Gosh, the name Dark Age of Camelot still holds an awful lot of weight. Mark Jacobs, lead designer of the MMORPG and once co-founder of its developer Mythic, launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new realm vs. realm MMO on Tuesday, and it's going swimmingly. Jacobs's new venture City State Entertainment is looking for a whopping $2,000,000 to make Camelot Unchained, which may seem awfully ambitious but pledges passed $500,000 in only eight hours. Goodness!

The Kickstarter campaign explains that Camelot Unchained is to be a subscription MMORPG focused on server vs. server war. It's a post-apocalyptic affair, only the apocalypse is a rift which floods our world with fantasy legends and nasties.

CSE says the "three main pillars of gameplay" are crafting, realm vs. realm competition, and housing. You see, all items are made and sold by players, who can set up stalls. Camelot Unchained will reward no experience or loot for PvE, so you'll need to kill some men and buy items from others to get anywhere. As for housing, players can build structures from houses and mines to fortifications. How all very old-school!

"In the rush to cash in on the WoW phenomenon, publishers/designers tried to simply 'out-WoW WoW', leading to most MMORPGs becoming more risk-averse, more 'casual player'-focused, and overall, less challenging," CSE says. "This produced, among other things, a loss of the pride and sense of accomplishment that came from succeeding in the older, more difficult titles."

So there you'll be, fighting, capturing and crafting to progress yourself and help the war.

You can't make a big fancy MMORPG for only $2 million, of course, so Jacobs will chip in another two cool millions of his own money if the Kickstarter is funded. Which still doesn't seem like very much money for a game of such scale, but there you go. It is quite focused, though.

Pledging at least $25 will get you a digital copy of the finished game, tentatively slated to launch in December 2015, and one month's free subscription. Fancier and more expensive pledges include earlier and earlier beta access, a cloth map, in-game items, name reservation, and other MMO-y doodads.

Hit the official site for more, and peep this pitch video: