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Evil Avatar has posted a Re-View Of Dark Age of Camelot (a closer look at the game after it has been published for some time now). Quite interesting read. Here's something from it for you:
A large part of the problem is that Midgard, Hibernia, and Albion do not feel like fully fleshed worlds. They lack depth, and feel often like one series of incidental encounters with monsters in level range X-Y after another. I don’t like to go around basing a game’s value on comparisons with other games in the same genre, but we’ve seen world and dungeon building done better and with more enthusiasm than this. This is supposed to be a fantasy world, and yet everywhere I go I’m assaulted with the banal. I get no more interesting view wandering through Myrkwood Forest or Camelot Hills than I might expect in a well tended park in Akron, Ohio (this exaggeration is predicated on the assumption that Akron has well tended parks). Where is the ambiance, the flavor of the world, sweeping deserts, mystical and unfamiliar ruins (Stonehenge? If it’s in a brochure I can order from a travel agency, it doesn’t really count), expansive atmospheric dungeons, undead cities, wizard towers, places that I hesitate to approach and enter with a sense of wonder? Even places like Muspelheim in northern Midgard hint at this kind of immersion and then fall short when you realize the lava is as caustic as Johnson and Johnson’s No More Tears Shampoo and that the castle protected by those giants isn’t accessible.
While Dark Age of Camelot has lots of interesting bells and whistles - I will get to the good things in time, I promise - to simplify, streamline, and enhance the gaming experience, the foundation of that experience is tragically lacking. The equipment, both dropped and crafted, are forgettable and little more than variations on a theme. Spellcasting becomes quickly boring, and by level 10 most mages essentially have the complete spell set they will use for the next 40 levels only enhancing in magnitude as time passes. There is no real sense of being in the game with anyone else unless you’re a member of an active guild, and even then one feels isolated from a sense of general community by the lack of expanded chat options. The quest system is actually quite good, but only through the first third of the game, and then suddenly one is thrust upon the treadmill de leveling with no real impetus to move forward save RvR. |
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DAoC Re-View at Evil Avatar
