King Arthur's Gold

King Arthur's Gold is an online action video game for Windows, Mac and Linux that was developed and published by Polish studio Transhuman Design.^[1]

Gameplay

King Arthur's Gold (abbreviated and referred to as KAG in the diehard fanbase) is a game about mining resources, building castles and destroying your enemies. It is a side-scrolling 2D pixlated action online multiplayer and offline singleplayer war game with a focus on building by gathering resources, buying and unleashing siege machines, and intense PvP-combat. There are three playable classes: Knight, Archer, and Builder. Each class has their own role in KAG and work together to defeat the enemy team. Knights excel at close range combat and demolition using bombs and explosive kegs, as they are referred to as. Archers have superior mobility and a selection of specialized arrows (fire arrows which burn wood and enemies, water arrows that have a glass vial of water of an unknown origin attached to the end that explodes and stuns enemies, and the pricey bomb arrows that explode on impact), along with a grappling hook that can be used for parkouring and scaling walls. Builders erect fortifications (block by block), build multiple blocks spanning "shops" (mainly as structures to buy items), construct lay traps and initiate escalades.

Some inspirations for the game are Soldat, Minecraft, Dungeon Keeper, Ace of Spades, and King Arthur's World. In KAG, two teams (by default red and blue, though by typing cheat commands in chat other teams of other colors, such as grey, magenta, and green, can be accessed and played) struggle to dominate the other on giant randomly generated or custom-made 2D "maps." ^[2] Currently, there are five online multiplayer modes: CTF (Capture the Flag - capture all enemy flags while not letting the enemy capture yours by bringing it back to their flag, and vice versa), TDM (Team Death Match - play as either an Archer or Knight in a 2-minute skirmish, where each participant has 1 life), THH (Take the Halls - capture all the halls to win), and the two neglected Sandbox (a free range mode with no objective) and Challenge (an assortment of different minute-spanning challenges, such as kill all enemies, or make it to the end of a map, where at the end of the match a leaderboard is shown along with the best score recorded on that server). In singleplayer, solitaire Challenges (albeit stylized as Challenges! and Sandbox, along with a basic Tutorials section (Basics, Capture the Flag, and Take the Halls) and the short Save the Princess campaign, where the player fights against a purple-clothed necromancer named Sedgwick.

Modding

The game has extensive modding support. Whole game logic is written in AngelScript and can be easily modified by anyone. Numerous mods have been created, adding new classes, items, and game modes. Total conversion mods also exist, e.g. Shiprekt where players build ships from blocks in a top-down view arena. Modded servers are nearly just as popular as official non-modded ones, where most players jump around in different mods. A few examples are Juggernaut, where one to two players play as powerful Juggernauts where each player gets a heavy hammer (the amount is dependent on how many players are in the server - when there are two Juggernauts, though, each Juggernaut's HP is cut and half), and the other Knights and Crossbowmen (like Archers, only they have no grappling hook, the shot always goes just as far, instead of where the Archer player can choose how far to pull the bow string back, and reloading causes the character to move extremely slow and barely jump). Juggernauts can also pick up their attackers and either throw them (victims die on impact and deal damage to those they hit) at enemies or crush them under their foot in a shower of gore to regain health. The blue attacking team wins by killing all of the red Juggernauts, while they win by either killing all enemies or last until the timer runs out.

Another game-changing mode is BunnyFection by the user named Quailz who also works on texture packs and making custom heads. This mod has the players play as tiny (1x1 block large, compared to the 2x2 Builder, Archer, and Knight) medium brown bunnies who are basically Builders, where the main difference is that wood is gathered from roots (trees exist but cannot be chopped down) found underground, bushes above ground. Being so small though, they can use fewer resources. The only downside to this is that in the main server that hosts this mod there are fewer resources then normal since fewer supplies are needed to build due to the smaller scale of the player (rather, it is common to see only a stone door built at the entrance to an underground dirt maze, and nothing else). After a minute or two after the match starts, where players are free to build without worry, one of them is chosen to be a zombie bunny, immediately turning into one (complete with sound effects) and having an undead rotting bloody glob with bones sticking called a hatchery. Each normal survivor bunny has 1 life, while the zombies have unlimited, spawning at a hatchery when having died (hatcheries can be created once a zombie has consumed enough flesh, which is gotten by attacking, eating, and/or killing bunnies and pigs, where they are used as spawnpoints, fast-travel points, and places to buy eggs of that contain undead creature which helps the player dig for and attack the surviving rabbits - buying is referred to as "gestating," where the button for the option shows an open mouth with the tongue sticking out). All undead can dig through dirt, wood, and stony dirt (the main resource for stone, besides destroying other stone buildings) to reach the bunny player, while zombie rabbits can gestate out acid that damages the stone a bit.

Territory Control, abbreviated TC, is a mod by TFlippy, where more info can be found at his website, whose URL is .

Players can also create their own custom heads (the only point of customization) and use them along with the official built-in ones (which are mostly human, but a brown pop-eyed horse and zombie one can be found), as long as the modded server supports and recognize it. A few heads are recognized by modded, unofficial, and official games (multiplayer and singleplayer), but those are specially-earned, usually by being part of the development team of King Arthur's Gold. Heads are merely cosmetic, changing nothing, not even the hitbox where damage can be dealt.

Development

The team of THD started working on KAG (King Arthur's Gold) at April 18, 2011,^[3] the first alpha version was released only 3 days later. The public beta was released silently on 1 May 2013.^[4] The real release of the game was on 5 November 2013.^[5] KAG is still under active development as of early 2017, the main focus is on bugfixing, adding minor content and supporting the community to develop content itself.^[6]

Reception

The game has very positive (84%) reviews on Steam^[5] and received an aggregated score of 81% at Metacritic.^[7] As of November 2016 the game has sold over 200 000 copies.^[8] Critics praised its fast-paced battles and light-hearted approach to medieval combat, while criticizing bugs and poor single player.^[9]

References

External links

• Official website
• King Arthur's Gold at MobyGames
• http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/king-arthurs-gold/