just got the trial Follow

I say do it. I've been playing a year and don't see any end in sight, either for the game or my interest in it.

Actually, many of the issues mentioned above have been fixed. The blue light over NPCs' heads when you have completed a quest with them is working, etc. And Mythic has obviously realized that there has been an influx of new players (there has been -- it's been noticeable; and I don't just mean the EU players, I mean newbs. The new blood of any game.) And has obviously also decided not to let the game die a slow death from neglect, as it was. Take a look. It has been made much more accessible to new players -- not that it will ever be as pick-up-and play as WoW, but I was drawn to DaoC and put up with all the frustrations of the old, unfixed, figure-it-out-for-yourself version -- which often left me tearing my hair out, thinking the game was so maddeningly difficult -- precisely because it was and I say is also the smartest, deepest game out there, the only one that seemed like it would actually prove worth all the hassles of getting up to speed unaided. (And the hassles are much less.) It was sometimes maddeningly hard, but it was never, ever stupid; there is a genius to its design that I don't have space to go into here; suffice it to say I never feared it would ever feel empty; and I would never reach a limit where I had topped out the learning curve and had exhausted all it could teach me.

And what it could teach me was stuff I never expected to learn from a mere game. I am not a MMO player. Because I had never found an MMO that seemed like it would reward the hours and hours one puts into MMOs. Until I found Daoc. And then I didn't realize it was that DaoC was special -- I thought I had just underestimated the genre, so I played DaoC for a while and when I got frustrated, I shopped around. I tried a whole bunch of the best-rated MMOs -- Conan, LotR, Dungeons and Dragons, Runescape, even Everquest II. And others. Inc. Wow. which took me exactly 15 minutes to tire of. (Sorry to any WoW fans; different cups of tea, etc.)

It didn't take me long to realize I am not an MMO player per se; but DaoC is not just an MMO. It was hard; it is less hard now for beginners but it is inexhaustible, really, in how good one can get. And the rewards were commensurate. It is the only game I have ever played that really simulates war. Not set-piece battles, not a pretty fantasy -- war. War I will never know but all human beings are curious about; war that Robert E. Lee spoke of when he said, "It is well it so terrible or we should grow to love it too much." War that my ex-Army Special Forces friend who was wounded to the point he was unwillingly given a medical discharge often cannot bear to remember but more deeply cannot bear to live without. I experienced emotions that I have only read about in war memoirs -- the fear of letting down one's comrades that is greater than the fear of death, and is what is called courage, though it is only one kind of fear trumping another. Battle joy, battle terror, the feeling of fighting three hours straight in mortal terror the whole time -- surrounded by a sea of red -- to hold a crucial keep; and the astonishment of finding three hours have gone by and one is still alive and have somehow held. (Said ex-Army Special Forces friend confirmed that that is as addictive a high in real combat as I felt it; I will remember that afternoon forever. --The day we held Dun Crauchon against half Albion, and I thought I was dead every minute and the hours passed like seconds and then it was silent and the Albs were gone, save for the bodies, and we had held. The astonishment, the bone-deep fatigue, the love of one's fellow defenders, the lasting pride.)

And it is much more newb-friendly now. Mythic has made things that were pointlessly hard comprehensible and learnable, especially for the beginner. But the end-game has not been dumbed down since I have been playing; there is a limit to how dumbed down DaoC can ever be. It simulates war to a degree I would not have thought possible; and war cannot be learned too well, or ever well enough.

So, yes, join. You can quit at any time. But I doubt you will want to.

It is not just a game. I am late-come to gaming, but I know excellence when I see it in any made thing; and DaoC was brilliantly conceived even when frustrating as hell. And it is much less frustrating now; but it has its brilliance still. There will be nay-sayers of course who grew accustomed to it the way it was -- nobody likes change, and players who played from the beginning never knew how hard it was for even bright, enterprising, willing-to-learn newbs to know what they did not know and everyone else did and never thought to teach them. For a long time I was notable for being The Newb That Actually Stayed. Suspect of being an idiot or an masochistic; except by some older players who recognized I had heart and initiative and that the game was just not designed for newbs.

But Mystic is changing that. Because the newbs are coming, and it looks like the game will live; and they will invest in a game with a future as they would not in a game without one, which is what it seemed when it was all slow attrition and no new blood. And they are.

And I have never before written so much as a paragraph trying to persuade someone to try a game before; and I have written a novel here; that tells you something right there.

Edited, Aug 13th 2011 4:13am by jessezam

Edited, Aug 13th 2011 4:15am by jessezam