The Mythic/BioWare Merger and What it Means for DAoC

Probably nothing, for the time being. DAoC has aged remarkably well, although it has to be in a zero-growth situaton. I place a lower limit on its continued lifespan of a year and a half, and it could easily be two or three times that, depending on how great the abandonment rate is. I have no idea what kind of development team DAoC retains, but it’s probably small, and likely to get smaller some time in the next two years, as BioWare decides to go with the bigger moneymaker that is WAR, and sees DAoC as a distraction from their priority project, which is SW:TOR.

In any case, DAoC is doomed. But not neccessarily to any greater extent today than it was a week ago. Mythic alone was just as likely to make a decision to cancel it as BioWare will be. I’ll be surprised if it’s not still around a year from today, but I’ll also be surprised if it’s still here two years after that.

 

DAoC Progress and Upcoming Activities

As of last night I’ve pushed my Dark Age of Camelot character Grimgallr to level 13, which may be close to as high as he’ll go. Still, it’s not bad in the context of a 14-day trial. I did finally locate a teleporter NPC who could transport me to a battleground, which turned out to be utterly deserted, but there were mobs there, so I killed a few before moving on.

I have managed to resist the tempation to reactivate my StationPass at this time; I plan to reasonably soon, but right now, with WAR on the horizon, it really wouldn’t make a lot of sense, since I plan to be tackling that exclusively for at least a few weeks. Here’s to hoping it will hold my interest in the long term, but frankly, expect me to be back blogging about Vanguard and EQ2 by October-ish, almong with dipping my toes into the occasional other title.

Getting a little taste of Dark Age of Camelot has been kind of an important step along the way – it seems to me like some of that game’s problems will be averted at least in WAR’s early months. But WAR will also lack some of DAoC’s strengthening features, like housing and the third faction. And Vikings – WAR has only weird mutant Vikings (the Marauder class,) which are much less cool than actual Vikings.

I need to be careful with the WAR Beta – careful not to spend too much time in it that my interest in the game is burned up by the time it launches. And I need to be vigilant in reserving my character names when early access starts for me (on the 15th.)

This weekend I’m driving to Indianapolis with Mrs. Ardwulf and another couple for a going-away party for a friend of our about to be deployed to Kuwait. Hey, at least it isn’t Iraq. We will probably not be back early enough Sunday for me to dip my toes into the WAR Open Beta, but I’ll be in as of Monday, trying a number of classes… but I’m going to try not to push any of them past level 5 or so.

 

Vikings > Pirates, Ninjas

I played some more Dark Age of Camelot last night, getting my character Grimgallr up to level 10. I still don’t understand how the archery system is supposed to work, or how you just fire regular arrows at targets, or why archery is so slow. I also got killed by what looked like a yard gnome and was totally unsuccessful at finding anything like a PvP area.

But it’s got Vikings in it! I love Vikings, and any game containing them gets about two extra points on the 1-10 scale.

Vlad had a reply to yesterday’s post in which he quite correctly points out that new games (such as WAR) are perceived to have more to offer. That’s true, but it’s only perception – I think an excellent case can be made that ‘when it’s new’ is probably the worst time to play an MMO. Nostalgia aside, pretty much every MMO either gets better over time or goes away entirely.

When I think about the games that I think are worth playing, a couple of them are relatively new, but a lot of them have a few years behind them now. This does mean that the weight of current buzz isn’t on them, which may be bad for population reasons, but it also makes them mature in the sense that their big problems have been mostly identified and fixed, a new features – sometimes impressive ones – have been added.

So no, new MMOs don’t have more to offer. I could point to Syp’s interesting list of features that WAR is going to launch without as an example. Rather, they seem fresh to the already jaded. I would make the case that while it’s understandable that WAR is the new shiny on everybody’s mind, there are and will continue to be existing games that will stand up to WAR in various respects and exceed it in some areas. I take this as self-evident, even not having played WAR at release yet.

 

Starting to Evaluate Dark Age of Camelot

Dark Age of Camelot is a game that I thought I knew a bit about, even though I’d never played it – Realm vs. Realm, pseudo-Arthurian setting, released in 2001, wide variety of races and classes. That’s all true, but it turns out that the game has a rather different feel than I expected, and that’s both good and bad.

I hadn’t really put it together that 2001 is only two years later than 1999, when EverQuest was released. My initial MMO experience was formed by WoW, EQ2 and Vanguard (and EVE, to a lesser extent, but that’s not very similar to anything else, so it’s easy to not use it as a standard to measure other MMOs by.) That DAoC feels so much like EverQuest took me somewhat by surprise, but it shouldn’t have.

This has an upside and a downside. Like EQ, DAoC has an interface that is not at all user-friendly by today’s standards. But also like EQ, it’s fairly powerful, relying more on slash commands than fancy GUI elements. There are probably commands in WoW that nobody uses because the default UI gives you everything you really need in graphical form, but in EQ and DAoC you’re playing a loser’s game if you don’t learn them.

This creates a somewhat steep learning curve to today’s gamers, used to being spoon-fed information, not just by WoW but by new-ish games in the same tradition such as EQ2 and Vanguard. This does not make the EQ/DAoC approach better – I’d argue strongly against that, in fact – but it does have a certain retro charm. UI responsiveness is okay – not up to WoW’s standard, but then, nothing is (Vanguard comes pretty close, for what it’s worth.)

When you first log into a server, you choose a realm; Albion, Midgard or Hibernia, roughly equivalent to Britain, Scandinavia and Ireland in general cultural feel – but this is a fantasy world with historical and mythological trappings, make no mistake – many of the races are very fantastical. Your choice of realm determines what races are available to you, and in turn what classes you can pick from.

I’m the kind of guy who likes having a wide selection of different character types to choose from – DAoC has 19 races (21 if you count the Minotaur three times,) and 44 classes to pick from. As in other traditional MMO, race is mostly a choice of flavor or aesthetics, and what statistical difference it makes appears to erode rapidly with leveling. But having the choice is fairly nice. The number of classes is somewhat deceptive, in that many (if not all – I’m not sure yet) have an equivalent in the other realms that plays pretty much the same, something that WAR borrows.

WAR, from what I can tell, integrates the RvR aspect directly into play, and fairly early in the leveling process. You can apparently level in RvR in DAoC, but I’m not yet sure where to go for RvR yet, or what level I have to be to get there. The low-level PvE is pretty conventional, but more quest-driven than EQ. There’s also crafting available in a number of different professions, but I’m a bit unclear on how it works and how choice of crafting skill is managed, although you can follow multiple crafting paths.

There’s armor dyeing right from the beginning, which is wonderful – although some of the colors get fairly expensive, and the selection available to a new low-level character is pretty limited just due to money. Annoyingly, though, quest rewards aren’t obviously flagged by whether you can actually use them or not, so a bad choice on an early quest meant I didn’t get the nicer quest armor, and had to settle for what I could find at a vendor.

There is zoning, and in some places, chunking a la Vanguard, complete with momentary lag. I can forgive this because of the game’s age – I’m inclined to be less charitable to newer games without seamless worlds, despite WoW making that the de facto standard.

Graphically, the game is almost shockingly good, considering its age – it looks far better than EverQuest in every way, and upon arriving in and looking around the tutorial area (a more recent addition, I believe,) my though was literally “Hey, this looks just as good as LotRO.” Obviously, it doesn’t have the dynamic lighting, reflections and shadows of that latter game, but if you turned all that stuff off, DAoC looks almost as good. Animations are maybe a notch above EQ’s, and not up to the modern standard… but again, 2001. The last game of this era that I tried was Asheron’s Call, the graphics of which are absolutely laughable – this looks like Crysis in comparison. Once I got out of the tutorial area and into an older zone the graphical quality went down a couple of notches – to something much more reminiscent of EQ in the landscapes and backgrounds – but the character models are still far better.

My biggest concern is, I guess, server population – an RvR based game will absolutely collapse without a sufficient population. I’m assured that at the level cap there’s plenty going on, but what about below that?

Overall, my initial impression is very positive – this is a game I may well look back in on at a later time. It’s flavorful, full-featured and mature, and well worth investigating. I’ll be playing some more this week (basically until the WAR open beta begins,) and I may have more to say on it.

 

LotRO Nonsense and Seeing Camelot

There’s an article on Massively noting that Jeffery Steefel over at Turbine says LotRO is going to be the next World of Warcraft, due to the Hobbit movie and the upcoming Mines of Moria expansion. Now, maybe Mines of Moria is going to be a blockbuster expnasion, introducing hitherto unseen elements into LotRO. Like fun, perhaps.

That aside, Steefel interestingly notes that LotRO’s business model may be changing. If this means transitioning to a free-to-play/microtransactions model, it’s sure to royally piss off those who shelled out the bucks for lifetime memberships. But it will be interesting to see how such a move plays out, since LotRO is pretty clearly a game designed with the subscription model in mind.

And a console version of LotRO is apparently being worked on. While not of interest to me personally, that could have a big impact depending on how well it’s received.

Over the weekend I became terminally bored – I’m not subscribed to anything right now, with both WoW and my StationPass expired. Nor am I inclined to renew either for 30 days, much of which are sure to be consumed by WAR. This state of affairs being unacceptable, I tried to get into Guild Wars and found every PvP queue I got into to be unacceptably long, even though there seemed to be plenty of people logged in, and I didn’t have a taste for PvE. Warhammer’s Open Beta doesn’t start until the 7th.

So I downloaded Dark Age of Camelot and signed up for a 14-day trial of that. It’s the only major western MMO that I had not tried, so I was interested to check it out, and rolled a Midgard-faction character on the Lancelot server.

After maybe three hours of play, he’s up to level 7, and I’m finding the game… interesting. What struck me instantly was how good the game looks, considering its age. The textures and character models are on par with those of LotRO, at least in the starting area. Clipping and flickering issues abound, and the second area I went to didn’t look as good, but for a game that released in 2001 it looks terrific.

Gameplay seems fairly deep; it reminded me of EverQuest, but that may have as much to do with the heavily EQ-inspired UI, which is something I don’t much appreciate. Target frames are rudimentary and item usage is clumsy. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to switch between bow and melee weapon without un-equipping and re-equipping, which is very awkward when some critter is trying to stick a spike in your neck. Hell, the first time I played I couldn’t figure how to log out of the game, and had to close it with the task manager.

This is a game that may be totally eclipsed by Warhammer, but it’s something that I feel like I missed by not playing it in the pre-WoW era; I would have so gotten into this in preference to EverQuest. Now, it may be too late, although it’s stil pretty playable, and strikes me as still pretty good. But the RvR dynamic is something that requires an active populations, and if you have to struggle through 50 levels of PvE to get to that, it’s not worth the trouble – and I saw very few players in the first seven levels.

It’s something to do this week, though. I’ll be playing it some more, if nothing else as I wait for WAR’s inevitable arrival.