I loved that they had dynamic dungeons.. could lvl 1-50 solo in them.. or with 1 friend or more.. was a great system:)
And they crafting was excellent... using Camelot Crafter i was the first maxed out tailor when classic servers came out.. just had the guild feeding me materials..
P.S. what made me stop playing was players with healbots in rvr... made it useless to try to play anymore.. hell, i would probably still be playing if it wasn't for that:(
I got the game after I had EQ and I think had DAoC had come first there is every chance it might have been more successful than EQ. It was in some regards more well-done than EQ- with a nice sort of medievil theme to the game. However, I did think it's PvE well and truely sucked. It was a bit like the Gnomeregan in WoW syndrome, where mobs are just sort of lazily scattered around.
DAOC was great because it was one of the first MMOs where you had 'realm pride'. People were truely dedicated to their side and although may have played other characters/realms on other servers always seemed to associated themselves with one faction.
Even to this day many players still hold strong to those afifliations
DAOC was great because it was one of the first MMOs where you had 'realm pride'. People were truely dedicated to their side and although may have played other characters/realms on other servers always seemed to associated themselves with one faction. Even to this day many players still hold strong to those afifliations Die HIbbies! Torrential (Pendragon): RIP
As a previously mentioned Hib, I can firmly say "I shroom you." I was thinking about what possibly made the realm pride possible. I think it stems from 2 major things. 3 realms is a given. But the second was that there was no "evil" side. People gravitate towards good vs evil now and it's just a way to simplify things. But with three sides each having their own influence (Britain, Celtic, and Norse) it became a matter of mythological/historcial preference. Still to this day there is a certain amount of pride about my wonderful Long House in Midgard.
DAoC was the only game that I ever logged on in order to just PvP. Since then, PvP has always been an after thought for me. The only thing I absolutely hated was Trials of Atlantis. The Relics just took way too long to level up and imbalanced PvP a great deal. Someone with maxed out artifacts could take on a whole group of people without any artifacts lol. I didn't like crowd control either, unless I was on my spiritmaster doing the CC lol
DAOC was great because it was one of the first MMOs where you had 'realm pride'. People were truely dedicated to their side and although may have played other characters/realms on other servers always seemed to associated themselves with one faction. Even to this day many players still hold strong to those afifliations Die HIbbies! Torrential (Pendragon): RIP
As a previously mentioned Hib, I can firmly say "I shroom you." I was thinking about what possibly made the realm pride possible. I think it stems from 2 major things. 3 realms is a given. But the second was that there was no "evil" side. People gravitate towards good vs evil now and it's just a way to simplify things. But with three sides each having their own influence (Britain, Celtic, and Norse) it became a matter of mythological/historcial preference. Still to this day there is a certain amount of pride about my wonderful Long House in Midgard.
We used to call them the "stun nuke nuke tree huggers"
I spent about 5 years or so in Albion, but when classics opened up I moved to Midgard, never looked back, I miss my troll zerker.
Also for those still hating ToA and NF, I think I posted before, they did fix ToA (kinda late tho), so you don't have to touch a grain of PvE to obtain everything in ToA, except the leveling of the artifacts but it's easier now, 1-2 nights grinding in the PoC (Passage of Conflict, RvR dungeon in the frontiers) with a pbaoe group would do it. And NF it kinda grows on ya, after they added the entral island, the 8man runners were happy as that was "their place" even a lake in the island was in some servers the "solo area", of course some people didn't respect that and went in to mess things up which ended up in those that respected it to band together (from different realms) to kick the intruders out hehe.
I have to say I did enjoy the old Emain fights, but NF does compensate and adds more flavor to RvR as there's so many different places to go and find Rps.
Kinda miss making 40 water potions every day, selling 20 for 20g each and trowing 20 in the guild vault...
I think aside from the game mechanics the thing that made DAoC what it is were the people. That and the different game mentality of the players at the time. It just seems they played for different reasons in that game. Granted there was competition but it wasn't against your fellow man but rather against the other realms.
Even though they were the enemy and they were out to kill you if they saw you, in the beginning there was still a certain level or respect in RVR. Dancing on someone's corpse, sitting on their face when they're dead, or just being rude seemed to be less prevalent ... at least where I played then it is today. I used to fight people one on one and whatever the outcome the winner would more often then not end the fight with a firm salute, a bow, or some other respectful gesture. There are times where soloers would be left alone to their one on one battles when set upon by enemy realms. More often then not people were out there looking for a challenge. Dropping one poor guy with 8 people provided no challenge and the rewards were negligible at best.
The "solo lake" illustrates this point rather nicely. It was agreed upon by the majority of the server on all three sides that this area was dedicated to solo (one on one) fights for people who wanted to test their mettle against others. The rules were simple: You didn't attack people engaged in a duel, sitting down and regenerating Hit Points, or players that were not healed to max. Often there was a set of ruins (I think it was a collapsed tower of some kind) that people would gather around and watch the fights, then issue their own personal challenges and see what happens. Sure there were people who chose to ignore these suggested rules and they were then set upon by the rest of the people and slaughtered mercilessly until they left the area and never returned.
What I just described above would never fly in new MMO's... EVER. There is no respect anymore, no common decency and most of all no honor. It is now about me, when back then it was about US.
I could go on and on about this but I'll let someone else take their turn. Perhaps Pedrob, Kyleran, Shylock1079, or Czzarre can have at it. I'll be back with more once they remind me about some of the neat things I've more then likely forgotten.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
DAoC had /face, /stick and /follow commands. These commands keep you autofaced toward your enemy and in range.
If you remove maneuver from PvP, why not just sit in your faction city, pick your foe off a dropdown list and mash buttons? PvP so easy that a one armed man can win.
Originally posted by Illius What I just described above would never fly in new MMO's... EVER. There is no respect anymore, no common decency and most of all no honor. It is now about me, when back then it was about US.
Its the mechanics of the game that determine the type of community it will have. Making a blanket statement like this is being narrow minded. There will be more games where the community comes first before the individual. I know that EverQuest fostered such a community because getting anywhere took time and you simply could not advance unless you worked with others. This is simalar to what you describe within DAOC although PVE was the focus of EQ.
I do agree though that in the most recent MMO's the well being of the community has been a distant second to the needs of the individual.
3 realms - it tended to balance each other out. The two sides down on their luck would team up against the third in pvp, take out the strongest, then try to obliterate each other.
Early on, it wasn't gear based. All gear was average, and therefore pvp was more skill than gear based.
Realm/guild pride. I believe this was the first introduction to guild colors/capes/shields. And it was great being able to dye your armor to match your guild. Realms? As pointed out, nobody was the bad guy.
Battlegrounds were fantastic for lower level toons.
It took time and effort, and hence meeting people.
Darkness Falls - brought two factions together for great pvp in the dungeon
Game play has changed a lot. Battles were fought in game rather than on forums. Players respected each other - even opposite realms. Our server's realms (Bors) were friendly enough that we rolled guilds together on other servers.
I would love to see another PVP game similar using the 3 team concept, and preferably something that's not so good/evil, light/dark, ugly/pretty, etc. Just different.
********************************************************************************** ***4 out of 5 voices in my head agree--I'm ok. It's the fifth one the scares the hell out of me.***
I miss the good old days of DAoC. I was there from beta through like 2 years or so, and it was one of the funnest games I have ever played. If they would have made DAoC 2 and not Warhammer it would have been 100x better.
DAoC was a decent game in it's early years, but it added unbalancing issues by providing dedicated gamers methods for dominating the game, hence the casual populace fled. They tried fixing this by introducing classic servers, but that precludes the expansions.
Biggest problem with DAoC, far too much crowd control and not enough ways to remove it. Over powered stealth was also an issue along with unbalanced classes caused by having too many classes.
I miss the good old days of DAoC. I was there from beta through like 2 years or so, and it was one of the funnest games I have ever played. If they would have made DAoC 2 and not Warhammer it would have been 100x better.
Actually they were going to make Imperator, not DAoC 2, which was a space MMO, had a good concept and graphics, but the Warhammer IP was stronger and then EA came...
DAoC was a decent game in it's early years, but it added unbalancing issues by providing dedicated gamers methods for dominating the game, hence the casual populace fled. They tried fixing this by introducing classic servers, but that precludes the expansions.
Biggest problem with DAoC, far too much crowd control and not enough ways to remove it. Over powered stealth was also an issue along with unbalanced classes caused by having too many classes.
Actually over time we adapted and grew to "tolerate" the CC, we even set up tactics to counter it and so on, that was a great part of the game, you had players that actually knew real life war tactics and they could be adapted to the game, baits, flanks, tank wall with pbaoe hiding behind, heck our RvR general (Mystchivious) had us spend the mornings in the enemy realm (albion) working on the ellyl faction, so we could run into the ellyl ruined house when we were outnumbered, most if not all of the albion players never really worked their faction, in fact some of their quests made them enemies of the ellyl, and these mobs were tiny but packed quite a punch (not to mention they hurled fireballs thru the walls lol), so we usually ran in there and camped until the enemy tired out and left, other times we would hide there and wait for our pray
Another thing that make DAoC fun was the sieges, defending and taking keeps was the most fun I had, you could place siege anywhere you liked (not like WAR that gives you a static point), so we could make walls with rams to hide our nukers and healers, place catapults together in rows with different ammo, hide trebuchets behind a small area with trees so they can't be seen and break down walls, drive the siege ram from door to door, later on we got the siege towers, we enjoyed putting those towers on every wall we could (before that we would treb every wall and make the keep look like a swiss cheese if we couldn't take it, so they had to spend a fortune repairing), that's another thing I never thought I'd say I miss, the repairing, made things more real, made you value your realm's keep, players wouldn't leave until everything was repaired to avoid enemies taking it too easy.
The real pride was fantastic, our alliance used to request other guilds to take a keep or tower when their bounty points were low (we paid the maintenance of the keep with that back then, not anymore), so everything was always claimed and fully upgraded to give defenders time to react when the enemy started to siege.
The relics...boy those were fun, prime time 100+ enemies invading your realm to open up the relic gates, you had to assemble over 100 to defend and coordinate with various RvR Generals that were doing different things, you had your intercept squad that made sure enemy reinforcements never reached their destination, you had the road blocks, these were the "elite 8man" groups that helped in the defense by distracting the enemy (they were so good that just being seen would make a chunk of the enemy zerg break off to chase them for the big rps, yet they usually died because 8mans are designed to be well oiled killing machines (I got a video of a Mid 8man destroying 4fg of Albs). Then you also had the stealth group, which were positioned in different places of the realm just giving reports of enemy movement, you had the easy rp lovers, which would just sit by in a tower or keep and wait until enemies start attacking to put up the boiling oil and kill many enemies (they die after that tho) and would also give us reports of enemies.
Everyone used to work together for the realm in DAoC.
The Best: RvR. The core of their PvP system was damn near perfect. Realms for leveling, frontiers and battle grounds for PvP. Simple and it works. They really only needed to expand on this with a sequel. More stuff to fight over in the frontiers and the ability to raid enemy realms...but not in the instanced, scripted way that they wanted for WAR.
The Good: Non-instanced battle grounds. On the right night, they were a blast. Would have been nice if they expanded these though, since they were so popular.
Classes/specs. Really, I'd only say these were good in comparison to newer MMOs, where there's very little customization or options. DAOC had several classes for each realm and each class had three spec lines. Again, not great, but chances are you could find some thing that fit your style.
Skills. Again, only good in comparison to newer MMOs. I much prefer to have 1 quick bar of effective skills, rather than 4 quick bars full of ambiguous, timered skills.
Group vs solo: They got this one right. Both options were viable, but grouping was much more effective and efficient in the right situation. Still, I spent most of my time solo...low-mid level PUGs were just horrible, even back in those days.
World Design: Not great, but it felt open. Lots of mob camps out there to find and few of those annoying mob fields that make exploration unbearable.
Factions. Nothing ground breaking, but there were mob factions that you could use to your advantage. Friendly/Neutral/Aggressive, much more interesting than a game world where EVERY THING is after you for no reason.
The Bad: PvE. Yea, it sucked. Boring, repetitive, mindless. They were determined to stamp out all "exploits", which resulted in a really bland experience.
The devs. They seemed completely out of touch with their game and player base. Expansions were the exact opposite of what players wanted. Class balance consisted of band aids for the utterly gimped classes and bloody, nerf bat ass whoopins for the over powered classes. You know a nerfing is particularly brutal when players spend months talking endless shit about class X only to switch sides and feel sorry for them after the latest patch "balances" them into gimp status.
End game focused. You'd have to be insane to ask for lower level PvP content. After ToA, a good number of players were ONLY playing the battle grounds. Some because they didn't want to grind for gear to be competitive at end game RvR and some because we didn't want to grind our way to end game RvR in the first place. And yet, there was no way in hell they were going to expand battle grounds.
The Worst: The grind. Oh yes, it was bad. None of this "I've run out of quest" bull shit. Things got slower as you got near 40, then they might as well have stopped. Soloing was insanely slow after 40 and grouping was a huge pain. First, you had to get into a group, which could take forever, then you had to stay with the group for hours to make any kind of progress. Utterly pointless and idiotic for a game that is focused around end game PvP. At some point, I got a character to the mid 40s and just gave up. It wasn't fun, it wasn't challenging, it wasn't engaging. Just time consuming and boring.
This is one thing that has been fixed in newer MMOs. It's not a ridiculous grind to get to level cap any more. Unfortunately though, there's nothing like RvR at the end of that road, only scripted raid grinding and instanced PvP.
Classes/specs. Really, I'd only say these were good in comparison to newer MMOs, where there's very little customization or options. DAOC had several classes for each realm and each class had three spec lines. Again, not great, but chances are you could find some thing that fit your style. Skills. Again, only good in comparison to newer MMOs. I much prefer to have 1 quick bar of effective skills, rather than 4 quick bars full of ambiguous, timered skills. World Design: Not great, but it felt open. Lots of mob camps out there to find and few of those annoying mob fields that make exploration unbearable. The devs. They seemed completely out of touch with their game and player base. Expansions were the exact opposite of what players wanted. Class balance consisted of band aids for the utterly gimped classes and bloody, nerf bat ass whoopins for the over powered classes. You know a nerfing is particularly brutal when players spend months talking endless shit about class X only to switch sides and feel sorry for them after the latest patch "balances" them into gimp status. The Worst: The grind. Oh yes, it was bad. None of this "I've run out of quest" bull shit. Things got slower as you got near 40, then they might as well have stopped. Soloing was insanely slow after 40 and grouping was a huge pain. First, you had to get into a group, which could take forever, then you had to stay with the group for hours to make any kind of progress. Utterly pointless and idiotic for a game that is focused around end game PvP. At some point, I got a character to the mid 40s and just gave up. It wasn't fun, it wasn't challenging, it wasn't engaging. Just time consuming and boring. This is one thing that has been fixed in newer MMOs. It's not a ridiculous grind to get to level cap any more. Unfortunately though, there's nothing like RvR at the end of that road, only scripted raid grinding and instanced PvP.
On the Classes specs, certain classes only had 3 spec lines (healers and casters mostly), melee using classes had much more, Armsman for example had Slash, Pierce, Crush, Two Handed, Polearm, Parry and Shield.
On the skills, you could easily taken out the other bars and just have your one and put your best skills there, and there were very, very few timed skills, one of the beauties (imo) was that DAoC skills and spells had no cooldown, well most of them, cooldown skills were added with expansions, that's why I loved healing there, as long as I had enough mana, I could spam my group and spread heal as much as I wanted and keep my group practically untouched (for those wondering the downside was that spells can be interrupted when hit, 100% chance).
World design is decent for the original lands, as expansions were added with new lands they got better.
The Devs...well I kinda have to agree there, they were doing good all the way till ToA, heck the first expansion SI was the best of them all. After the ToA mess, they started listening a little more, we got mount, we got subclassing (very small way), graphics got updated, etc.
The grind, it was bad at first, it got decent with SI, and it only got better and easier, too easy at some point, at least for those that knew where to go at what levels, it made things fly. For the PvP hardcore I can see how the 40s would be a pain to PvE, that's why they added exp and coin to PvP kills and increased the exp gain by about 4x in RvR zones, so it's a lot easier now for the full PvP players.
That is to level, to pimp out your toon with a good template, you'll still need to hit a few dungeons, of course one of them being the Labby which is a RvR dungeon so you get to PvP while getting your items from a mob.
Classes/specs. Really, I'd only say these were good in comparison to newer MMOs, where there's very little customization or options. DAOC had several classes for each realm and each class had three spec lines. Again, not great, but chances are you could find some thing that fit your style. Skills. Again, only good in comparison to newer MMOs. I much prefer to have 1 quick bar of effective skills, rather than 4 quick bars full of ambiguous, timered skills. World Design: Not great, but it felt open. Lots of mob camps out there to find and few of those annoying mob fields that make exploration unbearable. The devs. They seemed completely out of touch with their game and player base. Expansions were the exact opposite of what players wanted. Class balance consisted of band aids for the utterly gimped classes and bloody, nerf bat ass whoopins for the over powered classes. You know a nerfing is particularly brutal when players spend months talking endless shit about class X only to switch sides and feel sorry for them after the latest patch "balances" them into gimp status. The Worst: The grind. Oh yes, it was bad. None of this "I've run out of quest" bull shit. Things got slower as you got near 40, then they might as well have stopped. Soloing was insanely slow after 40 and grouping was a huge pain. First, you had to get into a group, which could take forever, then you had to stay with the group for hours to make any kind of progress. Utterly pointless and idiotic for a game that is focused around end game PvP. At some point, I got a character to the mid 40s and just gave up. It wasn't fun, it wasn't challenging, it wasn't engaging. Just time consuming and boring. This is one thing that has been fixed in newer MMOs. It's not a ridiculous grind to get to level cap any more. Unfortunately though, there's nothing like RvR at the end of that road, only scripted raid grinding and instanced PvP.
On the skills, you could easily taken out the other bars and just have your one and put your best skills there, and there were very, very few timed skills, one of the beauties (imo) was that DAoC skills and spells had no cooldown, well most of them, cooldown skills were added with expansions, that's why I loved healing there, as long as I had enough mana, I could spam my group and spread heal as much as I wanted and keep my group practically untouched (for those wondering the downside was that spells can be interrupted when hit, 100% chance).
That's what I'm saying. I prefer the DAOC style of no cooldowns and a limited number of powerfull skills. That system seems to leave more room for player skill and reflexes.
Best MMO I have played (played plenty of really good mmo's too).
The RvR system was, hands down, the crowning achievement of DAOC. The mechanics of siege warfare, class balance (not perfect but pretty good considering the variety and complexity of combat), the incredible community that was driven by a one of a kind realm pride and the epic invasions organized by influential palyers and powerful guilds which led to the greatest offensive and defensive rallies that have ever occured in any any mmo (EVE and WW2OL have similar feelings at times).
PvE, contrary to the views of some, was NOT weak either. The quest lines were well done in most cases (especially class epics imo). The Dragons, epic dungeons, pvp dungeons, vast swathes of freely exporable lands abound with dangers and excitement. Good itemization throughout the game with seemingly endless options for gearing. A good crafting system.
I miss DAOC a lot. I would scream with joy if Mythic would go to work on DAOC 2, as long as they expressly intended to modernize the original systems (most critically RvR) without simply dumbing them down....
WAR, may never have taken the thrown of WoW, but it could have shared the thrown room to an extent if they had kept the epic systems of DAOC RvR at it's core rather than mutilating the system and bringing it in piece meal.
I played DAoC in the early days before any expansions came out on the European server Prydwen.
For me, this was my second MMO experience, after UO, and I absolutely loved it.
Granted, for today's standards it had tons of flaws, but at the time it was a great game.
What made it a great game for me was the openness of the game. The class based system allowed for enough options to find something you liked. The world was big enough to feel vast. The 'feel' of the game seemed right. Cities were not small, but no big either. Getting lost was not easy, yet you still had to travel a bit to get from A to B.
I loved hopping on a horse to go from one point to another, just to watch the surroundings. People who have little time on their hands to play are right that it took too much time. I at the time was without work or study, so I had all the time in the world and then it was a blast (how good it is to be young, lol).
Grouping was the best in any MMO I have ever seen. Because of the huge benefits of grouping, barely anyone would even consider soloing the game, because progress was so much slower. At the higher levels that tended to get a bit more tedious though, since there you really needed groups for some decent xp, which was hard to find due to the lack of number of higher level players.
I loved the non existance of instances. You'd just hop into a dungeon and join the band wagon of whatever group was in there. PUGs overall were good, because due to the group aspect of the game, people knew how to play properly in groups. They knew their roles properly and due to the tight knit communities, messing up would get you a bad reputation. Having a bad rep gave your trouble finding a group. There were not many who dared to go that way, since they knew that leveling their char would take at least twice as much time solo. Hence the reason grouping and the community as a whole were so great.
PvE was a grind, that is true. Leveling did take too long, that is also true. It would have been nice if leveling would have been a bit more up to par to today's standards. I have come to understand that nowadays leveling is really too fast. That's not good either. Buffbots were an absolute nightmare. They should have countered that by making buffs only lasting within the vincinity of the buffer. I never got why they didn't implement that.
See, the RvR gave purpose to PvP. Loosing a keep meant something to your realm. Loosing a relic, or obtaining one, directly influenced the bonusses for all players in your realm. Having the right number of keeps under control of the other two realms would open up Darkness Falls, where you could farm for 'shields' which you in turn could use as currency to buy weapons that were nowhere to be found in the DAoC world.
I played a healing druid myself, and got him to 50 in about 4-5 months, which was rather quick. Around that time they released the Shrouded Isles expansion. I thought it was great due to the new zones and races. I loved going out with our guild to check out new stuff, do dungeons, crawl through Darkness Falls, practice siege weapons in the fields, learn crafting, etc.
The big bummer for me was when I reached 50. On our server RvR was not that active, so for me there was little to do. Looking for fights in the combat zones took lots of times, and due to the imbalance of the realms we usually got owned, lol. That unfortunately did kill the fun a bit for me. At the time some really good new games came out (SWG and EvE) so then I switched.
The real shame about DAoC is though, that with just some minor corrections of the concept, they could have probably been able to turn it into the best game of all. PvE was seperated form RvR. So if you only wanted to PvE, you could do that without a problem. Crafting should have been done better. It was too much based upon the 'grind' concept, which made it rather boring. The benefits were worth it though.
So, if one day, they would do a DAoC-2, with the same basic concepts of the original game, the same depth, but less grinding and more fun aspects along the way, I'd definately sign up for it. I doubt that will ever happen though. :P
Good: - large scale RVR with 3 factions - sieges, conquest - game mechanics enforced player interaction, made for a strong community - well-crafted game world. There are some memorable places in this game - especially in the original zones (remote valleys, dense forrests, etc) - Three lore systems, so something for everyone - catered to all types of (PvP) players - soloists, elitits (8vs8) or casuals (epic zergs) - had some good PvE coming in with the first expansion (Shrouded isles) - especially the epic dungeons. Very time consuming tho - people had a different attitude back then - more layed back. We just chatted a lot more, less focused on getting to the end of the game - but that is probably not specific to the game Bad: - became very gear-centric with the Trials of Atlantis expansion (TOA) - PvE grind got insane with TOA, massive time sink in what was supposed to be an RvR game - PVE was never that great to begin with (mechanics wise) - With time the atmosphere (especially in RvR) became more and more competitive, driving away 'randoms', introduced buff botting, gear grind, etc etc. Partly Mythic's fold, but otherwise probably the natural course of things with this type of game.
^^^This pretty much sums it up. I loved DAoC and would play a sequel with updated graphics and such, but I do not see Mythic doing it since they haven't learned a friggin thing from WAR (like listen to your customers!!!)
The other thing they really screwed up on is this new Ywain server. Big deal, there is 3k people on peak hours. They combined every stupid server to make that happen. Problem is that it's TOA servers....wth were they thinking? This immediately made most casual players (like myself) decide NOT to resub. I was thinking about when they were talking about a large combined classic server. Not now.
Hmmm, lets take all of the classic server players and try and get them to come back by putting them in a spot where they cannot really compete with those who are maxed on TOA servers...brilliant Mythic/EA! You had a chance to jack up the subs, but no, why not make it the EXACT friggin thing that tanked the game in the first place. Who the heck is calling the shots there now anyway??? Here's a quarter, buy a clue.
Comments
I loved that they had dynamic dungeons.. could lvl 1-50 solo in them.. or with 1 friend or more.. was a great system:)
And they crafting was excellent... using Camelot Crafter i was the first maxed out tailor when classic servers came out.. just had the guild feeding me materials..
P.S. what made me stop playing was players with healbots in rvr... made it useless to try to play anymore.. hell, i would probably still be playing if it wasn't for that:(
I agree. For how old DAOC was, it still blows out Darkfall.
I got the game after I had EQ and I think had DAoC had come first there is every chance it might have been more successful than EQ. It was in some regards more well-done than EQ- with a nice sort of medievil theme to the game. However, I did think it's PvE well and truely sucked. It was a bit like the Gnomeregan in WoW syndrome, where mobs are just sort of lazily scattered around.
DAOC was great because it was one of the first MMOs where you had 'realm pride'. People were truely dedicated to their side and although may have played other characters/realms on other servers always seemed to associated themselves with one faction.
Even to this day many players still hold strong to those afifliations
Die HIbbies!
Torrential (Pendragon): RIP
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
As a previously mentioned Hib, I can firmly say "I shroom you." I was thinking about what possibly made the realm pride possible. I think it stems from 2 major things. 3 realms is a given. But the second was that there was no "evil" side. People gravitate towards good vs evil now and it's just a way to simplify things. But with three sides each having their own influence (Britain, Celtic, and Norse) it became a matter of mythological/historcial preference. Still to this day there is a certain amount of pride about my wonderful Long House in Midgard.
DAoC was the only game that I ever logged on in order to just PvP. Since then, PvP has always been an after thought for me. The only thing I absolutely hated was Trials of Atlantis. The Relics just took way too long to level up and imbalanced PvP a great deal. Someone with maxed out artifacts could take on a whole group of people without any artifacts lol. I didn't like crowd control either, unless I was on my spiritmaster doing the CC lol
Edit: DEATH TO ALL TREE HUGGIN HIBBIES!
As a previously mentioned Hib, I can firmly say "I shroom you." I was thinking about what possibly made the realm pride possible. I think it stems from 2 major things. 3 realms is a given. But the second was that there was no "evil" side. People gravitate towards good vs evil now and it's just a way to simplify things. But with three sides each having their own influence (Britain, Celtic, and Norse) it became a matter of mythological/historcial preference. Still to this day there is a certain amount of pride about my wonderful Long House in Midgard.
We used to call them the "stun nuke nuke tree huggers"
I spent about 5 years or so in Albion, but when classics opened up I moved to Midgard, never looked back, I miss my troll zerker.
Also for those still hating ToA and NF, I think I posted before, they did fix ToA (kinda late tho), so you don't have to touch a grain of PvE to obtain everything in ToA, except the leveling of the artifacts but it's easier now, 1-2 nights grinding in the PoC (Passage of Conflict, RvR dungeon in the frontiers) with a pbaoe group would do it. And NF it kinda grows on ya, after they added the entral island, the 8man runners were happy as that was "their place" even a lake in the island was in some servers the "solo area", of course some people didn't respect that and went in to mess things up which ended up in those that respected it to band together (from different realms) to kick the intruders out hehe.
I have to say I did enjoy the old Emain fights, but NF does compensate and adds more flavor to RvR as there's so many different places to go and find Rps.
Kinda miss making 40 water potions every day, selling 20 for 20g each and trowing 20 in the guild vault...
I think aside from the game mechanics the thing that made DAoC what it is were the people. That and the different game mentality of the players at the time. It just seems they played for different reasons in that game. Granted there was competition but it wasn't against your fellow man but rather against the other realms.
Even though they were the enemy and they were out to kill you if they saw you, in the beginning there was still a certain level or respect in RVR. Dancing on someone's corpse, sitting on their face when they're dead, or just being rude seemed to be less prevalent ... at least where I played then it is today. I used to fight people one on one and whatever the outcome the winner would more often then not end the fight with a firm salute, a bow, or some other respectful gesture. There are times where soloers would be left alone to their one on one battles when set upon by enemy realms. More often then not people were out there looking for a challenge. Dropping one poor guy with 8 people provided no challenge and the rewards were negligible at best.
The "solo lake" illustrates this point rather nicely. It was agreed upon by the majority of the server on all three sides that this area was dedicated to solo (one on one) fights for people who wanted to test their mettle against others. The rules were simple: You didn't attack people engaged in a duel, sitting down and regenerating Hit Points, or players that were not healed to max. Often there was a set of ruins (I think it was a collapsed tower of some kind) that people would gather around and watch the fights, then issue their own personal challenges and see what happens. Sure there were people who chose to ignore these suggested rules and they were then set upon by the rest of the people and slaughtered mercilessly until they left the area and never returned.
What I just described above would never fly in new MMO's... EVER. There is no respect anymore, no common decency and most of all no honor. It is now about me, when back then it was about US.
I could go on and on about this but I'll let someone else take their turn. Perhaps Pedrob, Kyleran, Shylock1079, or Czzarre can have at it. I'll be back with more once they remind me about some of the neat things I've more then likely forgotten.
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
DAoC had /face, /stick and /follow commands. These commands keep you autofaced toward your enemy and in range.
If you remove maneuver from PvP, why not just sit in your faction city, pick your foe off a dropdown list and mash buttons? PvP so easy that a one armed man can win.
DAoC is not real pvp in my mind.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Its the mechanics of the game that determine the type of community it will have. Making a blanket statement like this is being narrow minded. There will be more games where the community comes first before the individual. I know that EverQuest fostered such a community because getting anywhere took time and you simply could not advance unless you worked with others. This is simalar to what you describe within DAOC although PVE was the focus of EQ.
I do agree though that in the most recent MMO's the well being of the community has been a distant second to the needs of the individual.
I agree with so many points, but specifically
Game play has changed a lot. Battles were fought in game rather than on forums. Players respected each other - even opposite realms. Our server's realms (Bors) were friendly enough that we rolled guilds together on other servers.
I would love to see another PVP game similar using the 3 team concept, and preferably something that's not so good/evil, light/dark, ugly/pretty, etc. Just different.
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***4 out of 5 voices in my head agree--I'm ok. It's the fifth one the scares the hell out of me.***
I miss the good old days of DAoC. I was there from beta through like 2 years or so, and it was one of the funnest games I have ever played. If they would have made DAoC 2 and not Warhammer it would have been 100x better.
DAoC was a decent game in it's early years, but it added unbalancing issues by providing dedicated gamers methods for dominating the game, hence the casual populace fled. They tried fixing this by introducing classic servers, but that precludes the expansions.
Biggest problem with DAoC, far too much crowd control and not enough ways to remove it. Over powered stealth was also an issue along with unbalanced classes caused by having too many classes.
daoc the best mmorpg game period
toa/catacombs screwed it up and buffbots
r1ck
Actually they were going to make Imperator, not DAoC 2, which was a space MMO, had a good concept and graphics, but the Warhammer IP was stronger and then EA came...
Actually over time we adapted and grew to "tolerate" the CC, we even set up tactics to counter it and so on, that was a great part of the game, you had players that actually knew real life war tactics and they could be adapted to the game, baits, flanks, tank wall with pbaoe hiding behind, heck our RvR general (Mystchivious) had us spend the mornings in the enemy realm (albion) working on the ellyl faction, so we could run into the ellyl ruined house when we were outnumbered, most if not all of the albion players never really worked their faction, in fact some of their quests made them enemies of the ellyl, and these mobs were tiny but packed quite a punch (not to mention they hurled fireballs thru the walls lol), so we usually ran in there and camped until the enemy tired out and left, other times we would hide there and wait for our pray
Another thing that make DAoC fun was the sieges, defending and taking keeps was the most fun I had, you could place siege anywhere you liked (not like WAR that gives you a static point), so we could make walls with rams to hide our nukers and healers, place catapults together in rows with different ammo, hide trebuchets behind a small area with trees so they can't be seen and break down walls, drive the siege ram from door to door, later on we got the siege towers, we enjoyed putting those towers on every wall we could (before that we would treb every wall and make the keep look like a swiss cheese if we couldn't take it, so they had to spend a fortune repairing), that's another thing I never thought I'd say I miss, the repairing, made things more real, made you value your realm's keep, players wouldn't leave until everything was repaired to avoid enemies taking it too easy.
The real pride was fantastic, our alliance used to request other guilds to take a keep or tower when their bounty points were low (we paid the maintenance of the keep with that back then, not anymore), so everything was always claimed and fully upgraded to give defenders time to react when the enemy started to siege.
The relics...boy those were fun, prime time 100+ enemies invading your realm to open up the relic gates, you had to assemble over 100 to defend and coordinate with various RvR Generals that were doing different things, you had your intercept squad that made sure enemy reinforcements never reached their destination, you had the road blocks, these were the "elite 8man" groups that helped in the defense by distracting the enemy (they were so good that just being seen would make a chunk of the enemy zerg break off to chase them for the big rps, yet they usually died because 8mans are designed to be well oiled killing machines (I got a video of a Mid 8man destroying 4fg of Albs). Then you also had the stealth group, which were positioned in different places of the realm just giving reports of enemy movement, you had the easy rp lovers, which would just sit by in a tower or keep and wait until enemies start attacking to put up the boiling oil and kill many enemies (they die after that tho) and would also give us reports of enemies.
Everyone used to work together for the realm in DAoC.
The Best: RvR. The core of their PvP system was damn near perfect. Realms for leveling, frontiers and battle grounds for PvP. Simple and it works. They really only needed to expand on this with a sequel. More stuff to fight over in the frontiers and the ability to raid enemy realms...but not in the instanced, scripted way that they wanted for WAR.
The Good: Non-instanced battle grounds. On the right night, they were a blast. Would have been nice if they expanded these though, since they were so popular.
Classes/specs. Really, I'd only say these were good in comparison to newer MMOs, where there's very little customization or options. DAOC had several classes for each realm and each class had three spec lines. Again, not great, but chances are you could find some thing that fit your style.
Skills. Again, only good in comparison to newer MMOs. I much prefer to have 1 quick bar of effective skills, rather than 4 quick bars full of ambiguous, timered skills.
Group vs solo: They got this one right. Both options were viable, but grouping was much more effective and efficient in the right situation. Still, I spent most of my time solo...low-mid level PUGs were just horrible, even back in those days.
World Design: Not great, but it felt open. Lots of mob camps out there to find and few of those annoying mob fields that make exploration unbearable.
Factions. Nothing ground breaking, but there were mob factions that you could use to your advantage. Friendly/Neutral/Aggressive, much more interesting than a game world where EVERY THING is after you for no reason.
The Bad: PvE. Yea, it sucked. Boring, repetitive, mindless. They were determined to stamp out all "exploits", which resulted in a really bland experience.
The devs. They seemed completely out of touch with their game and player base. Expansions were the exact opposite of what players wanted. Class balance consisted of band aids for the utterly gimped classes and bloody, nerf bat ass whoopins for the over powered classes. You know a nerfing is particularly brutal when players spend months talking endless shit about class X only to switch sides and feel sorry for them after the latest patch "balances" them into gimp status.
End game focused. You'd have to be insane to ask for lower level PvP content. After ToA, a good number of players were ONLY playing the battle grounds. Some because they didn't want to grind for gear to be competitive at end game RvR and some because we didn't want to grind our way to end game RvR in the first place. And yet, there was no way in hell they were going to expand battle grounds.
The Worst: The grind. Oh yes, it was bad. None of this "I've run out of quest" bull shit. Things got slower as you got near 40, then they might as well have stopped. Soloing was insanely slow after 40 and grouping was a huge pain. First, you had to get into a group, which could take forever, then you had to stay with the group for hours to make any kind of progress. Utterly pointless and idiotic for a game that is focused around end game PvP. At some point, I got a character to the mid 40s and just gave up. It wasn't fun, it wasn't challenging, it wasn't engaging. Just time consuming and boring.
This is one thing that has been fixed in newer MMOs. It's not a ridiculous grind to get to level cap any more. Unfortunately though, there's nothing like RvR at the end of that road, only scripted raid grinding and instanced PvP.
Best MMO in history. I miss it so much.
Too dated and clunky now, the combat is really bad as well and the UI was just ugly.
On the Classes specs, certain classes only had 3 spec lines (healers and casters mostly), melee using classes had much more, Armsman for example had Slash, Pierce, Crush, Two Handed, Polearm, Parry and Shield.
On the skills, you could easily taken out the other bars and just have your one and put your best skills there, and there were very, very few timed skills, one of the beauties (imo) was that DAoC skills and spells had no cooldown, well most of them, cooldown skills were added with expansions, that's why I loved healing there, as long as I had enough mana, I could spam my group and spread heal as much as I wanted and keep my group practically untouched (for those wondering the downside was that spells can be interrupted when hit, 100% chance).
World design is decent for the original lands, as expansions were added with new lands they got better.
The Devs...well I kinda have to agree there, they were doing good all the way till ToA, heck the first expansion SI was the best of them all. After the ToA mess, they started listening a little more, we got mount, we got subclassing (very small way), graphics got updated, etc.
The grind, it was bad at first, it got decent with SI, and it only got better and easier, too easy at some point, at least for those that knew where to go at what levels, it made things fly. For the PvP hardcore I can see how the 40s would be a pain to PvE, that's why they added exp and coin to PvP kills and increased the exp gain by about 4x in RvR zones, so it's a lot easier now for the full PvP players.
That is to level, to pimp out your toon with a good template, you'll still need to hit a few dungeons, of course one of them being the Labby which is a RvR dungeon so you get to PvP while getting your items from a mob.
The first three statements sounds like it came from someone who didn't fully try the game or simply has hate for it.
For the UI, yes Mythic UI is horrible, that's why there's a ton of player made UI's out there to fix that.
On the skills, you could easily taken out the other bars and just have your one and put your best skills there, and there were very, very few timed skills, one of the beauties (imo) was that DAoC skills and spells had no cooldown, well most of them, cooldown skills were added with expansions, that's why I loved healing there, as long as I had enough mana, I could spam my group and spread heal as much as I wanted and keep my group practically untouched (for those wondering the downside was that spells can be interrupted when hit, 100% chance).
That's what I'm saying. I prefer the DAOC style of no cooldowns and a limited number of powerfull skills. That system seems to leave more room for player skill and reflexes.
Best MMO I have played (played plenty of really good mmo's too).
The RvR system was, hands down, the crowning achievement of DAOC. The mechanics of siege warfare, class balance (not perfect but pretty good considering the variety and complexity of combat), the incredible community that was driven by a one of a kind realm pride and the epic invasions organized by influential palyers and powerful guilds which led to the greatest offensive and defensive rallies that have ever occured in any any mmo (EVE and WW2OL have similar feelings at times).
PvE, contrary to the views of some, was NOT weak either. The quest lines were well done in most cases (especially class epics imo). The Dragons, epic dungeons, pvp dungeons, vast swathes of freely exporable lands abound with dangers and excitement. Good itemization throughout the game with seemingly endless options for gearing. A good crafting system.
I miss DAOC a lot. I would scream with joy if Mythic would go to work on DAOC 2, as long as they expressly intended to modernize the original systems (most critically RvR) without simply dumbing them down....
WAR, may never have taken the thrown of WoW, but it could have shared the thrown room to an extent if they had kept the epic systems of DAOC RvR at it's core rather than mutilating the system and bringing it in piece meal.
I played DAoC in the early days before any expansions came out on the European server Prydwen.
For me, this was my second MMO experience, after UO, and I absolutely loved it.
Granted, for today's standards it had tons of flaws, but at the time it was a great game.
What made it a great game for me was the openness of the game. The class based system allowed for enough options to find something you liked. The world was big enough to feel vast. The 'feel' of the game seemed right. Cities were not small, but no big either. Getting lost was not easy, yet you still had to travel a bit to get from A to B.
I loved hopping on a horse to go from one point to another, just to watch the surroundings. People who have little time on their hands to play are right that it took too much time. I at the time was without work or study, so I had all the time in the world and then it was a blast (how good it is to be young, lol).
Grouping was the best in any MMO I have ever seen. Because of the huge benefits of grouping, barely anyone would even consider soloing the game, because progress was so much slower. At the higher levels that tended to get a bit more tedious though, since there you really needed groups for some decent xp, which was hard to find due to the lack of number of higher level players.
I loved the non existance of instances. You'd just hop into a dungeon and join the band wagon of whatever group was in there. PUGs overall were good, because due to the group aspect of the game, people knew how to play properly in groups. They knew their roles properly and due to the tight knit communities, messing up would get you a bad reputation. Having a bad rep gave your trouble finding a group. There were not many who dared to go that way, since they knew that leveling their char would take at least twice as much time solo. Hence the reason grouping and the community as a whole were so great.
PvE was a grind, that is true. Leveling did take too long, that is also true. It would have been nice if leveling would have been a bit more up to par to today's standards. I have come to understand that nowadays leveling is really too fast. That's not good either. Buffbots were an absolute nightmare. They should have countered that by making buffs only lasting within the vincinity of the buffer. I never got why they didn't implement that.
See, the RvR gave purpose to PvP. Loosing a keep meant something to your realm. Loosing a relic, or obtaining one, directly influenced the bonusses for all players in your realm. Having the right number of keeps under control of the other two realms would open up Darkness Falls, where you could farm for 'shields' which you in turn could use as currency to buy weapons that were nowhere to be found in the DAoC world.
I played a healing druid myself, and got him to 50 in about 4-5 months, which was rather quick. Around that time they released the Shrouded Isles expansion. I thought it was great due to the new zones and races. I loved going out with our guild to check out new stuff, do dungeons, crawl through Darkness Falls, practice siege weapons in the fields, learn crafting, etc.
The big bummer for me was when I reached 50. On our server RvR was not that active, so for me there was little to do. Looking for fights in the combat zones took lots of times, and due to the imbalance of the realms we usually got owned, lol. That unfortunately did kill the fun a bit for me. At the time some really good new games came out (SWG and EvE) so then I switched.
The real shame about DAoC is though, that with just some minor corrections of the concept, they could have probably been able to turn it into the best game of all. PvE was seperated form RvR. So if you only wanted to PvE, you could do that without a problem. Crafting should have been done better. It was too much based upon the 'grind' concept, which made it rather boring. The benefits were worth it though.
So, if one day, they would do a DAoC-2, with the same basic concepts of the original game, the same depth, but less grinding and more fun aspects along the way, I'd definately sign up for it. I doubt that will ever happen though. :P
^^^This pretty much sums it up. I loved DAoC and would play a sequel with updated graphics and such, but I do not see Mythic doing it since they haven't learned a friggin thing from WAR (like listen to your customers!!!)
The other thing they really screwed up on is this new Ywain server. Big deal, there is 3k people on peak hours. They combined every stupid server to make that happen. Problem is that it's TOA servers....wth were they thinking? This immediately made most casual players (like myself) decide NOT to resub. I was thinking about when they were talking about a large combined classic server. Not now.
Hmmm, lets take all of the classic server players and try and get them to come back by putting them in a spot where they cannot really compete with those who are maxed on TOA servers...brilliant Mythic/EA! You had a chance to jack up the subs, but no, why not make it the EXACT friggin thing that tanked the game in the first place. Who the heck is calling the shots there now anyway??? Here's a quarter, buy a clue.