encounter that will grant you one ally until the end of the quest, which is pretty strong, and should preferably be done first).

There is not much to castle management atm. You can get the merchant to trade items, the hospice and cathedral to heal characters (for a very high price!), and that's it.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Played a little bit, didnt get much time, but pretty much as Galdred described. Also everything is grey and washed out, at least the starting dungeon.

 

[SerratedBiz]

It depends. It turned out great for Mount and Blade (also, EA price was much lower than final retail price).
Internal QA will always result in a very limited pool of testers, or worse, testers who are not particularly interested in the genre of the game.
I think some complex games (like Phantom Doctrine, or the Slitherine 40K games) would have benefited a lot from early access.

I took part in several Slitherine beta tests, and you don't get as much feedback (we were like 3-4 to really post for Armageddon and Sanctus Reach).

I think that's the wrong way to look at it, or it's at least skewed.

I agree that games can benefit from talented QA, yes. Especially some of the bug-ridden messes being released nowadays (hi FO42, Cyberpunk, or my personal nemesis Cyanide). Passionate players make for good QA, yes.

However, what the poster above was impying is that buying EA is like paying for access to the demo for the game. Except that it's not. Developers have completely inverted the QA system by not only transferring the load from their teams (QA staff) to the consumer via Early Access. Sure, we get to enjoy a preview of the game but not only are we paying for the privilege (defeating the purpose of a demo, which is to try before you buy), but we also get to run point on testing their game. It's a win-win for them, and a win-lose-lose for us (yay we get to see the game, boo we have to playtest it and pay for it).

EA is fine for the indie developer. They can't afford quality QA, and this system is part of the reason why they can be indie developers in the fisrt place. However I think that companies, especially bigger ones, are starting to rediscover the benefit from actual demos and we're seeing more of the classical demo being released, AKA free previews of the game.

Disclaimer: I tried to find data regarding the ratio of development costs that goes into QA at present vs in the past, but I couldn't, so this is a purely logical argument.

 

[Galdred]

That is true. I think the price of early access is too high, making the "value" for the gamer too low. When I purchased Mount and Blade in EA, I paid 10 € or so. I also got Kenshi at a low price on gamersgate ages ago. These days, EA will typically go with an insignificant price cut, or no price cut at all.

For larger companies, EA is usually not something they are interested in, because it also makes their marketing approach harder (you cannot really advertise the game going to V1 as a "real launch".

 

[LizardWizard]

Well I backed the game simply because I enjoyed 2009 King Arthur immensely.

But the tutorial was fucking shit. And the first map is linear basic garbage. I closed the game after visiting the castle vendor, which offered color coded boring side-grades and was bored out my mind; falling asleep. Felt like a demo, certainly not 'early access'.

They got my money because of nostalgia, but I should have known better after Inquisitor.