Dark Age of Camelot

People of Midgard, Albion, and Hibernia -- fight for glory! The call to battle is strong and never-ending, and Mythic is looking to your continued diligence and thirst for blood to keep Dark Age of Camelot's PvP raging. For its part, Mythic has delivered the latest tantalizing update to the game today, Patch 1.111.

To keep the battlefield skirmishes hot, the studio has added new RvR missions to the Frontiers. This should hopefully cause a greater amount of conflict as players strive to accomplish their tasks.

Patch 1.111 also includes a host of class tweaks (including a huge buff to Thanes), additional controllable pets for Animists, and new Atlantis quests. These quests start at level 30 and will help players garner more Atlantean Glass for their artifacts, which should help ease the pain of grinding out Master Levels.

The patch is currently live on all servers.

You know what I love about the end of each year? The lists. Man, but I'm a sucker for lists, especially when they come in "best of" varieties. In the lull between Christmas and New Year's, there typically isn't a lot happening in the world of entertainment, so it's a good time to look back before we head forward.

And so it is for The Game Archaeologist. 2011 marks the second year I've been doing this column, and it's been one of my personal favorite series to write. Every week I'm learning more and more about the history of the MMO genre, and I'm encouraged to see just how much passion and interest there are for the titles that started it all and got us to where we are today.

So before we head into 2012, let's take one last glimpse back at the road we've traveled. If you've missed out on any of these columns or want to revisit your favorite classic MMO, I've compiled a huge list of everything I talked about this year, from histories to interviews to player stories. There's also a special request for you (yes, you) at the end of this column, so do me a favor and hit that jump!

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2011 was an odd duck of a year for MMO news. A huge chunk of the year felt devoid of significant releases, but that was mitigated somewhat by the major launches of RIFT and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Titles got shoved back to 2012 or beyond, MMOs that we thought never would go free-to-play did, and the industry continually surprised us with revelations, ideas, and controversy.

So in my last Perfect Ten of 2011, I put together the 10 most significant MMO stories of the year. Ten seems like an awfully small number for such a great big field, so I had the rest of the staff members chime in with their nominations just to make sure I wasn't too off-base with any of these.

It was a whopper of a year, and Massively was there for all of it -- the ups, the downs, the queues, and the QQs. It's time to wrap it up with a pretty bow and dedicate it to the history museum!

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Last month was a historic occasion for MMOs, as Dark Age of Camelot joined the exclusive Decade Club, turning 10 years old and making most of us sit down heavily and wonder, "Has it really been that long?"

It has indeed. You may wish to invest in a calendar. While it might be a tad tardy, I got the chance to interview the ever-busy Mythic about this milestone... and here it is!

The Game Archaeologist: Could you please introduce yourself, your role on the team, and the faction for which you live, breathe and sleep?

Stuart Zissu: I am Stuart Zissu, producer on Dark Age of Camelot. Asking which Realm I prefer is like asking which child is my favorite, I love them all! They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and each one brings something different to the table. With that said, my first level 50 was an Albion Enhancement Friar (before Enhancement Friars were "viable").

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Today we're going to start a new feature of this column in which we devote a week to catching up with previous Game Archaeologist spotlights and see what's going on in these classic MMOs. I figured that it was a shame to give these titles a big burst of publicity and then dump them like yesterday's news. After all, if these games' communities are still alive and kicking, and if the developers are churning out new content, then it's worth a monthly mention, don't you think?

I won't just be regurgitating news here; I'll also peek at the various official forums to see what the community is talking about and highlight discussions and debates that are of interest. Not every classic MMO will be featured every month in this space, as I'll try to rotate around to make sure they all get their fair share of mentions.

October was an interesting month for classic MMOs in that several of them produced extremely newsworthy stories that got front-page mention on Massively. On a special note, I won't be covering Asheron's Call today as we're prepping a special anniversary tribute for later this month!

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It's not every day that an MMO turns 10, and Mythic is taking full advantage of the situation to hype up Dark Age of Camelot's impressive milestone by treating players to a few goodies. First up is a highly detailed mural depicting the conflicts, races, and classes of DAoC over the years. Mythic has been revealing the mural piecemeal over the last few weeks before finally unveiling it today to the playerbase.

In addition to this poster, Mythic's unleashed Producer Stuart Zissu to film a video laying out the plans for the game's celebration. Zissu talks about the new training hubs designed to get beginners on their feet, epic encounters in the world for groups to tackle, moral arcs that give players concrete choices to make, UI changes, and the 10th anniversary t-shirt. Players logging into the game in October will also find that they'll be enjoying several bonuses to XP, crafting, and more.

You can watch Zissu get the crowds pumped up for the party after the jump!

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Dark Age of Camelot turns 10 this week, and if that doesn't make you feel old, well, you're probably not very old (and while we're at it, kindly remove yourself from our lawn). At any rate, Scott Jennings waxes nostalgic about the fantasy RvR title on his personal blog by posting a remembrance from original Mythic producer Matt Firor.

The piece is heavy on the meta details, and a read-through will give you an idea of how drastically the MMO industry has changed over the past decade. Firor talks about Mythic's scramble to meet the crushing demand for more servers and the resulting mad dash for the nearest computer retailer to purchase a dozen desktops that were quickly loaded with Linux and whipped into an ad-hoc server cluster.

There are more interesting details, of course, and you can read them all at Broken Toys.

Big changes are in the offing for Dark Age of Camelot fans. The latest Mythic dev diary sets the stage for a "return home to the Albion, Midgard and Hibernia of old." While the diary is long on pseudo in-character prose, it's short on specific details. What we've gathered, though, is that extensive revamps are in the works for many of the game's quests and more than a few of its classic adventuring locales.

Mythic's Kai Schober says that new and returning players "may be hard-pressed to find their way at the outset of their journey," and as such the devs have set about revisiting many of the game's famous towns and villages with an eye towards modernizing the progression path.

New types of quests are also in store, and the diary describes them as full of "moral deliberation" that will make for "diverse gameplay experiences as well as provide unique item rewards." Read more at the official DAoC website.

As part of Mythic's continued efforts to introduce a "New User Journey" experience that's friendly to Dark Age of Camelot beginners, the studio has turned its attention to the ever-crucial subject of gear. In a new dev diary by DJ Frazier, the dev spells out the problem: "For a new player who wanders into battlegrounds, especially ones like Thidranki or Molvik, they will often find themselves losing almost every fight they encounter, simply because they are playing against people who have had a chance to outfit themselves out in the best equipment they can find for their level range."

Because the team fears that this armor disparity proves to be a dealbreaker for many newbies, the devs are retuning the gear that players get during their leveling up process to be more durable and competitive on the battlefield.

The two main paths of leveling -- PvE questing and RvR battlegrounds -- will both offer solid picks of gear when patch 1.110 hits. Players who risk the battlegrounds will find themselves in possession of top-notch weapons and armor, whereas those who choose to quest will find themselves "90% of the way there" with their gear. Hopefully, these changes will create an environment that's much more welcoming to newcomers to DAoC.

Dark Age of Camelot is taking aim at bounties. Specifically, the development team is taking aim at the bounty points that players can now earn via quests in the game's battlegrounds. Longtime players have no doubt noticed this change, and in the latest developer diary for the game, Kai Schrober outlines the team's plans to continue improving player experience via a new set of equipment purchasable from special bounty vendors inside the battlegrounds.

The equipment available isn't meant to just be good -- it's pre-templated and should bring characters close to the apex of their abilities. The goal, obviously, is to help players feel rewarded for their participation in the game. But the diary also goes into detail about more enhancements to gameplay, including new epic events surrounding quest hubs and new teleporters to give players easy access to battlegrounds. It's a laundry list of improvements for DAoC, a clear sign that even though the past few months have been a bit quiet for the game, development hasn't abated.

Dark Age of Camelot's new website is already paying off in spades for players, as the developers are able to pass along a host of new information, concept art and previews for the populace. DAOC will be 10 years old as of next month and isn't slowing down. Exhibit A: The team is already hard at work on the 1.110 patch.

John Thronhill penned a dev diary about the patch this week; he focuses on the new Lesson Quests that will go hand-in-hand with the beginner experience. Lesson Quests are designed to help newbies get their footing in this complex setting, especially since the game continues to see a "large amount of returning and brand-new players" each month.

As players progress through Lesson Quests, they'll not only get a better understanding of how DAOC works but be rewarded with buff tokens, potions, and other nice goodies. As part of the quest chain, NPCs will demonstrate crowd control techniques and other RvR survival skills in the hopes that new players will be able to make a better contribution to the war. These tutorial quests can also be skipped if players already know the ropes.

Lesson Quests aren't the only new additions coming with 1.110, although Thornhill says we'll have to wait until another day to hear about the rest.

I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your default PvE, your same-as-PvE-except-we-have-a-naming-policy PvE-RP, and the two player vs. player variants: PvP and PvP-RP.

Those are all well and good, but... y'know... couldn't rulesets be used to create fascinating variations on these games? It turns out that yes, yes they can.

While the vanilla rulesets are the vast majority, there does exist a group of fringe rulesets that dared to walk the different patch, er, path and made versions of MMOs that are a bold and refreshing flavor. Like blue! Sometimes these new rulesets were whipped up to inject new life into an aging title, giving players a valid reason to come back and see the game from a different perspective.

In this week's Perfect Ten, we're going to check out just how wild 'n' wacky server rulesets can get!

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Last month we brought you a brief blurb about ASTA, the new fantasy MMORPG from NHN. The CryEngine3-powered title is making its official debut at this week's Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, and a six-minute video trailer has surfaced that shows off quite a bit of detail about the new title.

The clip features a lot of concept art, behind-the-scenes shots, and talking-head developer interviews as well as an English-dubbed voiceover that's heavy on lore and backstory bits. There's also a lot of commentary regarding ASTA's design philosophy as well as how the developers are striving to avoid Asian MMO cliches to create a title that is original yet familiar.

Finally, the video lets us in on the fact that ASTA is aimed at players "who are not very good at controlling the keyboard and the mouse simultaneously." Despite its apparent simplicity, ASTA will be featuring RvR and PvP mechanics designed specifically to facilitate large-scale conflict rather than small-party skirmishes or duels. Dark Age of Camelot fans may be interested to know that the ASTA video specifically references the older title as inspirational material, and you can find that and more after the cut.

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