Warhammer had its chance - now Dark Age of Camelot deservers a revamp -

I was recently asked to respond to an EA survey in regards to some quick help I recieved while speaking with a rep who helped me with a simple issue for the mmorpg: Dark Age of Camelot. I wanted to type in the below response, but alas, it was too lengthy. So, I am posting it here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm actually going to add to the quality of the game experience as related to "What factor determined your rating for the game?" I understand, after watching a handful of past mmorpgs slip beneath the waves while their developers smiled stubbornly and played, "Nearer my God to Thee," that the genre has a plethora of issues.

The Corporate Investor Issue: A Grim Reality

For one, you need to make investors who have little if any sense of the genre happy. This alone can destroy an entire mmorpg product. This naturally effects the creative side of the genre, which is why we continue to get cut and paste or simplistic 2 faction mmorpgs with instanced battlegrounds and same same pve grinding for gear and rep rewards.

Dark Age of Camelot is not that game.

Why not invest in something we know works?

I understand, as do a number of gaming pals throughout the past few years, that companies don't always have the best interests at hand for a project that they might see as outdated or not worth investing in - in this case I'm referring to Dark Age of Camelot, and how it has been affected by its nephew, Warhammer Online (oh my how the apple falls far from the tree).

Dark Age of Camelot, any talk of DAoC 2, and even Origins, a server long promised to the loyal community, fell through with little if any commentary as a follow-up of Warhammer's release. Was this a viable new direction for Mythic? Warhammer appears to have taken a dark path since its inception. The "professionals" that were hired to handle character concepts, especially the very foundation of pve and pvp mechanics, were sorely in the wrong field. NOt just my opinion, endless threads and diminishing server populations within the first six-months attested to this. To make matters worse, we all saw the mass of Mythic employee firings in September 2009. We hoped that Mythic's talent had not been given a boot.

Today, we have a Warhammer that is a far cry from what loyal players (and yes I feel I can speak for most) experienced in its inspirational title: Dark Age of Camelot, while all the while, the propoganda machine that that spoke for the game - the very same people that sat with witty personalities while defending for example, the over-reaction of the community to aoe damage, were nothing but a detriment to Warhammer's financial development.

I was the first to post a video of 2 bright wizards and a warrior priest hiding behind a cave wall and laughing their butts off as they aoe'd a raid down that was just out of line of sight of the enemy. A RAID. My video was taken from youtube as a response to a video link that showed Paul Barnett reacting with a cocky attitude about players complaining about lack of aoe balance (an issue the game had just long enough to lose a ton of player base).

I was lucky enough to be the FIRST post under his link at the main Warhammer forums. This video response blatantly showed he was out of touch - not a viable behavior for the "Creative Director" and a wonderful example (or nefarious) of part of what was wrong at the company PR room.

So here we are, arguably not that far from a free to play model for Warhammer (I'm sure it's at least been layed out on the table)...and Dark Age of Camelot, a game that no one has since been able to mimic is left to gather dust, treated like the red-headed step child of a WASP family. I'll shut up now, but I want to remind the employees of Mythic/EA/Bioware (what have you)...as to what DAoC offered that titles such as Warhammer, Rift, Wow, Vanguard Saga of Heroes, Age of Conan, Lord of the Tings online, etc failed to do:

1. 1-50 leveling zone that immerses the player in their realm. There is no lazy cross over of quest lines between factions here. We won't see the enemy at level 15 questing or griefing us. They have a country, far far away over the sea - as it should be.

2. Three factions: The third faction (something WAR missed out the gate), is a whild card. Players tend to flock (at least initially) to one faction. Many players in WAR complained that Destruction owned a particular server or what have you. Even with a smaller third population, the lengthy boring sieges that can occur between two factions are now broken up. Thusly, in Dark Age, even the potential victor has to look over their shoulder because they never know what could be INC. Now that's fun.

3. Darkness Falls: This one dungeon adds a surprising amount of flavor to Dark Age. Lengthy forum threads discussed bringing this back (player threads mind you)...we at some point were told something similar was INC and instead we got the Land of the Dead. Again, we get something that really had very little if any fun value. Yes it had some of the limited 2 faction conflict - but we already expressed we were mostly 3 realm players so that never appealed to us anyway. In short, LoTD was boring - like most of the game.

Many of us wrote endless threads about what to do to fix a game that was so out of touch with its various departments, that even the opening video showed a dual-wielding Shadow Warrior taking out a Marauder. The real shadow warrior, while effective with max gear and build specifically to "kite" 1-2 opponents at a time for long periods of time, became an example of what we did not want for the main bread and butter fantasy archetype (at least one of them) of the genre. Warhammer did the same with the rogue archetype, limiting stealth to a broken coded 30 second effect. Warhammer took the negatives of the genre, took fascinating classes from Games Workshop (I used to run the fantasy battle version back in the 80s), and broke them, made them boring as heck to play to a majority of player base that left. Those were two classes as an example, but ask a Magus, or Engineer, White Lion and his pet pathing issues, etc., as to what they've had to deal with that even goes beyond just broken mechanics.

Anyway - I could go on forever. Enough already. I got derailed but I cannot express the frustration so many of us felt when we were given queue words like RvR and siege warfare as intentional pick up words and we were instead given an mmorpg that was a broken down mishmash of what we didn't like from other titles and then on top of that they took classes that were somewhat fun elsewhere, and made them lackluster and vague copies. In short: not fun.

What else makes DAoC so Fun? I mean, the graphics are sou outdated, the UI is ancient...seriously?

Dark Age of Camelot has a number of fine qualities. Dark Age of Camelot has immersion, even though Mythic put a 6 minute (or less?) timer between faction logging - which killed the loyalty factor, but still, even with that mistake, it has immersion:

We have housing, 3 factions, NO instanced battlegrounds, just persistant zones where conflict is continuous and unpredictable in size and shape. We have separate pve worlds between the realms, which means we technically have 3 separate games (yes I know this is the one thing Warhammer did borrow, but you could still run between pve zones at will in Warhammer...bah).

In DAoC we had (have) Darkness Falls - an incredibly fun 3 realm pve / pvp dungeon with no necessary questing. Find your mobs and graba soda and chips and just chill out and grind as your xp baloons (watch out for bad guys though lol).

And finally, as I just mentioned in the dungeon "Darkness Falls," we can grind on mobs, we don't need to do those god awful quests, or beg for someone to help up get through a few phases of a public quest, or fall asleep at the keyboard while clicking next, next, next at the quest giver because we have no interest in some watered down lore that would make J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, Tad Williams, Stephen King, Peter Straub, etc., fall asleep reading.

Ironically, I spent 10 hours yesterday on Albion building a Cabalist - it's just crazy that DAoC has so much darn flavor that that actually was relaxing for me - somewhat peaceful and therapeutic, and a wonderful alternative to endless cheesy quest grinding.

As an aside, let me say that I tried playing my 41 rogue in Rift the other week (I lasted about the same amount of time as most of my daoc buddies did before they quit the game), and after 32 minutes I had to log. Fed ex questing and kill 12 wolves here and run back BS has to stop. I quit WoW a while back after falling asleep in Cataclysm, so no, I wasn't going to go queue for an instanced battleground either. Been there, done that, and capture the flag pvp ended for me in elmentary school. I want castles, towers, siege weapons - Medieval Total War the RPG meets an mmorpg. I'm back in Dark Age of Camelot now. I don't care about the graphics or UI - the quality of the game is by far above the bar standard of the genre. I'm at a point with these titles where I feel like I'm part of a minority adult population that well recalls Everquest, Asheron's Call, and that as a gamer who consistently tries new titles, I find myself going back to that sweet sincere girl next door, who while simply dressed, has more character than the theme park population down the street of oh so pretty girls who have very little if anything to say.

My Wall of Text is just about Over - thank you for reading this far:

Let me say to someone here (if anyone even reads this), that while I am sure this will be seen as nothing more than an erasable "vent" or a whine *as Barnett used to say, that these feelings are worthy of attention.

Someone at Bio/EA/Mythic, someone has to have a financial or otherwise creative connection that as well has COMMON SENSE. This person (or persons dare I dream?) will see Dark Age as not only an mmorpg that has some real value in concept and creativity, but as something that is worthy of investment in either a massive upgrade - a re-release of Dark Age of Camelot call it say, Dark Age of Camelot - the Age of Kings...etc, whatever, and give us a fresh graphically developed mmorpg.

AND HERE's THE CATCH:

You don't even have to make a DAoC 2. If you took a look at what an Unreal engine or such does to the graphics (check youtube), and upgrade the UI to today's standards, etc. My God - you'd have a gem that no corporate investor could deny is quite awe inspiring, and finally, FUN.

/my 2 cents - sorry for the proverbial rant.