Review

[Balandar]

I had to write two reviews on some electronic media content. I ended up doing it over DAoC. Could of done better, but not worth a hell of a lot.

Dark Age of Camelot.

Dark Age of Camelot is the latest MMORPG (Massive multiplayer online role playing game) out on the market today. Released in October it’s already teeming with tens of thousands of players, and growing daily.  Developed by Mythic Entertainment, this game is beautiful, addicting and a blast to play.  You may have heard of Everquest, Asheron’s Call, and Anarchy Online - DAoC blows them all away.  The initial release had an incredibly smooth launch compared to the botched launch of WWII Online and the steaming pile of crap known as Anarchy Online.  There was no lag, the servers were stable, and it didn’t crash every 5 minutes. There were some 40,000 people online launch day and only 16 tech support calls!

DAoC is broken up into three different realms - Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard.  Albion takes place after the death of King Arthur and is predominantly human. Hibernia is a magical land filled with Elves, half-giant like creatures called Firbolgs, and a small mischievous race of people called Lurikeens.  Midgard contains brute force races such as Trolls and Dwarves, but still has its share of magic.  None of the realms can communicate with each other and you can only have characters on one realm per server.  This prevents issues with players finding out plans of invasions from other realms and also keeps a bit of mystery to the other realms.  The only thing you can do with players from other realms is to try to kill them.  Imagine two realms doing battle in an open field with 150 players on either side casting magical spells from streaking lightning to gaseous poisons.

The graphics are best to date for any online game.  The dazzling spell effects are outstanding.  You also have complete control on how to view your surroundings, from first person to third.  Imagine an invisible bubble around your character that extends out about 30 some odd feet.  You can position the “camera” anywhere in that bubble relative to your character, i.e. having the camera in front of your character so you can see a close-up of his face.  There is also an option to lock your camera and still let you control your character.

DAoC continues along the same lines as Everquest in the ideas of leveling and questing.  You kill monsters to gain experience to gain levels to increase your skills.  Questing is much easier now, everything is auto-entered into your journal and is easy to follow along.  You also no longer need to run around for hours and kill hundreds of the same creature to get a quest item.  The item will automatically be placed into your inventory when you kill the monster.  Unlike Everquest, there are no Zones (except the occasional dungeon or your capitol city).  No more waiting for 60 seconds to enter a new region, even with the current zones it only takes a few seconds to load!  Death is an inconvenience, but not permanent. You’ll lose up to 10% of your experience for that level but you can return to the place where you died to gain 5% back.  Also if you just gained a level and die you will not lose that level.  All of your items stay on you when you die, so no more corpse runs.  Death in RvR (Realm vs Realm) is Nil.  You do not lose experience, gold, or anything - just your pride.

The question remains, should you play Dark Age of Camelot?  Even if you’ve already invested hundreds of hours into the other online games out there, you’ll find that just a moment with DAoC will convince you to switch to Mythic’s game (not to mention the countless sleepless nights ahead).