Dark Age of Camelot: Status Report #1
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-07-09

In the Status Report feature we bring you a short Q&A on a regular basis with people from the live team of currently active mmorpg's. It is our aim to provide you with a short overview of the changes and improvements that have been accomplished in the past few months or are still in the pipeline. Today we offer you the first installment of the Dark Age of Camelot Status Report.

Mythic: The secret of having a smooth launch is not a secret at all - just make sure that your technology works, servers are stable, the feature set is locked down and secure, and you have a lot of bandwidth. We had the unique opportunity to self-publish Camelot, so we weren't held to any particular feature set. So, if we felt a feature would jeapordize the launch, we put it off until after launch and made it a content download patch.

Honestly, I don't think we would have done much differently had we the chance to go back in time. There were lots of skill and balance problems that we should have been more aware of, but in big picture items I think we did the best we could.

Mythic: Most of the items that we've added into Camelot since launch were at least talked about during the game's initial development. Everything you list in your question was actively planned for the whole time.

MMORPGDot: Why the decision to put the latest new feature of the game (Housing) in a separate, free expansion pack?

Mythic: Because Dark Age of Camelot: Foundations (our housing expansion) is such a big download (55 megs), we made it optional. That way players who are not interested in housing don't have to wait for the download.

MMORPGDot: Is there anything you could reveal to us yet about future plans regarding DaoC?

Mythic: Our path remains the same - we'll keep making regular content patches to the game every month or so, and will try to have a retail expansion every year. Our goal is to keep doing this as long as there is a large and dedicated Camelot Fan base. We do plan on having another free expansion that starts development this summer that overhauls our Realm vs. Realm combat system. We'll release more details on this as development on that expansion continues.

MMORPGDot: Thanks for your time!