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From a news posting on PVPonline. Evidently this guy is soon to be addicted.
Well, I went ahead and made a very poor choice today. I bought Dark Age of Camelot and I have a level 2 Rouge on the Gawaine server. Why is this a poor choice? Because DAoC isn't a computer game, it's a habit.
How can I tell he difference, Scott? I'm glad you asked. My friend Caesar has developed a simple two question test that will determine whether your new purchase is a game or a bad habit. Ask yourself:
1) Can you pause it? and...
2) Does it ever end?
If you can answer "yes" to both those questions, then congragtulations, you bought yourself a game and should suffer no adverse side effects. If you can't answer yes to both those questions...you just purchased a new monkey for your back.
Knowing full well what I was doing, I bought DAoC for a couple reasons: Most importantly, I would like to play something with my brother and this is the only kind of game he likes to play. Also, I hear that DAoC has learned a lot of lessons from previous fantasy RPGs and I wanted to experience them firsthand. Lastly, it has Camelot in it and I want to walk up and say "It's only a model." in game.
I've played the game for 20 minutes and I've already discovered a whole host of things that the game designers did right. It's obvious that the people designing the interface have played these games before. I'll list some here and then get back to playing.
-You can set the login screen to automatically connect you to the game as one of your characters. Just set it to log in as your current guy and skip the click, wait, click, wait process.
-The chat window is split. The top part is for game spam (talking with merchant, action descriptions, damage, etc) and the bottom half is for communications between players. This is really ingenius because you don't miss what your friend is saying because there are 20 things going on at once.
-You can reduce the alpha channel of every window and make it as transparent as you like. The whole thing, even the window borders. So you can have the chat window at 70 percent opaque so you can read text easily, but you can have your status window at 20-30 percent opaque so it doesn't block the screen.
-You don't need a person to bind you. Each town/area has a bind stone. Just walk up and bind yourself to that region. No more standing around begging other players to bind you.
-Money denominations automatically convert for you. after amassing enough copper, it automatically turns into a silver and so on. Why would they allow this? Because you can't store your money in the bank. You have to carry it all. Which means that no one can just amass a huge fortune.
-I think they solved the problem of "twinking", or having a high level character load up a low level friend with weapons he could never get on his own. Items such as armor and weapons have a level associated with them just like the enemies you fight. If you try, at say level 2, to use a sword that a level 20 fighter would use, you'll end up breaking it.
-When you first choose a server, you have to pick one of three realms to play in. Once you choose, you can't make any characters on different realms. Each realm is at war with the other that's where the Player versus Player aspect comes into DAoC. They don't allow you to make a throwaway character that you could use to spy on the enemy with.
So far, I'm seeing the same general gameplay as everquest, but with really smart thinking behind game mechanics. It looks like someone might have finally paid attention to the competition and at least tried to build a better mousetrap.
Okay, time to jump back into the role of Gasim, Saracen rouge of Albion. I need to get my fix.
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