1.121 Patch Interview with MMORPG

Solicfire

Venerated Dark Age of Camelot just keeps chugging away with new updates, new everything. Loyal players are often treated to new ways to play the game including the recent announcement that big changes are in store for all character classes. We chatted with Producer John Thornhill about exactly that. See what he had to say in this exclusive interview.

MMORPG: Dark Age of Camelot is making some big class changes in the coming weeks. Many players are excited for the update. Can you tell us the story behind the new updates?

John Thornhill: Certainly! We’ve been focused over the past few years on some major updates including a new RvR frontier layout, the new RvR zone Ellan Vannin, the Darkness Falls RvR dungeon revamp, Champion Level 15, and the Otherworlds Campaign. Since a lot of those changes revolved around core end-game systems, we didn’t want to also change much with class balance until the players had had time to settle into those new systems.

That said, while doing those previous updates we’ve been laying the ground-work for a class balance-focused patch and after lots of clamoring for one from our player-base, felt like this development-cycle was the perfect time for it.

We had a few goals with 1.121:

-Address some long-standing issues preventing certain classes and class-archetypes from being included in group-play

-Introduce more active/counter gameplay mechanics

-Keep all three realms unique and make them more unique where possible

This past January we kicked off player-run ‘Class Podcasts’ on our official Twitch channel to gather feedback from players on what sort of changes they’d like to see. We took their feedback, iterated on what we were already planning, aligned everything with our goals… and that’s how we arrived at Patch 1.121!

MMORPG: PvP has always been a mainstay in DAOC, what are the checks and balances you use when making adjustments to class abilities and skills?

JT: First, we have some excellent team members who know the ins and outs of DAoC combat, classes, and gameplay while also being very experienced developers. It’s a must-have for tackling something as extensive as this update.

There are too many checks and balances to list them all here but just generally we try work with what’s already there: things like costs (health, power, endurance), cast-times, re-use timers, and of course the damage values themselves are all great for the nitty-gritty balancing act of individual abilities.

One of the best overall checks we have is the mutual-exclusiveness of our specialization lines. If we really like the idea of introducing a powerful ability to a class, that we think would really benefit them, we can balance that by putting it in a place that makes the class have to choose that ability while giving up others.

A good example of that is the new Bone Captain for Bonedancers in their Bone Army line; it can control up to 6 sub-pets instead of the other 2 specialization line’s commanders that can only control 4. However, the Bone Army specialization is missing the damage and utility of those other 2 lines and so you have to give up a lot to get 2 extra sub-pets. These sorts of hard-choices add even more depth to the combat system.

Finally, we always make sure to test, test, test both internally and on our public test server so that we can be as sure as possible that what we’re releasing is not only balanced but also fun!

To find out more please click on this link: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/11/feature/11017/Dark-Age-of-Camelot-The-Story-Behind-All-the-Latest-Updates.html