Camelot Unchained - AKA Dark Age of Camelot 2

There is a god. :)

 

A mixture of hope and apathy

At the moment I’m kind of adrift on an uninspiring sea of MMORPGs. There’s no siren call strong enough to tempt me into paying a subscription fee, I’m just not finding anything particularly alluring. Too much of the same old same old I suppose. So instead I’m just fiddling about with single player and F2P stuff, whilst I wait for one of the more interesting online games on the horizon.

As always I am tempted to return to EVE, but also as always, it’s just not life style friendly enough for me and my regular AFKing. Alas, I can’t see me being able to play EVE the way I would like to anytime soon. Though it’s probably a positive thing that real life prevents me from doing so, as I know EVE can devour you like a Sarlacc with the munchies. For now I’m mainly playing Star Trek Online. Just nipping on for an hour here and there to play through episodes or missions and set my next batch of Duty Officer assignments running. It’s free to play, quite engaging and I’ve always had a soft spot for STO. That said, the game won’t ever be my long term MMO love affair, but is more of a regular casual flirtation, perhaps with the occasional tongue. Flashing eyes across the office, the odd late night drinking session, but not quite worth a divorce.

Oh, I've downloaded RIFT again and will dick about the free 1-20 bit. Not logged in yet.
The only other online game I’m playing at the moment is Tribes: Ascend. It’s free to play, the cash shop is not essential and most importantly, it’s fun. This reimagining of the classic Tribes 1 and 2 is getting better and better and I recommend people try it out. Just be warned that it is not like your normal online shooters. It’s MUCH faster and you have to learn to lead your shots a lot more than normal. It’s all about predicting people’s movement and it can take some getting used to. Anyway, it’s a good game and recommended.

At some point soon I will be making use of my 2 weeks free in both WAR and DAoC, but I doubt very much I would subscribe to either in the near future. Obviously I’m a fan of both games, or at least what they once were, it’s just that WAR would really need to do quite a lot to make up for the Wrath of Heroes disappointment. The less said about that the better. Actually, as I write this I’m changing my mind slightly regarding DAoC. There is a bit more chance that DAoC could persuade me to take up a month’s subscription. It did grab me last year, surprising me how well so many things still played and looked. I swear if that game had a decent UI update it could see a reasonable resurgence.

Aside from those retro distractions, for me it’s all about the upcoming games; Planetside 2 and Mechwarrior Online. There’s a load more Planetside 2 news appeared in the last couple of days, which I’ll gather up and post about soon. Mechwarrior is continuing to drip feed news at a slow steady rate, though we’re still waiting to see some in-game footage. I hear we may see something soon however. Mechwarrior isn’t a MMO of course, but this blog is about stuff that interest me, so meh whatever. Oh and Hawken looks great. Me like mechs.

Elsewhere, I’m not totally writing off Funcom’s “The Secret World”, yet I don’t find myself particularly caring about it either way. To be honest I’m not quite sure why. Despite my many misgivings regarding Funcom, I do like what they try to do and certainly TSW has many features that tick my boxes. My apathy confuses me slightly. If I don’t get on the beta then I doubt I will try it until well after launch.

And on the subject of apathy… If for a moment I take off my Hat of Trolling+3, yes Guild Wars 2 has much potential and does look like some serious PvP goodness. That doesn’t change the fact that it will never be a game I get excited about and I still find it hard to motivate myself to write about it, but it’s certainly one I would like to see realise its PvP potential. Obviously Kill Frenzy and I will try it out.

Hopefully sometime soon we’ll start to get more news on Dark Millennium Online and World of Darkness. Both games are perceived as being on rather rough seas, what with the challenges faced by THQ and CCP, but I guess we just have to wait and see what news arrives. I still have high hopes for both games, purely due to their settings. Actually that’s not true. I have some confidence in CCP to deliver something interesting and hopefully sandboxy. Plus THQ have some excellent 40k games in their stable, so we know they’ll do the 40k universe credit when it comes to atmosphere at least.

I think that’s it for major MMOs of interest to me, can’t think of anything else. There are a few small games I have an eye on, but they’ll get posts of their own at some point. Oh and for the record, Diablo 3 I’m indifferent to and World of Warcraft Panda bear stuff just doesn’t work for me. Sorry Blizzard, as if you care lol :D

Skyrim, MMOs and dead eyes.

This is a really good post I saw linked on G+ today: I do not wish for an Elder Scrolls MMO. Go have a read, once you're done here. ;)

I compared the atmosphere and sense of place that Skyrim has with MMOs recently, but I too wouldn't want to see Bethseda make the next Elder Scrolls game as an MMO, they're too good at making single player games and we still need to have quality single player games. What I would like to see is some MMO developers be a bit more influenced by games like Skyrim and less by the long standing traditions of firmly rooted spawn camps merely existing to service questing and/or grinding. As really all we get in the vast majority of games are worlds that quickly start to feel sterile and lifeless with their soulless automaton mobs and overall static nature. I'd just like something that wee bit more alive. Which is considerably easier for me to type than for some poor sod to make reality of course, but there you go.

OK this screenie is not an example of anything except pretty, but meh, I like pretty.

One of the reasons I was quite enamored with RIFT was it almost did this, well, ok "almost" is a bit much... lets just say it at least it tried a little bit. The rifts added a nice random and chaotic element to things, but unfortunately that was still overlayed on the standard essentially static game world and actually the impact of the rifts was lacking at level 50. I know when SWTOR arrives it will also be the same and once the nice new glow from all those sabers wears off I'll probably notice the game staring at me with sinister dead eyes.

Lots of undead eyes in Skyrim.

Though as I've said many times before regarding SWTOR, I am looking forward to it, but thanks to my slightly jaded/tired (or perhaps experienced?) state I'm not super hyped or anything. It will be the same again and that's no bad thing, it just is what it is.

To be honest though whilst I'm a bit tired of the status quo, that doesn't mean developers should do much different to the WoW winning forumla. It still sells after all. Perhaps I'm just experiencing the symptoms of having played too many MMOs since Ultima. It's no coincidence that the true faction based RvR games (DAoC & WAR) were the ones that held my attention the longest, as I think that higher level and complexity of player interaction in those games distracts from how sterile I often find the PvE side of MMOs to be.

Ah well, bring on Planetside 2 :)

In their world, everyone is a winner

In my recent post about DAoC2, I mentioned that if DAoC 2 were to ever appear, while I think it would be very successful, I don’t believe that it would be a WoW beater and in fact neither will any RvR or PvP based MMORPG ever. So what’s my reasoning behind this?

It’s really quite simple. People don’t like to lose. 

Games were not created to favor the loser. It is strange to think people are sitting in video game design classes and dreaming of games that punish the victor, even if those designers are not the best gamers. Especially as games become more involved and advanced, those playing will spend days or even weeks working past what is giving them trouble.

In a PvE centric game like WoW it’s completely possible to play the game for years and always win. You will clear the dungeon, beat the bosses and emerge victorious. Even if learning new raid content and having to spend a few days wiping on a boss, you can be assured that you will eventually beat it to a pulp. No matter how difficult a particular PvE challenge is, a player knows they have a 100% chance of beating it should they put the time and effort in. You also know that you will have it on farm status at some point in the near future. Whether you win or lose is entirely down to you.

PvP and in particular RvR is very different. They might not like to admit it, but even the biggest epeen waving prick loses fights in RvR and bloody often too. I know because I’ve seen them lose :P Situations will arise that are impossible to win, it doesn’t matter how well you play or how well you’re prepared, you will lose and there’s nothing you can do about it. At some point your elite warband of doom will ride round a corner and straight into 4 warbands of OMFGZERGDOOM from the enemy faction and BLAM! You lose, simple as that. Sure, you can put up a good fight, get some kills, stay alive a long time and perhaps claim a moral victory, but it will still boil down to you respawning. Battles and campaigns will be won or lost and whilst you can influence the outcome, you cannot decide it with 100% certainty.

That huge mass of casual players that in reality bulk out the big name game’s subscription fees don’t want the results of their valuable gaming time taken out of their control. They want to consistently achieve and have a sense of progress; they need to be in control. They log in, do their daily quests and log out, safe in the knowledge that they’ve taken a step further towards item A, B or C. They do a dungeon, they want item X, but if they don’t get it they know if they go again and eventually they will. And hey, they still got a token/plaque/whatever, so no time was wasted, the winning end result is inevitable. They don’t want to log in and get their arse kicked for an hour and come out of it with nothing and have no guarantees that this won't happen again tomorrow, or every day for ever...  where’s the fun in that? What a waste of their precious time and I don't mean that sarcastically at all, because yes time is precious. And while I say this regarding casual players, it also applies to a great many more hardcore gamers, they will quite often be even more demanding of constant and reliable progress. What they are winning is relative to their different goals in-game and the time and effort associated varies, but the expectation of consistent winning crosses the boundary of casual to hardcore players.

Whereas the dedicated RvR gamer is far more comfortable with just taking part in the challenge itself. They of course will also be interested in character progression and winning their campaign, but they will also revel in those moral victories where the only reward is a smile, a bit of epeen bolstering and perhaps some banter. To play RvR games for a long time means you must have accepted defeat and enjoy what may turn out to be impossible challenges. Perhaps they are playing for the fun of the fight itself and the utterly valueless epeen internet glory.

I don’t mean to imply that the RvR gamer is better than PvE gamers in any sense, it’s just people have a different set of desires, levels of patience and just what they’re willing to accept and enjoy in life. The majority of people want to win and given the choice between two good games where one supplies reliable victory, but the other you are only able to influence a result, then obviously more people will opt for the fun victory. For most people that question would be a total no-brainer.

Just look at EVE, a game that is rampant with RvR in the form of player run Corporations battling each other for territory and power. EVE is an extremely well made, very high quality and all round excellent game. On the pure quality stakes I would say it can comfortably stand next to any other MMO. It also has regular FREE expansions. Yet, it isn't even vaguely close to WoW's sub numbers. It's just too harsh for most players. You can get your arse kicked, have everything you own destroyed or stolen and the perception amongst non-EVE players is that this happens all the time and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Which is potentially true, it's the nature of these type of games and as EVE's infamous history shows, no Corporation is invincible... That's a horribly risky style of gameplay for most people. The masses want their win and in WoW, RIFT and other PvE centric games everyone is a winner!

So then, what'll it be for you? The taking part or the winning?

Me, I like a bit of both.

The classic MMO that you said needs a 2 after it's name

Recently I put up a poll to see opinion on which of 4 classic MMORPGs deserves a sequel. I was tempted to have a larger list, including the likes of Asheron’s Call, City of Heroes and so many more, but for me the games on the list are the ones I consider the big 4 genre defining MMOs. They are the classics that really laid the foundations for the modern MMO and proved to developers that online gaming was going to be big, serious business. It could be said that it was these games that led to World of Warcraft, certainly EQ and DAoC did. Also whilst they may be some of the oldest games out there, they are all alive and kicking today and are far more active than you might realise.
 
The poll finished:
 
63% Dark Age of Camelot (2001)
25% Ultima Online (1997)
7% Anarchy Online (2001)
3% Everquest (1999)
 
Firstly there is something to acknowledge regarding this poll that will have influenced the results. Despite me writing about whatever I feel like at the time, my blog is seen by most as a WAR blog and as such has readership associated to a particular style of MMO gaming. That style being games with a focus on structured openworld faction based PvP campaigns; where the PvP has purpose and impact on the game world. So I’m sure it’s not really a shock that Dark Age of Camelot was a clear winner, as this is without any doubt a poll with a slightly biased audience, but we should also remember that a great many of us WAR gamers also played and loved a lot of other games; including the classics in this poll.
 
And whilst we all know DAoC can stake a claim as the master of structured realm vs realm PvP, don’t fooled into thinking DAoC was the only game to do this. Ultima Online has (or had, I’m not sure all of these systems are still properly active) multiple PvP systems including: Chaos vs Order, Player driven community/guild based openworld pvp and an extensive 4 faction system where the game’s major cities could be captured and taken control of. Anarchy Online is also split into factions, with a pretty cool storyline where rebel factions are battling the Omi-Tek Corporation’s dictatorial government. Everquest, well, its split into different races, but the game was in my mind utterly focused on PvE grinding and I found it’s PvP to be purely about ganking and griefing. EQ was clearly the inspiration for WoW and AoC’s PvP servers… Yeah I hated Everquest. I tried EQ after I’d been playing UO for a while and crikey it was horribly dull in comparison. Still, it turned out to be the biggest influence on the entire genre, so my loathing for the game doesn’t matter. ANYWAY, yes indeed, DAoC is the master of RvR, but it’s not the only game to have RvR.
 
I think though that this poll (and the bazillion of forum and blog posts elsewhere about this) does demonstrate that within the community there is a real desire to get back to the broader RvR concepts that DAoC personifies. Huge open zones that are fully PvP enabled, with PvP objectives for the structured campaign, but that also have PvE scattered throughout the same landscape. Effectively a game centred on hybrid zones, packed with character, atmosphere and purpose. Small scale skirmishing, large scale raid combat, keeps, fortresses, relic raids, siege weapons, frontiers, true enemy territory, all of that. Also a game where neither the PvP or PvE feels like an afterthought, which is something that to my mind no MMO has managed since.
 
So DAoC 2 then, sweet, sweet DAoC 2…. For so many of us it is the dream MMO, the game we still hope one day will get made, but most likely won’t and will continue as the biggest missed opportunity in the land of MMOdom. It has been argued that WAR is effectively DAoC 2. It’s not. Rumour is that WAR was made with a directive for it to NOT be DAoC 2, how true that is I don’t know, but it does make sense. Why WAR isn’t DAoC 2 is a whole other and lengthy post that I may write one day, but lets just take it as a given for now. We are talking about a true DAoC 2; with Mids, Hibs and Albs battling it out in a massive world. There are many factors that make a sequel for DAoC so desirable and I could write and write about them, so instead I’m only going to mention one. I’ll leave it to you folks to comment or blog about others.
 
You may think I’d say RvR, but actually I’m going to say that the setting was an inspired and brilliant choice. By basing it around the legends of King Arthur and Camelot, combined with the Norse sagas and Irish myths, it tapped into a comfortable familiarity within us. Almost everyone knows and likes one of these legendary themes, so the game never had to convince anyone of its lore and atmosphere being good, since you already know it is. I’ll always remember the day during the beta that my friends and I ended up on Salisbury Plain and discovered Stonehenge… We were all wetting ourselves with excitement, we KNEW this place in real life and now we were there fighting giants. We discovered tombs underneath and the excitement continued. This sort of thing runs throughout the game, almost everywhere you go there is a legend or location that you will have heard of.
 
This flows all the way into the quests and storylines in the game. DAoC is packed with huge stories, masses of NPC conversations, all running through these familiar themes. All within a massive world, with weather, properly dark nights and one where you often actually had to travel to get places. If you’re not interested in PvE or a game’s theme at all then you could of course ignore it all, but should you have any interest in PvE or the setting you’re in, then DAoC delivered flavour and atmosphere on an epic scale.
 
So what about you? Why did you vote for DAoC? What makes it so worthy of a sequel?
 
There is one thing though. If DAoC 2 ever materialises, it will never, ever, be a WoW beater. No RvR or PvP based MMORPG ever will be, which is something I’ll be posting about soon. I do think though that it could be a highly successful game and would become the premier PvP game with ease, but only if Mythic stuck like glue to everything that makes the original such a landmark in MMOdom.
 
The big question is of course: Do Mythic plan to (or have they already…) start working on it?
 
It would be easy to assume after WAR and with Bioware being focussed on Star Wars that this is very unlikely. Easy to assume…

If you could make an old MMO a modern classic

If you could revamp and re-release any MMO from before World of Warcraft, what would it be and why?

So we’re talking about the likes of Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online, etc; those foundation games that developed the concepts we take for granted in modern MMORPGs. Imagine one of them getting the chance to have an up to date game engine, fancy graphics, a polished UI, the works…

My initial thought was (shock horror) Ultima Online. I first played UO sometime around 1997/8, in its relatively early days and I bloody loved it. It was a wild and dangerous game world where you just never knew what would happen and because of the ability to kill and loot other players, it was a game where the server community really mattered. It developed its own self policing community, with guilds built around murdering scum, or those defending against them and even trade guilds. There’s a lot of old UO in EVE.

Alas I just don’t think original UO can be recreated with the very different overall MMO community we have today. It was too harsh, too risky, far too broad in scope and just isn’t easily accessible enough. Plus the purple pixel obsessed gamer of today wouldn’t understand the era of UO I would want to return to, since their motive for playing wouldn’t be there. Yet the main reason I’m not picking UO is perhaps an odd one; it’s the game I have the most epic tales and awesome memories from. I don’t fancy tarnishing those memories watching some ADHD epeen retard jumping around everywhere spamming chat about WoW.

As such my regular readers will no doubt have guessed what game I’m going for…

DARK AGE OF CAMELOT

It’s still a good game today, not without issues, but they are mainly due to its age and there is still just so much that is so bloody right about it. If DAoC’s graphics were updated and, most importantly, it had a major UI overhaul (as in every department), then I think it could step up and deliver the goods.

The oft talked about three faction RvR system works perfectly. The population auto balances itself as under populated factions battle the common enemy and every fight has a level of wonderful uncertainty. It also provides a smorgasbord of characters to choose from, it is an alt-o-holics wet dream.

The gameworld has a great feeling of being alive and is incredibly atmospheric. This is down to a combination of the varied and well executed racial themes, the art design, the sound effects, the bloody huge scale of it all and the proper day/night and weather systems. Fighting battles in the pouring rain as thunder rumbles around you… just glorious…

Whilst the RvR system is less “jump in and play” friendly than WAR’s, the DAoC campaign itself is far, FAR, FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR superior. I used to bang on about how WAR needed to work on having an epic campaign, rather than the ping pong one we’ve got and I stand by that. Yet all those years ago DAoC had it nailed. Taking keeps was a big deal and certainly in the old days, stealing a Fortress relic was a proper achievement. Then there are the details of fights themselves, the destructible walls, siege towers, properly mobile siege weapons, the truly massive frontier zones to fight in and so on.

It would be easy to wax lyrical about Darkness Falls… The classic PvP/E dungeon gets all the hype, it was (and still is) great, yet that takes away from all the other solid PvE that so often has a risk of PvP. All the frontier zones had PvE elements; I’d go so far as to say DAoC combined PvP and PvE seamlessly.

I could go on for ages about DAoC, hell I’ve posted enough about it since I started this blog. The thing is though I genuinely think it would succeed; a modern version of DAoC would have so many of us dropping everything to play it. Of course a fully realised DAoC2 would be the ultimate dream, but I reckon there is awesomeness to be found in just taking the original game and sorting out a posh up to date version. A fresh server to start from scratch on, with all the UI mod cons the modern MMO gamer expects and graphics to make me weep with joy. Yes please, DAoC revamped… That’s the one for me.

How many Mythic devs does it take to make an expansion?

As people talk about WAR’s future, or lack thereof according to some posters, you often read comments about how Mythic couldn’t afford to make an expansion, that the company is too small now. I don’t know about this, it seems to be packed with assumptions and I’ve never seen any real evidence to confirm either way. So the thing I’m wondering about this is this…

Back in the old DAoC days Mythic brought out a lot of expansions, all of these were of considerable size and impact, but one of the earlier ones in particular stands out: New Frontiers. Mythic completely changed the ENTIRE ORvR landscape, the zones had the same names, but the graphics, layouts, structure and how they worked were utterly transformed. Which leads me to the following question:

Was Mythic a smaller company with fewer resources than today when they made the huge "New Frontiers" expansion for DAoC?

I suspect they were smaller then, but I don’t know for sure. Certainly this was before WoW launched and MMOs truly exploded and if Wikipedia is to be believed (don’t laugh :P) subscription numbers were around 250,000. Mythic now have UO, DAoC and WAR, but subscription numbers are not available. Not that sub numbers alone would indicate if a company has more or less money to throw around. Of course in the past they also didn’t have EA’s backing, nor Bioware’s involvement, which I presume puts them in a better place today. Of course those comments are just based on my own more positive assumptions...

So I wonder, have the naysayers assumed too much or is Mythic really in a worse place than in its regular expansion making past? Could Mythic surprise a lot of people and deliver what many consider impossible? I've heard a lot of interesting stuff recently, stuff I can't confirm and as such don't want to post, but if rumours and "stuff" are to be believed, Mythic have got something up their sleeve and it smells of warpstone…

Unless its all bollocks and we're doooooomed! DOOOOOOOOOOMED! Need more rats for the doom wheel!

What WAR needs from DAoC - What should and might happen

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Time to bring this series of posts to a close and consider which of Dark Age of Camelot’s features Mythic MIGHT actually bring to WAR.

First off here are a couple of things I’ve not mentioned before, because to be honest they’re not hugely important to me right now and I didn’t think about them much, but I think they will be a big deal for others and I fully expect will get introduced to WAR.

Alternative Progression – Mastery and Champion levels
You’ll often see people saying they want the renown cap increased, they’ve hit 80, got fully geared and need new incentives to play WAR. A fair comment, but I don’t think Mythic will increase the renown rank cap, instead we’ll get something similar to DAoC’s Mastery and Champion levels. Basically they are an alternative levelling system, each with their own XP bar, levels and associated benefits. I doubt Mythic will do a carbon copy of the existing system, but for reference here’s roughly how they work

Mastery levels
There are 10 mastery levels, each one requiring the player to achieve a range of PvE challenges. These challenges vary dramatically in scale, from things you could solo to others requiring almost realm wide co-operation. The challenges themselves are extremely varied, with exploration, puzzles, bosses and huge dungeons. Once you’ve completed that mastery level’s challenge you get access to new special abilities or bonuses and can then earn mastery XP for the next level. These abilities and bonuses are also rather varied, with players choosing from different paths available to their class. There are all sorts of things, from damage increases, to group buffs and travel abilities. Important to note the XP can be earned in both PvE and PvP, so this isn’t purely PvE.

Champion levels
Similar to Mastery Levels, but more based around quest lines that could be PvE or PvP related. However there are no mastery style challenges to complete and as you again earn Champion XP from PvP and PvE, the method you choose to gain it is up to you. As you progress through the Champion levels you get to choose abilities, including things that are not normally available to your class.

Between these two systems you gain a massive amount of individual customisation for your characters, so you really can make your character different to anyone else. It also allows Mythic to introduce new carrots for people to work towards without increasing the existing level caps, which in theory can prevent decimating any chances a newly dinged 40 has. I’ve not heard anything from Mythic on this, but I fully expect to see a variant of it in WAR.

Update for clarification – I’m not suggesting they should add these alternative systems based around PvE, I’m just explaining how they work in DAoC and that I expect a version of them to appear in WAR. Ideally Mythic would make them more PvP orientated.

Zone locking removed
The campaign is too fast, too restrictive and promotes massive zergs that the servers and game engine cannot handle. Everyone knows this, including Mythic if they choose to admit it. DAoC’s open campaign system is proven to work. Make control of a percentage of keeps across all zones the defining factor towards city sieges starting. Do this and it WILL spread players out, reducing lag and promoting group-warband scale play, it WILL massively increase WAR’s sense of scale and it WILL just bloody work. Also making the campaign require effort and increasing the relevance and importance of keeps (and therefore guilds holding them) will be an injection of life in to WAR’s almost extinct realm pride.

Prior to 1.3.5 I wouldn’t have thought Mythic would do it, I thought they’d be reluctant to admit how bad an idea zone locking has proven to be, despite the fact that this and the 2 factions thing are the biggest errors in all of WAR’s development. However, then 1.3.5 arrived and Mythic demonstrated with Carrie at the helm (I presume this is what has changed things) they can and will completely revolutionise the crap features. With the cities Mythic made a bold move and delivered something just plain better. Next step is the campaign.

If Mythic had doubts about this… which they bloody well shouldn’t, because as history has demonstrated they should trust my sodding judgement… Uhm sorry for the EGO!!! moment… So yeah if they have doubts but were really clever, they’d do a live event week… The Age of Chaos, where the system is demonstrated on live servers. Though I think they might just go for it, after all really it’s a no-brainer and would revolutionise the game in a brilliant way.

Relic Raids
We know the fortresses are coming back, we don’t know how. The obvious suggestion is relic raids. Relics provide a realm wide buff and the goal is capturing enemy relics from their fortress, marching it back through it’s (now unlocked) racial pairing and securing it in your fortress. No need to go into much more detail, many people have discussed this before and whilst Mythic may do something totally off the wall with Fortresses, I think this is the safest and most sensible option.


There’s a lot of other things from my previous posts that I would have liked to say I think Mythic will do, but alas I’m not that confident.  The alternative levelling systems I think are a way off, probably with the first proper expansion if and when that arrives. I know a lot of people have huge doubts of Mythic and EA investing much into WAR, which of late my confident stance has lessened a touch and I’m a bit more on the fence regarding. However the beauty of those last 2 changes, is they don’t require huge new resources, instead they use knowledge from their classic and still excellent DAoC MMO and use WAR’s existing game-world to make it work better.

A key phrase for Mythic’s attention I think is simply “Make it work better”.

What WAR needs from DAoC – Part 3

Seeing as this is part 3 it would seem a sensible moment to look at the whole 3rd realm malarkey. We’ve all talked about 3rd realms a lot in the past and I think everyone agrees that this far in to the game it is probably the most difficult change Mythic could make…


DAoC’s three-realm system provides the campaign with a couple of very important things: paranoia and fragile power.

Paranoia
Whenever you’re fighting in DAoC’s vast oRvR frontiers, you’re always paranoid, always suffering (or rather revelling in) a sense of nagging uncertainty. Any straightforward fight can escalate into utter carnage; you just can’t tell what’s going to happen...

I’m logged in and grouped up with my Midgard hunter and fighting the foul tree hugging Hibernians, when suddenly a large force from Albion appears from the forest to my east. They don’t engage at first, they just stand there, watching… In that brief moment a range of possibilities ran through my mind. Will they charge us, or the Hibs, or both? Will they let us kill each other and just mop up the survivors? Perhaps they will ignore us all, leave us unable to fight and use this as an opportunity to make a strategic move of some form… But then it’s not just down to them, what about us? Perhaps both Hibs and Mids will see the Albs as a greater threat and attack first, yet that is relying on both factions reacting in the same way… What if we break for the Albs, but the Hibs don’t? Bloody hell this could get messy fast!


In that particular fight I’m remembering the Albs charged, but unfortunately for them both Mids and Hibs saw them as the large threat. With almost psychic coordination both realms ceased fighting, swung round to meet the Albion charge and after a protracted fight defeated the new enemy. However it was then our turn for some misfortune as the Hibs finished that fight in a better state than us and kicked our arse immediately. It was epic fun though. When fighting in WAR’s 2 realm system you just can’t get those moments, it’s always going to simply be us and them.

It’s worth noting that above I’m referring to a particular sense of paranoia and tension when fighting the enemy and making strategic moves. However you’ll find a different kind of tension throughout all of your frontier oRvR experiences, but that’s more to do with the way the zones work than the 3rd realm. I guess the easiest way to compare it to WAR is it feels a bit like solo roaming in Land of the Dead, when the enemy has the zone controlled and death means game over.

Fragile power
The 3 realm system means any attempt at being the dominant realm is a fragile thing. If one realm starts to dominate the campaign, they will find themselves under attack from both of the other realms. Not normally in any kind of official alliance, more just an unspoken agreement to deal with the bigger menace. Really it is just like that fight I described above, but scaled up a lot. With the open zone system this means that if one realm gains a lot of territory, they now have to maintain control over a lot of territory and against a lot of enemies. If the only RvR you’ve played is in WAR, it’s hard for me to get across quite how vast a task it is to control a lot of land in DAoC. It would take a lot of effort with just 1 enemy realm to deal with, but with 2 enemies it doesn’t take much for the cracks to appear.


Time once again to ask: what if any of this could WAR introduce?

A third realm IS doable and DAoC’s “New Frontiers” expansion proved Mythic are capable of making changes on the scale required. However, that was a different game in a different time. There’s no escaping it would be a massive undertaking today and I imagine would cost so much money to do that it couldn’t be seriously considered by Mythic. Playing make-believe for a bit though, if they did go for it there are a few obstacles to clear.

Q) In the current oRvR zones, if 2 realms have little room for manoeuvre, how the hell do you squeeze a third in?
A)  As per my previous post you make Tier 4 zones full oRvR and give us much larger battlefields. And remember it’s not just the 3rd realm thing adding an extra sense of tension and paranoia to DAoC. The large openRvR zones and more dispersed roaming players create a much larger wilder feeling world. You can see how this could actually work in WAR when playing in Land of the Dead, only 2 realms but a large open zone without funnelling and a constant sense of danger.

Q) How do you connect new lands to the existing racial pairings?

A) You make a T-junction in the central zone of the existing pairings. I made a post about how this could work a while back. In that post I was working based upon the premise of zone-locking and went with Wood Elves as you can see, but the T-junction works regardless of zone-locking or the superior open zone campaign system. Slightly changing my original idea, take West Praag, Cinderfall or the Elf one I’ve forgotten the name of, and turn those into the gateways into the other realm’s lands. In my head this would require the least amount of change to existing zones.

Q) Who’s city gets sieged?
A) Again check out that post of mine from before, for more nice pictures with a suggestion for using the current locking zone lark. That said, I'd much prefer it if we also got rid of zone locks, in which case we could have a system linked to keep and territory control. Once your controlled points reaches a certain low, your city is attackable by the realm with the most controlled points.


Q) WAR’s realm’s have 3 races each, so what races for the new realm?
A) Disease. This is one discussed in comments plenty of times on here before, so credit to all involved in those discussions. Skaven, Beastmen and Nurgle Chaos (Nurgle is the rival of the already playable Tzeentch Chaos). This is the ONLY combination of the remaining primary races in the Warhammer lore that doesn’t have a serious lore conflict. Those 3 are made for each other.

However... time to stamp on this dream. :(

Whilst it could work (it really could, honest!), I very much doubt its feasible to do because of the scale of it and the costs I presume it would involve. No matter what we all want it all just boils down to this.
So when WAR gets new playable races I fully expect them to be part of the existing 2 realms, but maybe that's not such a bad thing...


Next: Summing it all up, what should and might actually be done.

What WAR needs from DAoC - part 2 - siege warfare

Siege warfare: Castles, keeps, towers and flight-masters?

To really understand why siege warfare in DAoC is seen as being much better than in WAR, just like in my previous post you once again have to take a step back, look at the big picture and consider more than just the details of the combat itself. Not just the how we fight, but the why we fight. So the first thing to think about is what is the actual purpose of keeps? In the most basic sense within both games the purpose is the same; the keeps are there to provide us with something to fight for, they are battle objectives if you like. However beyond that basic reasoning the two games go in very different directions.

In WAR capturing a keep gives points towards the score required to lock the zone it’s in... The only reason to attack a keep is when trying to lock the zone, and in return the only reason to defend a keep is if you want to prevent the enemy getting the points towards the aforementioned zone lock. Unfortunately other than that point score and a bit of extra loot for a guild claiming the keep, ownership provides no benefits of any form. And it must be stressed, once you get the zone lock and the active zone changes, that keep is now completely irrelevant. This is why you very rarely see a guild in WAR take and hold a keep in any serious manner, unlike in DAoC where they will often end up staying there for hours defending their ground. In WAR keeps are just cap it, get the points, lock the zone, move on and repeat back and forth. Am I being too harsh? Not really. Ask yourself, what does holding a keep give you?

In DAoC taking and holding keeps provides an entirely different set of benefits, but to understand why, first I have to explain the difference between WAR’s flight-masters and DAoC’s teleporting. As you know, in WAR when you want to go to a different zone you simply talk to a flight-master in any warcamp, a loading screen appears and then you are in the new zone, instantly. However in DAoC there no flight-masters, instead there are Border Keeps and teleport stones. Each realm’s frontier (which consists of multiple seamlessly linked zones) has a couple of Border keeps. These are massive un-attackable keeps that separate the PvE levelling zones from the full RvR enabled frontier zones, in other words these are the doorways to RvR. Once inside you will find no flight-master for quick travel, instead you will discover a teleport stone, that works like a flight-master, sort of … Same-same but different!

Spread across the frontiers are DAoC’s many attackable keeps, each of which have 4 towers fairly nearby in the surrounding landscape. If your realm controls a keep and all 4 towers, then a teleport stone within that main keep becomes active and under your realms control. You can use these to instantly travel between ANY teleport stones also under your realm control. So if you capture a keep and towers deep in the enemy frontier lands, this means your realm buddies can then teleport yourself from the Border keep (or other controlled keeps) directly into that newly captured keep within the enemy frontier… as long as you also control the 4 related towers.

Think about that for a minute. Control of DAoC’s keeps effectively give you supply lines into enemy territory. It allows you to pin your enemy back and bring your armies in to their lands. Remember this is a campaign without zone locks, where anywhere can come under attack at any point, as such this is a campaign where your ability to manoeuvre is an extremely significant factor. These keeps provide a way of controlling territory. They let you turn segments of the enemy frontier into your own territory, restrict enemy movement and provide beachheads to launch your attacks from. When you look at the frontier map in DAoC you can see effectively lines of battle as control of the land is gained and lost. Like an old school war map! REAL strategic choices. Do you push for the keeps nearest to your frontier and try to directly expand your territory, or do you send raids deep into the enemy frontier and try to capture a strongpoint and make a push directly from the heart of the enemy frontier? What about both? Could you hit 3 enemy keeps at once and potentially control 3 different routes into the enemy frontier?!

But full control of keeps is a fragile thing. Control means having the keep and all 4 towers (tower image to the right)… You can’t just hole up in the central keep, because the enemy will launch attacks on multiple towers at once and you’ll lose the ability to teleport. You’ll end up trapped in the castle with reinforcements having to reach you on foot or by boat, neither of which is that quick in zones this size. Unless of course that’s the point and you holding this keep is merely a diversion for an attack elsewhere… which is a definite possibility with the open zones and freedom of choosing where to fight.

So comparing the two games, in WAR keeps give you nothing more than points on a scoreboard towards a ping-pong campaign nobody cares about (sorry WAR), but in DAoC the keeps define territory, give major travel options and are actually the defining feature of DAoC’s campaign, instead of a score board.

So what of the keeps and siege warfare itself?

At first glance it’s very similar to WAR, with oil, rams, doors and keep lords. The big difference is once again the options you have. Not only do keeps in Camelot have destructible walls, siege weapons can be placed anywhere (no silly siege pads), you’re able to build siege towers and there are other abilities that let attackers climb the walls, which means you’re not limited to just attacking or defending a single doorway. Defenders will be spread around the battlements, as the attacks could come from anywhere. Just spamming AoE on a doorway will not work. All told this is much more like those images of sieges we see in the movies and it makes for much more epic feeling battles. Much more epic, simply because we’re spread out more and we have options in how we play. Visually and in layout terms the keeps are quite different, DAoC’s having a much more traditional, but not necessarily better, theme. DAoC’s feel bigger, but I’m not entirely convinced they are. I think it’s a more a case of placement, which is just like real castles being often on hills and raised areas, which makes them quite imposing as you approach. A key point is that you’re not funnelled to the doorways in the same way as WAR, so you will always see much more of the keep and be fighting over a much larger area, which I think gives it a more dramatic ambiance

I think it’s time to ask: what if any of this could WAR introduce?

OK this is following on from my previous post and the changes I’ve suggested there regarding the overall environment.

Teleport stones = Flight Masters
Having already removed the zone locking system, opened up tier 4 to be fully RvR and added some more objectives to the former pure PvE sections, it’s time to give the keeps and objectives some real meaning. Flight masters should only work if your realm controls a keep and a certain number of associated objectives. Otherwise you have to fly to the nearest zone (with a controlled flight master) and then ride. Alternatively you could choose to leave your city gates or a lower tier entrance and ride there. A racial pairing will now actually have a feeling of going into enemy territory as you travel from one city to the other. While this will mean it can sometimes take longer to get into a fight (though we have scenarios for instant action still), I think the trade off for a proper campaign with a real tangible feeling of pushing into enemy lands is more than worth it.

Upgrade siege warfare
I gather destructible walls are hard to implement now, as are freely deployable siege weapons. OK, so give us siege towers and ladders that work on inner and outer walls. This will mean both attacking and defending melee has more of a role in sieges, the combat is spread around more, it’s a hell of a lot less boring and it brings an end to the DOORhammer Online era.


As before I think these are feasible changes. I’m not asking for 2 years worth of new artwork, or in fact anything that requires structural changes to the game world (I don’t think?). It’s about moving us away from the too prescriptive campaign and not making everything too easy for us. Actually I think that’s a big contributor to Mythic’s errors (and some of the great things too) with WAR, they have really tried to make everything as accessible as possible. They’ve tried so hard to make it easy for us to take part in anything, that they have actually made it a bit too easy.

What WAR needs from DAoC

As you may have noticed, I always have a secondary MMO, something I dabble with to prevent me overplaying and burning out on my main game. Recently this secondary MMO has been my return to Dark Age of Camelot, a game I quit something like 8 years ago. I decided to dabble with DAoC because a bunch of my friends have already returned and I was curious to see if my memories of “the greatest RvR game ever” stood up to modern inspection. Returning to old favourite games is always risky, since there’s a very good chance that you will discover your memories were viewed through rose-tinted spectacles and you end up tarnishing those memories. Returning to DAoC has shattered one lens of those oh-so fragrant spectacles, but at the same time it delicately polished the other and confirmed a lot of what I (and many others) have always said WAR needs.
 
I think I’ve decided to stop playing DAoC now, for a range of reasons, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to post details about the many things that have been a disappointment on returning to the game, simply because it doesn’t really serve any purpose. It’s an old game, there were obviously going to be things that felt dated and things that changed over time. As gamers we tend to revere our old favourite games and when we do return it’s easy for us to be overly dismissive of things that are probably changes for the better and/or live in denial of things that by modern standards are a bit crap. With DAoC I have seen and felt both sides of that and I’m well aware that my break from the game was so long that it has probably made me overly biased. In 8 years a lot will change… So I’m going to ignore the negative things and instead explore the great things that I’ve re-discovered in DAoC and feel WAR really should look at adopting.
 
To avoid post reaching truly monstrous length, I’m going to split this over a few. Starting with:
 
Environmental!
 
Good game-play in an MMO is about far more than the intricate details of what button X and ability Z does. It is just as much (perhaps even more so) to do with the overall environment the combat takes place in. And believe me, the environment in DAoC is magnificent. Forget about quality of graphics, they alone do not make up a game’s environment and when I use the word environment I mean it in a broad sense, encompassing everything that makes up the world and the situations you play in. DAoC’s magnificence is all about its huge scale, the ambiance, it’s sense of place, the three-realm system and the freedom you have.
 
Each realm has it’s own frontier lands. These frontiers are fully PvP enabled areas each of which include multiple zones, though note there is no loading going from one zone to another, or even between different realm’s frontiers. So in WAR terms it’s not just a case of walking from the Chaos Wastes to Praag, imagine being able to walk from the Chaos Wastes to Black Crag and with no loading at all! You see in DAoC all 3 realms RvR areas (frontiers) are linked together. You can travel between them on foot over ground, via a vast network of underground tunnels, by boat and in a very limited fashion by teleporting (like flight masters, sort of…. I shall explain why this is different later). And the frontiers are huge, actually... scratch that, they are HUGE!!!11 Yes indeed, of such monstrous scale that they deserve upper case and a couple of 1s. This gives it the feeling of a big world, not just a series of levels to load. And crucially it backs this big world up by putting far less restriction on your routes of travel than WAR does. You are not funnelled into one small valley all the time with invisible walls or strangely impassable hills. Likewise, you are not going to find your mighty army defeated by a 3ft high iron fence (Praag I’m looking at you!). This all means that in DAoC wherever the terrain forms bottlenecks there will nearly always be another route you could take, longer or more dangerous perhaps, but there are options. Options, options, options and for both attackers and defenders!
 
Objectives (I use the word in a more general sense, not in WAR’s Battle Objectives) are spread all across these frontier zones. These give you reasons to go pretty much everywhere and due to the factors mentioned above, this means you can find people (or they find you…) at almost any part of the map. You know how Land of the Dead has all the best drops and is also the best XP? Well that’s what the frontiers are like. They are populated by mobs to fight for excellent reward and not just RvR objectives in the way WAR defines them. There are also the keeps, towers and relic fortresses providing defensive and strategically important positions. Now combine this VAST world, freedom of movement and wide range of objectives, stir it up a bit. Looks nice yes? OK now chuck in the third realm and you have not only an amazing sense of freedom and scale, but also tension and paranoia. Every moment you are in a frontier is a risk, over every hill and round any corner there could be enemies lurking. A single faction cannot dominate like in WAR, because it will end up being attacked on multiple fronts. To stay on top you will have to work hard and can’t just zerg your way to the win.
 
There are also cosmetic things that I think really add to the world’s ambiance. It’s easy to write off cosmetic improvements as distractions, but they can really add to the big world feeling. Night and day cycles where it actually gets dark at night adds a lot of atmosphere as well as the ability to be sneaky (names only show up when fairly close in DAoC). Oh and sunsets, everyone loves a good sunset. Though my personal favourite little touch is the random weather. I was in a big fight a couple of days ago and suddenly the sky darkened, rain started pouring down and thunder rumbled above the battlefield. A huge battle in a proper thunderstorm… Epic.
 
 
The question therefore is: what if any of this could WAR introduce?
 
Almost all of it!
 
But not this
Camelot’s 3 way linked frontiers will not work with WAR. The Warhammer world has a pre-defined map and some of the distances involved are just too big. The Elf zones for example are on the High Elf island of Ulthuan, it’s in the middle of the ocean and is not a place you can walk to from Praag. It is physically impossible. There are similar issues between the other areas. Which unfortunately means that the 3 racial pairings have to remain separate. However, there is something else that could be done…
 
Remove zone locking
Thanks to the zone locking campaign system, in tier 4 we only ever had 3 areas to fight in at any one point. This is too restrictive and is a big contributor to WAR’s zerg culture. Scrap it. Have all tier 4 oRvR zones active all the time. Getting to the enemy city should be about reducing the number of keeps and objectives the enemy control across the entire world. Once their faction controlled objectives drops below a certain number then the outer walls of their city become vulnerable. This system would work for both a 2 or 3 faction game by the way. An open system like this would allow for more strategy, make the game more varied, reduce lag and give small group/single warband warfare a much needed boost.
 
Third faction
Lots of debate in the past and with the rumours recently, lots of debate in the present too. It IS possible, but it is a big ask. Should it be introduced? Abso-bloody-lutely! Will it? Oh man I’d like to think so, but I just don’t know.
 
Expand the oRvR lakes
I’ve banged on about this in numerous posts before. All that wasted space in tier 4, all that terrain that nobody goes to (particularly since tier 4 XP levelling is now done in Land of the Dead). Mythic simply need to change some of the PQs and/or buildings into battle objectives of some form, turn on RvR and tada! HUGE open world zones in WAR! OK maybe it’s not simple, but it can be done and it’s not pie in the sky thinking. I’m not suggesting full terrain changes like New Frontiers, just some tinkering and changing of boundaries.
 
Weather, all day, all night
Make it properly dark at night and get rid of player names at a distance. As well as the obvious improvement to atmosphere, we can now use the cover of night to sneak about and set ambushes, etc. Put in weather effects, rain, mist, thunder and lightning… what harm could it do? AND we can then say cheesy shit like “we attack at first light!” or “dead by dawn!”
 
 
What do you think? Pie in a rainy sky? Or a case of why on earth did they not use more of the lessons learnt in DAoC?
 
Next: Siege warfare

Ahhh look at the ickle baby zoney woney

Over the last week or so fate conspired to buff the crap out of my spare time. Due to a variety of real life issues I ended up with a truckload of time to myself and being the red blooded male that I am, I just couldn’t stop myself from revelling in whores, booze, a gigantic pile of Columbian marching powder and a rather awkward encounter with an aroused badger, in lederhosen.

Or perhaps not… In somewhat less dramatic fashion, what actually happened was old age and sensibilities kicked in and I instead spent the time watching boxing (a job well done Mr Haye!), football (Rafa wtf did you sub Torres for???) and OMFG SHOCK HORROR!, I played a lot of computer games…

This included getting my Zealot to level 21, my Squig Herder to 34, gained a smattering of renown on other characters and also acquired some nice new armour for my Magus. Not much new there, but the Zealot was a real surprise for me to be honest. I’d left him ages ago at a mere level 8 after I received a mouth full of bad tasting gunk (reminds me of a French lass I met once). I just didn’t get into it at all. Then last week on a whim I decided to get a couple more levels and with a loud “CLICK!” everything fell into place. I now officially like Zealots. It’s an interesting class and has a lot more potential for hybrid play than I had previously realised. My current alt-oholic plan is to level my Squig Herder to 40, closely followed by the Zealot.

The other big event of the weekend for me was, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this; I started playing Dark Age of Camelot again. Yup, back to the old school. A few days back a bunch of my mates started playing the free trial on the US servers, oh how I chuckled when I heard… The fools, the rose tinted fooooooooools! And then it happened, whilst chatting to them on vent, I got curious. Doh. Curiosity leads to consideration, consideration leads to interest and interest leads to downloading a free trial client, rolling a Midgard Hunter and getting some levelling (or should I say leeching) done.

Playing DAoC again has been fascinating. There is so much about the game that is incredibly obtuse, annoying and downright dated; yet at the same time it still has so many wonderful things to teach modern MMOs and in particular WAR. Which is a little ironic considering both WAR and DAoC are Mythic games. The detail of those things is a topic for another post, something I’ll think about writing depending on how much I play DAoC, but there is one big over all concept, feeling, sense, thingy that WAR really needs to pick up.

SIZE!

DAoC feels huge, open and monstrous. It feels like you are let loose in a massive wild world, a place where you can actually adventure. This is not because of the expansions and added content expanding the game, but due to a wide range of factors and not just the way its zones are made. DAoC has since launch just seemed “big”. Where as WAR feels enclosed and restricted. Regardless of the zones actual size, the way WAR funnels us into small areas and has huge chunks of irrelevant and unused landscape, it constricts the game’s sense of scale. As I said before there are a lot of factors that contribute to this different feeling of scale, it’s a lot more than just how the zones are designed and again this is something I may go into more detail about another time. What I will say though is whilst it is probably too late for WAR to address a lot of those factors, it is not beyond the realms of possibility to greatly improve WAR’s sense of scale. Mythic could work some magic, if they felt so inclined anyway. Here’s a thought…

West Praag! What’s the point of it? Once visited by a group of tourists in 2008, the area is now completely without life. So why not turn RvR on, change some of the existing terrain into objectives of some form (that influence the overall Praag zone locking) and pow! You’ve dramatically expanded the main Praag RvR area, added life to a dead zone and reinvigorate the main part of the Empire/Chaos campaign. Why not, my Mythical friends, why not just try it? Just this one zone, try it out see what happens, you could always turn it back if its fails. And what is the worst that could happen? A completely unused area gets visited.

Regardless of if that idea is shite or not, I would highly recommend that Mythic give serious consideration to this feeling of scale. It’s something that DAoC has so right, yet WAR could do so much more with.