Dark Age of Camelot

The Good
As with all MMORPG's, DAoC is centered around building a character and climbing the ranks of the game. This is accomplished by killing monsters over and over and over. Consisting of a 50 level character curve, DAoC will appeal to those who don't mind investing the time and effort (usually measured in weeks as opposed to days) to bring your character up to that level. In this arena, Mythic has provided an impressive array of areas to hunt in - but it will always come back to killing monsters. No matter how you look at it.

The difference between DAoC and traditional MMORPG's is its three realm system. On any server there are three realms - two of which will be unavailable for you to explore and play in (at least on that particular server). Once you have reached the higher levels (40 plus is the usual marker in the game) you can engage in sanctioned PvP in "frontier" areas for control of any of 21 keeps or 6 "relics" (items which give either magic or strength bonuses to all players in the land). A great deal of strategy, planning, organization and politics can go into the playing at this level - and is not for the faint of heart. Two sides will always loose and the strife that comes from that can get intense.

The graphics, gameplay and product support from the company are all very good.

The Bad
The traditional leveling system - present in all MMORPG's - is here in force. You will spend a great deal of time leveling your character to be at the point at which you can engage in the PvP aspects of the game. Should you change your mind on the type of character you wish to play you are doomed to repartake in the same leveling again. It is often hard to gauge what type of character will serve you best at higher levels so this almost forced repetition can be even more tiresome.

Success, at least in the PvP arena, relies a good bit not on yourself but also on your realmmates. Picking a good server - and a good realm on that server - is paramount before you begin to level. That is often hard to do without inside information on the structures, success history and information on quality of other players.

The Bottom Line
I personally have spent a great deal of time in the last year playing this game. Even with the downsides, the game itself is astounding. If you can stomach the "level grind" there is a great game to be found here. The people management and strategy of leadership challenges inherent in this game come closest to real life combat of any game I have ever seen.

It is also, at least as far as I have seen, the prettiest of the MMORPG's out. The leveling is a little easier when it is surrounded by pretty scenery.

The Good
The game is relatively easy to get started in, and it is easy to find partners to group up with and kill monsters. Combat is challenging since all the monsters than give you enough experience to be worth your time have a good chance of killing you. The best part is that you are always tempted to go after those oranges and reds for the extra experience even though they can really ruin your day, even if you are in a group.

There are enough different builds for each class to play around with many different playing styles. Most classes have combat and spell abilities so you can focus on one or both when you spend your skill points.

The graphics and sounds are nothing special, but they are good enough so that they don't get in the way of gameplay.

The Bad
The biggest problem with DAoC is that the gameplay is extremely repetitive. It never varies from the "hunt monsters and sell loot" or the "buy supplies and craft stuff" gameplay style.

This would be ok if the monsters were more varied, but for the most part, even though the graphics vary for monster types, the monsters all fight in the same way: charge the characters and kill them. The monsters do not even behave in an intelligent way: they attack the person that is doing the most damage to them, not the person they could kill the fastest. The silliest part of combat is the practice of "pulling" monsters. If I attack one monster in a group, I would expect a group of monsters to come after me, not only the monster I attacked. There are some monsters that do attack in groups, but even then they don't attack with any sort of tactics other than "rush and kill".

Another big problem with combat are the proliferation of combat moves. Even a 10th level character can have too many moves to fit on one quickbar. Switching bars during combat can cost you precious time that you don't have when you have to sprint away NOW. The main thing that fills up the quickbar are "chain attacks" which are attacks that you execute in sequence to do lots of damage. One wonders why Mythic didn't just make the attacks combination attacks (that is, once you earn the next attack in the chain, the next attack automatically executes its required attack first) to begin with so you wouldn't have to use 3 quickbar slots to execute that cool backstab manuever.

There are no healing potions in the game, (or at least I didn't find any and none were for sale) so if you don't have a healer in your party you have to spend way too much time resting after combat. Finding a healer can be difficult at times, and I hate spending most of my playing time sitting around waiting for my health bar to fill.

The worst part of the game is crafting. Crafting consists of buying materials and hitting the "craft" key for that item until you run out of materials. This is not fun. When a game requires you to do something this tedious ( I read an entire issue of National Geographic while raising my tailor skill from 0 to 100) you know it is badly designed. The worst part about crafting is that no matter how much time you waste doing it, it seems that you still can't craft items that are good enough for your character to wear unless you spend a whole day of REAL time crafting to get your skill in the 400's or higher.

My last quibble with DAoC is in character development. Level 1 characters are very weak. You don't really get to do anything interesting with your character until level 5, and it really takes until level 15 or so until you can really enjoy the game. So why not just start the characters at Level 5 so you can skip all the boring parts like wandering around killing worms and bugs and doing silly item delivery quests?

The Bottom Line
DAoC is an online RPG that is fun for about 4 days, but it eventually gets bogged down in tedious and repetitve gameplay that ruins the game completely.

The Good
While I still pine for a MMORPG that isn't set in a cloneworld of Middle Earth or Blade Runner's LA, DAoC is a refreshingly different fantasy game. Some argue that it's dumbed down, I counter that it is (wisely) less encumbered with annoying minutia. It's also a rather fine looking game. Most importantly, both solo and group combat are fun.

The Bad
As Ummagumma noted, the quest/task journal is pretty lame (although it's worth noting that quests and tasks are completely optional). You might take on a quest from Bob the Smith in town X. Part one is to deliver a scroll to Joe the Enchanter in town Z. If you review your quest log, your instructions are Deliver scroll to Joe the Enchanter. It doesn't record what town Joe is in. It doesn't record who assigned you the quest (Bob) or where you received it (town X). So if you log off before completing the quest, chances are you'll never be able to complete it unless you wrote down Bob's initial instructions.

The Bottom Line
Everquest light, but not in a bad way.

The Good
DAoC eshews the "virtual life" model of some MMORPGs like Ultima Online for a more direct "hack n' slash" approach. While this might lack depth, it's also a simpler, more direct type of game for beginners of the genre to get into. A real bane of these types of online games has been high-level PKers who get their jollies running around slaughtering newcomers. Developer Mythic has completely solved this by splitting the online world into three distinct areas, and citizens of each of these lands can not kill one another. Instead, after reaching a certain level, players may then venture into frontier lands and do battle with the other races, in epic contests to steal relics from one another's keeps for special realm-wide bonuses. This entire system makes for a great pace; as you increase levels you can match your abilities to the various monsters that roam the countryside. Facilitating this is the HUD the game provides, giving each monster a colour-code alerting you to its strength compared to your own. There is also a quick bar for easy access to spells and special abilities, of which there are a lot because each realm sports plenty of different races and classes. The graphics are also very nice, and the engine seems very stable and optimized. In fact, Mythic pulled off what has to be the most seemless, bug-free launch in the history of MMORPGs. The various quests you can undertake are also varied and seem geared to the race and class and path you ultimately decide to follow.


The Bad
Unfortunately, even though the game strives to ease newbies into the game, the quests are sometime confusing, and the journal fails to provide detailed information on how to proceed, making it necessary for the player to keep comprehensive notes, somewhat defeating the purpose of an in-game notekeeping system. I've even noticed a few instances where the journal provides just outright bogus notes, making finishing a quest rather needlessly difficult. Travel is another annoyance; since it is so hard to make any kind of money when you first begin the game, and since so many of the early quests are simply errands you have to run from one town to another, you won't be able to purchase horse travel immediately. Meaning you have to run on foot, which gets tiresome after awhile. A lot of the commands and interface controls are not intuitive either, so you'll be at a loss as to how to do what until you get used to them. And as I mentioned above, there is no real "liveability" to the game, so if you're looking for something that allows you to sink completely into another, online life, then this isn't the game. Here you just pop in, kill kill and kill again, and then pop out when you get tired of it.

The Bottom Line
A very nice, smoothly paced introduction into the world of online role playing games. It might not be particularly deep in its philosophy, but it sure beats a poisoned arrow in the eye.

The Good
The style of art for this game was unique for the time. The cities were well done. The forests looked how they should. And for the most part the game was one big zone.

The Bad
This game was the most boring slot machine I have every played. The game consisted of walking up to a spawn with your friends, having a friend attack a creature, and then everyone else in the group pressing the same attack key repeatedly until said creature dies. And you would do this for 300 hours! The game highly touted its PvP, but that PvP was almost 100 hours into the game play for the lowest most non-complex tier. That is way too long for all but the most rabid of players. And the few players who reached the pvp battlegrounds reported that they were extremely buggy and impossible to defend.

The developers went thru many iterations of pvp design but could not save thus sinking ship. The extreme level dependency in pvp combat meant that unless you were willing to play for 8 hours a day, you wouldn't stand a chance. Even if there were 20 players a few levels lower than a single enemy that single enemy could easily wipe them out.

Finally, the hacking of this game was atrocious. Some high level players used 3rd party apps that let them hunt down lower level players, while evading the more difficult players. So the pvp lands degraded into a grief fest instead of quality pvp game.

The Bottom Line
If you want to grind your way thru 200 - 300 hours worth of static spawns this would have been the game for you. Expect to spend hundreds of hours standing in one place killing red badgers, just to graduate onto black badgers. After fighting black badgers for days, you then graduate onto fighting big skunks and thus the pattern repeats.

Finally, after running on this treadmill for hundreds of hours you can fight in pvp, only to discover that you can't possibly win a fight until you spend 100 more hours on that treadmill! And even if you take all of this time power leveling, you will still lose because of the hundreds of players who were hacking the game.

This game was a perfect example of an "exercise in futility".