Dark Age of Camelot Preview
The NDA has been lifted and we are now a month away from being able to purchase and play the final version of Dark Age of Camelot, so I thought I would give you my initial impressions of the game and provide you with a basic description of how it plays. I have not yet played the high level game (Illia has and will be writing his own review), but I have played characters in all three realms high enough to get a good feel for the game.
Why beat around the bush. Let me state right from the start that I think this game rocks. I am having a blast playing the game that can only be compared to the fun I had when I first started to play Everquest. So far Mythic seems to have gotten everything right, and I can’t wait to see how it will look by the time it gets released. Negatives? Sure there are a few, and I’ll go into them as I go through the review, but they are so outweighed by the fun factor in this game as to be almost non-factors.
Let me start with the basics. Like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. In fact, Everquest players will find much that is comfortingly familiar in the game, while reveling in the many differences. As with all role-playing games, you basically create a character who starts out weak and ill equipped and slowly build him up in prowess and ability. You can fight solo, form groups with up to seven other players, form guilds, become a tradesman and set off to defend your realm against the savages that inhabit the two opposing realms.
DAoC is divided into three separate realms. Each realm has its own look and feel, with classes, races, architecture, spells, equipment, mobs and more all unique to that realm. In some ways it is like getting three games in one. You can play a character all the way to level 50 and then start over again in a different realm and get a completely different gaming experience. The world is huge, with no zones, except for a couple of cities and dungeons. The game’s graphics are top notch and very immersive. You really feel like you are in that world. The spell effects are especially eye catching, and each realm has its own set of effects so presumably you could watch a three way battle on the frontier and tell who is doing what just by the look of the spells. And the sound effects are also very well done, adding to the sense that you have really entered into another world. The one complaint I have here is the lack of a rotating third person camera view. I like to be able to see behind me when I play and can’t get that view in DAoC.
The game play in DAoC is far broader than in Everquest. You can play the game completely in a player versus environment mode, similar to how you play EQ, and get a huge world in which to do that. Those who wish to stay completely away from pvp play should have no problem doing it and should have plenty of places to play safe from hassle. Players cannot attack other players from their own realm, and most of the realm is safe from incursion by players from other realms short of an all out concerted effort to breach the borders.
However, the pvp aspect of the game is really intriguing. I’m normally not a big fan of pvp combat, but I have found myself looking forward to the frontier wars envisioned by Mythic when they designed the game. Once you hit level 20, you can set forth to the borderlands and take place in the battles against the other two realms. There are keeps and castles set up to raid and capture. You can raid a keep and raise your Realm’s flag and the guards will suddenly be on your side, allowing the landscape of the borderlands to change back and forth depending upon which realm is winning more battles. Or you can set forth in a small group to harass the enemy. Players from different realms will not even be able to communicate with each other. The idea is to make the other realm’s players as close to player-based NPC’s as possible. Finally, each realm has special artifacts which, if captured, will weaken all members of that realm and strengthen the members of the realm that captures them. Mythic envisions that players and guilds will rally around the capture and protection of those artifacts.
The classes are set up so that specific classes have their defined powers, similar to EQ, but also so that within a class you can still get a wide variation between players. This is because there are areas of specialization within each class. When you start off, you start in a broad class category, such as Warrior or Rogue or Sorcerer. These vary by Realm. Then at level 5, you get to pick a class specialization. Within that specialization, you get specialty points that you can put towards a variety of skills. How you use those points determines the path your character takes.
Let me use the class I am playing in the realm of Albion as an example. At character selection, I had the choice of playing one of four races: Briton, Highlander, Avalonian or Saracen. Since I wanted to play a magic user and they have the highest intelligence, I chose to play an Avalonian. I then had a choice of five initial classes: Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Elementalist and Acolyte. I chose to play a Mage and set off to conquer the world.
When you log in, you are right next to your trainer. You can train up points in a specialization right there, but being wary of wasting my points, I chose not to train anything and save my points. That seems to be the wise course. Right away, your trainer gives you a quest to run. It is a minor fetch and carry type of thing, but gets you a decent amount of experience points. There are also the usual low level critters to kill and the variety of cheap animal parts to harvest and sell for a small profit. Money is definitely tight in this game. Still, you don’t have to buy spells in the game, since they are added to your spell book automatically when you gain the proper level or skill level.
As a Mage, you get two basic lines of spells: matter, which gives you self buffs and dot spells and body which gives you life draining and debuff spells. Once you get to level 5, you are asked to join a college and specialize. This is where the division between classes and even characters really starts to grow. I chose to specialize in Sorcery. This gave me four new lines of spells. All sorcerers get the basic line of mind twisting, which gives a variety of charm type spells. You also get three specialization lines based upon the three basic lines. How you use these points really effects your abilities. If you choose to put most of your points into the Mind Twisting skill, you will gain power in domination which lets you charm and make pets of other humanoids in the game, giving you a vast variety of pets to choose from. If you choose to put your points into the body skill, you get power in the body/mind spells which are powerful direct damage spells and debuffs. If you choose to put your points into the matter you get advanced dot spells. You can specialize in one line, making sure you will always have the highest level spells, or you can spread your points out to get more, if lower level, spells. Thus, it is not possible to get, for example, the highest domination spells for high level pets and also the highest direct damage spells. This means that you could run across two high level sorcerers that are actually totally different in power simply because one chose one specialization and the other chose another one. Remember, this is description is just specialty for one class in one realm of the game.
The spell tables are probably my biggest complaint in DAoC. I just don’t feel there is a great enough variety. Most spell branches consist of a couple of spells that just gain in strength as you go up in level. So, for example, you start out with Corrosive Mist 1 as a first level Mage. As you go up levels, you will get Corrosive Mist 2, 3, 4, 5 etc., each basically the same spell, but with higher damage levels. From what I can see of the spell tables, most casters will never use more than a handful of spells the entire game. There do not seem to by any of the fun non-combat type of spells, like transportation spells, vision spells, illusion spells, travel spells, etc. Hopefully, more will be added before final release.
Battles in DAoC are very similar to those in Everquest. The Mobs have a good AI and when you see a group, you need to plan carefully if you don’t want to bring the entire group down on your head. Even then, the Mob you are fighting may cry out for help and you can suddenly find that his friends were close enough to hear his screams and have come to his aid. One interesting twist is that the Mobs will actually hunt you. You can be walking down a road and a Mob could spot you, check you out, go back and get his friends and bring the whole group down on your tail. I think that’s a nice touch of realism.
Many of the players in beta seem to have played Everquest, and the group dynamics have taken on EQ trappings. There are pullers, tanks, healers, blasters, crowd control, and all the other things we expect out of an Everquest group. Of course, the classes are different and you need to learn their capabilities, but that’s part of the fun of starting out a whole new game. Still, you can hot key your commands and set up your spells in pretty much the same way you do in EQ and the terminology that the players have been using so far have pretty much been lifted completely from Everquest. If you have played EQ, you will really have no trouble quickly adapting to DAoC’s battles.
I have not tried out the trade skills yet, but DAoC is set up so that you can play a merchant without ever having to level up and go out hunting. Even a level 1 can master his trade, and you can actually make a profit making the items and selling them to the NPC merchants, meaning that you don’t necessarily have to hunt just to finance your trade. Plus, the trade skill items are generally better than what you can buy from the NPC merchants, meaning that player merchants should make up an important part of the game’s economy. In this way, DAoC seems closer Ultima Online’s style of merchants than to EQ’s.
Quests in DAoC are definitely more valuable than in EQ. Even if you are not happy with the reward, the amount of experience you get more than makes up for it. You could easily level up your character just by doing the quests. So far the types of quests I have seen are mostly of the run and fetch variety. However, some have been quite clever. There is one you get early on from your guild trainer where you warn a sentry post of an impending attack just in time to see a dozen creatures storm the guard post and participate in the battle. If that is an example of how future quests will work, I’m definitely impressed. Also, you keep a quest journal in the game that tells you which quests you have going and which step you are in, so if you lose track you can consult your journal and see what you need to do next.
Now for the two most important questions you are probably wondering. First, is Dark Age of Camelot better than Everquest? And second should you be scared off of purchasing the game in light of the disastrous release of Anarchy Online?
I’ll start with the second one. I really believe that this game is going to be stable and playable right from the start. Of course, there is no guarantee of that. Nevertheless, with Anarchy Online, pretty much every beta tester was screaming that the game was not ready for prime time. The beta version had serious lag, frequent crashes, and lots of well known bugs. It turned out that the beta testers were right on the mark. With DAoC, I have not experienced any serious instability in months of beta testing. As they have added more testers to really test their servers, there have been occasional crashes and lag spikes, but they have usually been worked out within a few days. The game certainly seems stable at this time. Of course, it is hard to predict how well a game will perform when it suddenly adds 100,000 new users, as DAoC is likely to do, but based upon the current version, it seems like it will be playable from the start.
As good as it is, the game is still lacking a few things I would have liked to see added before release. There are really only three major cities – one in each realm. I’d like to see more. There are also only a handful of dungeons. Mythic promises to add more cities and dungeons to the game later, but it would be nice to have them right from the start. There is also a promise to add more items, armor types, quests, etc after release. After experiencing the huge variety available in Everquest, some people might be disappointed by what is currently available in DAoC. This is not to say that what is there isn’t quite good, but it is more limited than you might be used to. There are simply not as many and as varied a selection of items, spells, NPC’s and quests as populate Everquest. Personally, I don’t see this as a major problem, since the game is already loads of fun as it is, and Mythic promises to keep adding to it and building it up over time. It is, however, something to keep in mind when you start out in Camelot.
Now for how DAoC compares with EQ. It’s actually a very difficult choice. For those who have never player either game you can’t go wrong with picking one or the other. Both are tons of fun. It depends whether you prefer the established world of Norrath or the raw world of Camelot. For players who are playing Everquest and are still having a blast exploring Norrath, there’s no real reason to switch over to a new game. But for those who have played EQ a while now and are looking for something similar but also quite different, this is the game for you. The pvp aspect alone really makes this game shine, and the other parts of it are also top notch. As for me, I’ve already put in my order and intend to play DAoC a lot. I also intend to continue to play EQ. Both are too fun to give up. It is actually quite nice to have two kick ass MMORPG’s to choose from.
Mythic has clearly looked at what Everquest got right and what they got wrong and designed their game accordingly. The interactive features that make EQ so unique and add to the game so much are pretty much all there with DAoC. But they have also tried to eliminate some of the features that detract from Everquest. All items drop randomly, so there is no reason to camp a certain Mob for the best loot. And to encourage you to move on, they implemented a bonus feature where you get a considerable extra bonus by killing Mobs in a new area, which drops over time as you stay in the same area to hunt. I have found that the lure of an additional 25% bonus has been enough to send me looking for greener pastures. In my opinion, this is a definite improvement over EQ.
There is also no twinking in DAoC. You can still give money to lower level characters, so in that respect you can twink them, but items that are too far above their level are simply not usable by them and will quickly decay and disappear. Thus, if you are a new player of the game, you won’t have that frustration of constantly running across other players your level decked out in armor meant for characters forty levels above them. This should add a lot more balance to the game.
My conclusion? Without a doubt, this is the best game I have played since Everquest came out. It seems to have everything I like in EQ and, most amazingly, have solved most of the things I dislike about EQ. If I had to find a complaint, it is that Camelot does not yet have the breadth and complexity that Everquest has. In its current format it is really a simpler game. Of course, the reason for this is that it has not had more than two years and two expansions worth of constant patching and upgrading to fill in the spaces. Given the commitment Mythic seems to have made so far, one can only feel confident that a continuous effort will be made to keep upgrading the game and over time it will build up that complexity. Even now, the game completely rocks. This is definitely a winner in my book. I’ll see you in Camelot.
