King Arthur's Gold

If you're reading this and you played KAG in 2012 please send me a message, it'd be awesome to find out if any RYMers were there for that era.

My rating is for the original alpha, not the steam release.

This is my most played game of all time.

It got strangely big in Australia by virtue of our most followed video game show giving the original alpha a really high score, and to this day (5 years later) its largest fanbase might be Australian. Back when my friends and I would play Terraria or Minecraft every night, we gave this a shot. It was fun, but absolutely inaccessible. After half an hour of trying to figure out how to all join a server, we were greeted by a complete lack of tutorial, one of the worst chats I've ever seen and 64 players repeatedly running into each other’s swords. None of us had any idea what was going on - I don't think anyone on that server knew what was going on - but it was fun. There was an allure in that mass of individual pixel bodies. It was a really good time, and I don't really know why my friends never went back.

A couple months later I saw the desktop shortcut during a bout of boredom and gave it another shot. This time of day the Australian server was a lot more manageable, and I actually managed to change classes, place buildings, and get a kill. Even though I still wasn't really good at it, I understood what was going on for the most part. And I was hooked. Whenever I had free time, KAG was the game I would play, and with time I got good at knight, could get positive K/Ds and was pretty much an Australian server regular. People started to know my name (I was yoshimotoman) and I started to talk to people in chat. It felt really good to have a place where people would say, "hey yoshi!" when I joined.

It was around this time that I simultaneously found out about gold users and clans. Gold users were just premiums, basically, who'd pay a little extra so they'd get to wear a hat in game. At this age I was so impressionable that anything I saw on the internet would be the coolest, most respected and adult thing imaginable, and gold users were like my superiors. This was also how I found out about clans; most gold users had clan names like AUSS and [AOE], and you could figure out how good clans were by the scores of players from them. There was a big skill curve in the alpha, and it showed.

By now I'd been playing about an hour everyday for a month when someone noticed me. I still remember his name, GhostyS, and the clan was [WoO] (Wizards of Old, I think). There was a test which I passed, and then I had to visit the forums, a place I'd never even heard of before. It was my first introduction to a message board. Later on I'd go in and out of browsing there, but I never really found much to do, as it was a pretty boring place - but I was actually the creator of one of the longest threads on there, called something like "Shitty builders". But I'm getting ahead of myself.

[WoO] didn't have too much in the way of communication, so I only knew a couple members other than GhostyS, but as I got to know Ghosty more and more I realised how much of a dick he was. I was a whiny kid back then, too, but he was way worse than most whiny kids. One day we had a fight, I left, and afterwards WoO shutdown. It's hilarious now thinking back to how petty all the controversies were, but they were fun too.

I went through a few clans that didn't work out before becoming a clan-less nomad, which ended up being a very, very good thing. While at first I'd assumed that those with clan names were at the top of the food chain, the real hot shots were those who'd waltz onto a server with nothing but a username. If you saw someone join with [YB] you knew they'd be at the top, but some wanderer who ended up carrying the team? That was epic. People respected me - I was one of the 10 best knights in Australia at the peak of KAG's player-base. It might sound like I'm boasting but this isn't really me I'm talking about. I think of my time on KAG as a different person.

KAG had begun to change. It was always an alpha, it was always receiving updates, but whereas in the past I wasn't attached to the current features now these updates felt like they were taking parts of the game from me. Adding water and every subsequent "addition" in my opinion made the game very much worse. The nerfs and the buffs were bullshit. If this were a review, and I had to write one thing telling you how I feel about the actual game, I'd say: "They ruined KAG." But the process of ruining KAG would take another 6 months before the steam release.

I have no recollection of what triggered it, but one day I had a fight. Before I'd been known for being a really nice guy, when everyone else was always arguing in chat, but this day I was mad. I said I was quitting KAG. Obviously I wasn't actually - it was a huge part of my life - but I shut down my account and made an alt called Gonf.

It was one of the best feelings in the world to have none of that weight attached to me anymore, and to be able to let go of all the connections I had to all those users was relieving. I became a different character, one who was more silent and grammarous, and an authoritarian stance on issues. I felt adult and I think people responded that way. By this point gold users meant nothing to me. The true superiors were guards and devs (to this day, the thought of those green names and fancy hats just seems so cool).

Gonf became known on KAG and I made better friends. My two biggest achievements in KAG were becoming admin on the biggest Australian server and getting into POWER. On the admin thing, I was a shitty one, and people didn't really treat me any different, but it was something I'd aspired after for a long time. But on POWER, that remains one of my greatest achievements in life (no joke). POWER was the single best clan around the world; with founding members from Australia, US and Singapore they dominated every region. POWER was a branding that you were the best of the best, and they never went over 25 members. I'd been friends with the leaders for a while but never thought to apply, until the offer was instead made to me. It was an incredible feeling to actually type POWER into my clan field for the first time.

And then, over time, I stopped coming back. More and more people were moving to the beta (which I had never played and didn't really have any interest in) and the servers became more and more bare. In the scheme of things it feels like a lot longer, but the space between me playing KAG for the first time and eventually leaving was around the length of 2012. It was a good year.

Before I talk about the actual steam release I want to recall something: a long time after leaving and after 1.0, I decided to check back in on KAG classic, to remember what it was like. There was only one server with people on it and it had two players. The game was dead. I joined the match and tried to keep my eyes open through all the nostalgia. One knight (a first time player, I guessed) sat with his shield up trying to stab. And on the opposite team a builder was constructing a castle, off in his own mind. Contrasted with my first match of 64 players packed into the server, this was one of the saddest and most fragile things I had ever seen. Maybe I'm getting too personal or tangential, but I want to say quickly that as a writer one of my most precious ideas is to write a book about the impermanence of fads and sites on the internet, and how people will always move on and accounts fall inactive. It's an incredibly beautiful and profound process to me, to look at user-bases rise and fall, just like RYM's.

Part of this review is about the actual game page you're visiting (the steam release). That part of the review is: it's shit. KAG 1.0 does not want you to get good at it. It's very hard to get the hang of, and once you do few people actually become skillful at it. No matter how good you are there will always be bullshit deaths, way more than the alpha, and just as many bugs. On top of all of the unnecessary junk that was added just to expand the "feature list" (the water is the worst water I've experienced in any game), so many systems that made the original alpha fun were removed either deliberately or accidentally (the rush and pull of opposing teams up against each others towers, the sky-bridges, the intricate swordplay, even the simple spike trap has been sent to hell). And if you are still interested, the worst part is the player-base is very small. The few people hanging on are those that couldn't escape the contagious addiction of the old days, after that addictive quality was long lost. Don't buy it. A few times I've tried to go back to it and every time I've left out of frustration after 20 minutes. They took everything good about KAG out of it and replaced it with a whole lot of garbage. What's more, they took out the soul of the community, as even POWER has long since faded into obscurity. I know; the game is dead, move on. But I still reminisce on the interactions I had as a true member of a community.

I'm writing this to remind myself of the moral: even if you'll regret it later, express yourself online as much as possible because it will lead to some of your best memories (but don't shitpost - it feels terrible when someone tells you you're ruining threads on the internet). And if possible, find a place to post it where you fit in; I don't really fit in on RYM and I will be on my way probably some time soon (the only reason I'm still here is to make lists), but hopefully I'll find someplace I love to come back to like KAG. There are some dumb things I've written but in the end I was being myself, and it's really nice to have evidence of that. What happened 3 years previous will always be the best time of your life.

And to elaborate on that opening sentence, I'm pretty sure that over the course of 2012 I put over 1000 hours into King Arthur's Gold, far more than any other game I've ever played. And it was kind of worth it.

Here's a video of what made KAG great:

In it you can see legends Ruleral, Cheesemiester, Noburu, MrJinkies, cykalu, Antman, and Guro, and also just the awesome events that could happen when server admins messed with their settings. Really really good memories. Also a lot of shitty ones that need not be recalled.