Category Archives: Dark Age of Camelot

Alas, Camelot

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Mid-week, I watched as Camelot Unchained’s kickstarter neared its goal of $2 million. Seeing as how the man Jacobs had already brought in $3 million contingent, I had a feeling that somehow the kickstarter would not fail. Was Camelot Unchained a sure thing? Heck no, and by appearances it got through by the skin of its teeth.

I am pretty relieved that it got through the finish line, but this was not best game to lay across as the poster boy to anti-publisher’d MMOs. It’s niche, and unlike say the next Jim Jarmusch film, significant effort has to go in to the game to get back enjoyment. (Okay, so significant effort sometimes has to be put in to understanding a Jarmusch film too, but at least you only lose an hour or two.) I do not think Camelot Unchained is going to be a very casual-friendly popcorn MMO, which in my conjecturish opinion many Dark Age of Camelot players have grown to love.

One article at onrpg.com had fellow blogger Spinks up in arms. I tend to agree that the article was filled with too much hyperbole while ignoring plenty of non-AAA MMOs that have thrived (e.g., all of onrpg.com’s site). The developers of Storybricks replied that onrpg.com had the right idea (perhaps wrong words?). Camelot Unchained’s kickstart will make it a smidge easier for any MMO developer to get funding. However, it is really hard to back an indulgent cause while not being interested in the luxury product.

I am glad that it was a success, but whether it was or not, now it is back to silence. It’s going to be 2 years until Camelot Unchained is going to make those kinds of waves again, and it might be 4-5 before there is any noticeable ripple effect in the world of MMO development. Congrats to the City State team. I’ll be looking forward to their future developments.

–Ravious

Camelot Unchained Kickstarter

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I couldn’t think of a clever title. Anyway, Mark Jacobs and City State Entertainment need a cool $2 million to jump start a counter-revolutionary MMO. Camelot Unchained hearkens back to those glorious days when Dark Ages of Camelot was the place to be for brutal PvP.

I’ve already said this, but I have to say it again. This might be the first Chipotle MMO. Every mechanic is made to feed the beast that is Realm vs. Realm combat. This means fighting other players, fighting against (NPC-defended) objectives, and crafting to help the realm’s war machine. There will be no fat to appease players that don’t want to RvR.

I find it kind of ironic that the possible funding of Camelot Unchained could mean that the MMO genre is more than capable of birthing this niche MMO. The irony lies largely in that Mark Jacobs’  blog is “Online Games Are a Niche Market.” $2,000,000 for a niche of a niche? I like to think that perhaps online games have outgrown their niche status.

Back to the kickstarter. There are a lot of reward tiers for Camelot Unchained. $5 for people that don’t like RvR but want to see more focused MMOs. $25 gets backers the game at the bleached bones reward level, and it goes up from there. The estimated launch for Camelot Unchained seems to be about 2015. If they don’t reach $2 million, it looks like there might be no Camelot Unchained.

I am betting that there will be plenty of Camelot Unchained features and interviews this month to keep the kickstarter in the limelight. I hope it succeeds. The more niches in our niche the better.

–Ravious

Wild Thoughts Unchained

Camelot Unchained

A Mark Jacobs appears! I have plenty of mixed emotions. He’s been a role model for me for reasons I’d rather keep to myself. He also got me and every other blogger riled up for an MMO that ended up not really working in the end. There are a lot of other reasons I want him to make more waves in the MMO business and just as many reasons to see him go away. My hope is that he is now humbled and right-minded…. And hungry to make a damn good MMO.

I want this Chipotle MMO. This mirror world Dark Age of Camelot. With Darkfall floundering around, there is plenty of room for a strong, fantasy-based RvR game to make its mark. Yet that room is beginning to fill. The biggest competitors are going to be Guild Wars 2, which is currently having some WvW growing pains, Pathfinder Online, which seems more EVE corp. v. corp. and could vaporize at any time, and The Elder Scrolls Online, which has another Dark Age of Camelot dev at the helm. In 1-2 years, who is to say what will happen?

I do want a successful MMO to have tiered subscription options. I do want crafting to be a huge fuel for PvP. And, I want one crown jewel to rule. ‘Everything owes allegiance to RvR’ is exactly the right way to make this game. That’s how Camelot Unchained is going to differentiate itself from the pack.

Pathfinder Online kickstarted the process with nearly 110% funding, and I hope Camelot Unchained can turn memories of Dark Age of Camelot in to cash for its own Kickstarter coming next month. Theoretically, many Dark Age fans have grown up and make some decent money now. Of course that also means less time for MMOs, or they are still applying salve to the Warhammer Online burn.

WildStar’d

Carbine Studios tells people they are ready to rumble in 2013. Syp is excited too. I get the feeling that WildStar is MMO soda-pop in the best possible way. Since my thoughts are unchained here too, I think it will be lots of fun in a light way. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are deep, deep things… like a competitive 40-man raid that evolves or player housing with PvP. Just the feeling I get is that this is going to be a great game for jumping in, experiencing something fun, and jumping out.

Its primetime competitor, The Elder Scrolls Online, seems more-of-the-same in conventional MMO ways. WildStar feels fresher. Their information release so far feels like Star Wars The Old Republic vs. Guild Wars 2 all over again. Star Wars was cinematics and pretty scenes. Guild Wars 2 was gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. It’s the same thing here. The Elder Scrolls Online is talking about lore and history, and WildStar is showing off paths, telegraphing, and UI. Maybe it’s a small thing, but I feel like I know more about how WildStar is going to play than The Elder Scrolls Online, even though both have been in development at least 5 years…. And both want to be the MMO of 2013.

And, Kill Ten Rats will know more. Zubon and I are heading for Arkship 2013! We’re going to have a lot to tell you, and unfortunately some things that will be bound by NDA. Either way I’m sure between the two of us, you, valiant reader, will get a well-rounded opinion on WildStar. If you have questions you’d like us to ask, feel free to put them below. Either Zubon or I will likely do another question gathering post after all the dust has settled from press demo and interviews have come about this week (and early next?).

–Ravious

On the Same Team

There were two feelings I really liked when trying the GW2 beta. The first is the playground between the sandbox and the theme park. The second, and I have not felt this for a long time in an MMO or even most team-based games, is that the players were all on the same team.

If the design is working as intended,* everyone on the same server is on the same team. If someone is fighting, you should help him. There is no kill-stealing. If someone is on the ground, you should rez him. You’ll get experience points and achievement progress, and then there’s someone else around to help you with the event.

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Engi Census

Playing the Steam free game of the weekend, I have come to wonder: how many games have an Engineer that builds a turret; how many games have an Engineer that does not build a turret; and how many games have a non-Engineer that builds a turret. (I think I will avoid counting Warhammer Online’s Magus and units/classes that “summon” rather than “build.” I’m unclear whether the Raven builds, summons, or do we count “deploy”?) Was there some first game that set the standard that Engineer = build a sentry gun? It feels like engineers and self-directed turrets have become a standard game item, but perhaps exploring some examples will reverse this. I keep finding near-hits, where perhaps they consciously avoided calling the turret-builder an Engineer in recent games. I wonder if non-builder Engineers are also intentional aversions? Inventory below the break, please contribute in the comments.

Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes. Continue reading →

Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot

My wife still bears a grudge against Dark Age of Camelot. That’s fair. I started playing around the time we moved in together, and I played it a lot.

After college, my group of friends spread across many time zones. At various times we had people in California, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Japan, Australia, China, and the Philippines. We decided to schedule online gaming a few times a week, plus however often we could catch each other in-game. Our attempts at taking a pen-and-paper game online were not entirely enjoyable (software for that has come a ways, with voice chat these days if nothing else), and many of us were excited about Dark Age of Camelot, so we joined Albion.

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New Content Is Shared Content

Fantasy MMOs tend to start with race-based newbie zones and meet up some number of levels in, thinning to a smaller number of high-level areas before expanding again at the cap (discussed previously). Games with strictly divided PvP factions get a more strongly separated version of this, as you can send your night elf to play with your dwarf friend but not your orc friend. Some games will bring everyone together sooner, others will create several paths to the level cap. Please, make an alt while we work on the expansion.

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

Most Typical Member

Prototype theory holds that we conceptualize through categories in which some members are more central than others. If I ask you to name a piece of furniture, you are quite likely to come back with “chair,” “table,” or “sofa”; if you immediately thought “armoire” or “ottoman,” you are weird; if you went with “Charles, or Susan if it’s a girl,” you are very weird. If you asked an American for the best example of a bird, the most bird-like bird around, you will get far more robins than penguins and almost no emus.

The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.

We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.

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Support

For those of us inclined to do so, the healer is a great role. Yes, it has problems in PUGs when three different people pull then blame the healer, but it is rewarding to see your friends made into boundless engines of destruction and victory.

Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.

As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.

This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.

The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.

: Zubon

Early, Middle, Late

For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading →