#401: dark age of camelot
a very special entry of june gloom’s media room
dark age of camelot (2002, PC, mythic entertainment): i’ve played a lot of video games, i’ve written a lot of reviews, and covered a lot of different genres. but one that’s kind of opaque to me is the MMO. i never had the kind of history with MMOs most of my friends do —back in their heyday, both before and after world of warcraft, i was too poor to afford the $15 monthly fee, and anyway my weird fundie mother never would have allowed me to get into stuff with magic and wizards and stuff. to say nothing of still being on dialup until 2003.
so i never got into MMOs. even after i could afford the $15, i was never interested because the only game in town for a while was world of warcraft, a game i still harbor a lot of resentment for. i never got into final fantasy XIV either, largely because watching people play endgame content is the worst possible way to introduce someone to the game. (but i’ll be dragged into it soon enough!)
up until now, the closest i’ve played to an MMO is probably the original destiny, and that’s about it. recently i found out that dark age of camelot is not only still around, but still running on official servers as a free-to-play game. curious, i decided to give it a try for the List, something to round out the arthurian legend stuff i’ve been working through.
i bounced off so hard, man.
it’s pretty impenetrable by today’s standards, and while i understood some of it, a lot of it just made no sense to me. i think i got maybe two hours’ worth and i called it a day. i can’t review this. i don’t even know how. i have no background to base an opinion on. so you know what? with 400 reviews under my belt i figured it was time to do something special: i’m handing the reins over to my partner april, who played the game a bunch back in the day, and on my invitation is here to talk a little bit about dark age of camelot, its place in the wider MMO culture, and her recollections about that era.
Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) was a graphical 3D MMO released in October 2001, nestled in the middle of two major competitors: the first commercially successful 3D MMORPG, EverQuest (EQ) (March 1999), and the hugely popular and anticipated World of Warcraft (WoW) (November 2004). I was an avid player of all three.
I was lucky enough to have a tech-savvy father and gamer brother in the house, which meant we had fully capable PC computers to play all these games. I was in middle school during the time of EverQuest, and high school by the time I was introduced to DAoC. I found peers at my school that also played these games, or at least were willing to try them out with me. Here we begin to see the MMO genre’s greatest strength and arguably it’s greatest weakness: the Massive Multiplayer portion of its design. But let’s step back a bit.
Before 3D game engines got involved, “Massively Multiplayer Online” game experiences were known more as MUDs: Multi-User Dungeons. These experiences were text-based and heavily influenced by traditional role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). The influence of D&D’s systems can be seen in all three MMO’s mentioned so far: a variety of fantasy races with different stats that influence gameplay, a variety of fantasy classes that make use of unique abilities, and a game world full of adventures for the player to experience. However, unlike it’s top-down, 2D, and isometric predecessors such as Ultima Online, EverQuest offered a full 3D world with a camera perspective much more closely aligned to games like Quake. The MMORPG genre evolution was a clear combination and progression of the multi-user fantasy role-playing genre with the budding 3D graphical revolution.
[it’s interesting to note that quake was originally intended to be a sprawling fantasy RPG, the vestiges of that idea being visible in the gothic fantasy setting and the axe the player carries. -june]
So why Everquest, then DAoC, then WoW? The conventions of 3D navigation and RPG graphical user interfaces were being built before our eyes. Unlike then-current games like Quake, complex role-playing games are made of character stats, evolving equipment, trade skills, and long-term personal progression. There was just so much information that had to be communicated to the player, not just about how to play, but what to do, where to go, not to mention all that combat stuff. The opaque game design was a huge barrier to entry for many people, even if the graphics looked so much better than the existing 2D role-playing games.
Assuming you had the patience to read all the game’s text and learn it’s interface, EverQuest made some questionable design decisions. I clearly remember the moment I chose to quit EverQuest and play DAoC instead. For one, all the friends I knew that used to play Everquest no longer did, which made getting help difficult. Progression was grindy and slow overall. However, the most egregious error in EverQuest’s design was the punishment for character death (otherwise known as the major consequence for player mistakes.)
Not only would you drop all of your character’s precious inventory and equipment where you died, but you would lose experience (EXP) points, the precious resource that gave you character levels, the heart of all player progression. There was no limit on the amount of experience you could lose in a given time frame. If you died while you were scared, naked, and starving, scrambling to your corpse for your protective equipment, you would lose even more experience.
One day, I was playing as usual, killing monster after monster, “grinding” enemies that were challenging but beatable, for over eight hours. An entire work day. I had gained one level. I was fatigued and made an error as I continued to play. I pulled one too many monsters and died. When I loaded into the game at my spawn point, frustrated and ashamed, I found I had lost not just an entire level’s worth of experience, I had de-leveled. My entire day of grinding experience, gone, because of one mistake. I tried to get my body back, but I was so far away from my closest spawn point, I died again. And again. I lost another level. I backslid from level 32 to 30 that day. I quit.
A friend of mine from school rescued me from my depression. Try out Dark Age of Camelot, he said. “Join my guild. We’ll help you.” The interface was similar enough to EverQuest for me to understand. I put my spells from my spellbook on my hotbar, I could click on highlighted text to discuss topics with the NPCs (non-player characters), and the graphics looked even better than EverQuest. Any time I was confused or lost, I had my school friend or our mutual guild people to help me. I had a supportive community again. I remember them taking me out to scary areas, escorting me, helping me grind for experience. In return, I learned in-game trade skills to make gear and decorations for our guild house, which was one of many gameplay systems involving guilds. Dark Age of Camelot was the first MMO game I reached the “end” of, where I got a max-level character.
I don’t remember a single thing about the story or lore of EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot. I just remember the fond times with my guild mates, who were weird but likeable folks. Somebody was always online to chat with when I logged in to play. Ventrilo, a voice communication software, was released in 2002, and we used that to communicate via live voice rather than text. It became obvious I was the only girl on voice chat, and also incredibly young (one of the guild officers was named Dirtyoldman Cherrypicker and admitted he was at least 60 years old,) but they treated me with respect nevertheless. Unfortunately, the lack of engaging story and end-game content got me bored of Dark Age of Camelot. The playerbase of DAoC is split into three warring factions: Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard. The game boasted — and delivered — massive battles between these three factions. I am not a competitive person, and the PvP combat of DAoC didn’t interest me.
Then, another game I played, Warcraft I, II, and most recently III, was coming out with an MMO! Or, more accurately, Blizzard was building an MMO in the Warcraft universe. A game with cutting edge graphics, juicy interface design, and a real STORY! I was so pumped. Blizzard was in its prime and had a reputation of building excellent games, like those of Warcraft III, Starcraft, and Diablo II. I got into the closed and open betas as soon as I could. I ended up playing WoW for over 10 years (I have the statue to prove it,) but that’s another story.
You might notice one notable MMO that’s missing from this timeline… Final Fantasy XI, released in 2002, wedged in between DAoC and WoW. I did take a brief time to play FF11 on its release. FF11 had, by far, the most gorgeous graphics: smooth-skinned buff elves (excuse me, “Elvaan”), pudgy-cheeked Tarutaru, and dexterous kitty-girls, the Mithra. Moogles and Chocobos were everywhere. However, FF11 made a fatal flaw that immediately made me quit. Can you guess what it was? That’s right, experience loss upon character death. After level 10, the kid gloves were off. Experience was lost upon death, experience gain dropped off, teamwork/groups were absolutely required to fight anything worth your time, and woe is you if you attempted to strike out on your own. You’d get wrecked by a level 11 sentient radish.
After my depressing experience without a strong community in EverQuest, I could understand the game design approach of making it a hard requirement to be in a group. MMOs succeed when there is a community that helps fill in the gaps of poor tutorial design, interface design, and a lack of new content. However, if I could guess the most successful part about WoW’s game design within this timeline, it was the decision to make solo-play viable.
Sure, there were “required” group quests every so often in WoW’s story and progression… but you could easily skip them and come back to them when you overpowered the content. You never felt forced to be in a group, for protection or progression. Death barely cost you anything. You were a ghost after dying, effectively making the player immortal during the “corpse run,” and if you couldn’t or didn’t want to return to your body, you could pay a small fee in in-game currency, represented as item durability, to pop back into reality. The game design was kinder to the player overall.
So, while DAoC had a rich community, FF11 and EverQuest punished you severely for not having one, and WoW gave up the need for it. Even now, when logging into DAoC on a new character in preparation for writing this, the first person I ran into cast buffs on me and sent me a whisper, “Why no guild?” And you can directly see the lessons learned from FF11 in its successor, Final Fantasy XIV, which appears to be outlasting WoW (as of at least June 2021.)
so there you have it — dark age of camelot was in many ways an answer to the flaws of everquest. it was a wild west in those days, when a lot of things we take for granted now were just being invented, but some people still have nostalgia for that era.
which is probably why DAoC lead designer mark jacobs has popped up with a spiritual successor titled camelot unchained, which promises a revival of the realm vs realm structure of dark age of camelot — assuming it can get past its financial woes and other controversies.
-june❤
big thanks to april for helping me write this.
