As of the New Year, Mythic will devote both its entire DAoC teams to subscription based content (just like Foundations) for at least the next quarter or more. We will be reintegrating the teams with one mission, to take DAoC to the next level and in a way that all of our customers can support. The DAoC Team will be focusing on new content (the RvR expansion which you will be hearing a lot more about starting this week), new features and updating and redoing the existing areas of DAoC. Additionally, we will continue to work on any issues that are currently associated with ToA encounters and of course, any new issues that might arise based on that expansion pack. For those skeptics who will simply say that “Mythic is cutting out the expansion team and putting them on Imperator,” that is not the case. Mythic currently has two full teams working on DAoC and all of those people will be still working on DAoC next year; they will just be working on DAoC LIVE content. I made a promise last year about DAoC’s future and not only are we keeping the promise, we are expanding on it. Never before in the short history of MMORPGs has any company followed this path (at least not with a team this size). We are proud to make this commitment to our players and only once we are totally satisfied with the state of the game, will some of us go back to work on a new expansion pack. Looking forward, selling a couple of hundred thousand boxes (per expansion pack) is great but that shouldn’t be our guiding star. The star should be our commitment to making DAoC the best MMORPG on the market, and we are showing our commitment to our game and to our players by this action.

So, what does this mean to the average player? It means we will be able to devote more developers to our RvR expansion and so we will be able to put in more additional features than we originally planned. It means that there are going to be development resources available to improve the game visually and through updating of older areas, that wouldn’t have been available otherwise. It means a continuing commitment to adding features to DAoC that wouldn’t have been added until after our next retail expansion or beyond. It means that 100% of the developers’ time will be spent on improving the game for players today and not waiting until the retail expansion.