Amber Night

Sanya Weathers has a good “how I got here from there” writeup at The Escapist. Read it. It’s good.

But read it on your own damn time because that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Today is all about pining for the fjords…of Midgard and its surrounding environs. In her Escapist article, Sanya linked to one of her older articles dating back to the days when we were all waiting for the the next big thing. If you fell in love with DAoC like I did, the article, entitled Miss Tweety’s¹ Dark Age of Camelot Preview, is a great bit of nostalgia, but it’s also a fascinating peek into the MMO industry, specifically the early days of Mythic Entertainment.

So let’s hop in the wayback machine and take a look at what Mythic expected their game to look like, and compare it to what actually launched, starting with my favorite topic, dirt napping.

I asked what the major point of contention among beta testers was, and no surprise, the answer was the death penalty. The beta tester message board at the time of the visit had two major threads. One entitled “The Death Penalty is Too High!” The other entitled “The Death Penalty is NOT Too High!” There you have it folks. You really can’t build a MMOG and make everybody love you.

No, but you can piss everyone off in equal proportions, which is probably the best anyone can hope for. If I learned anything from reading the DAoC boards, it was that you knew something was seriously unbalanced when any one group of players was happy.

Back in the old-timey days, game design dogma dictated that players need harsh death penalties to make death meaningful. Players (aka the *ahem* customers) mostly disagreed. Mythic understood that there had to be something better than the sometimes crippling Everquest-style corpse runs. They designed a system where you lost some experience to death (but never below your current level), much of which you could get back by “praying” near your tombstone at the place you died. Your first death per level was practically free, with gradually increased penalties for subsequent deaths.

You could always tell the popular (and dangerous) camps by what looked like a randomly placed graveyard but was actually the site of a party (sometimes plural) or raid wipe. This was especially common in Cornwall, where newer players learned why Tomb Robbers were supposedly running away after you pulled them. About 20 yards away from the randomly placed graveyards were solo tombstones. These were almost always left by the casters who were just a little bit slow in realizing the battle was well and truly fucked up beyond all repair and had only decided to run after the last tank dropped. (Had I thought of it at the time, I’d have started a “CSI: Dartmoor” guild.)

The biggest annoyance was trying to find your own tombstone in a sea of other tombstones, especially before they fixed the client so that everyone else’s name wasn’t hovering over the hundreds of other tombstones in the area.

I disagree with the assertion that PVP combat will not need to be tested as fully once PVE combat is finished. Matt told me that Mythic is “trying to make fighting a 40th level monster exactly like fighting a 40th level player, with appropriate stats, weaponry and armor. In a way, this is how we’re testing the PVP aspects.” This is terrific, in terms of monster tuning. But players are tricky bastards, and think of all sorts of twisted things not foreseen by the most brilliant of designers.

As it turned out, PvP class balance would continue to plague Mythic and probably will until the day after the last server is turned off. The first class to be nerfed into cottage cheese were Smite Clerics (fuck I loved my Smite Cleric) and then Hunters (fuck I loved my Hunter) but just about every class in turn had some major tweak that pissed off everyone playing the class while simultaneously delighting everyone else. If anyone’s got the battle scars to prove they can manage a designed-from-the-ground-up PvP game, it’s Mythic.

[In Midgard] Water, water, everywhere. Lakes, streams, rivers all over the place, and yes, there will be boats.

Boats (remember, this was 7 months from launch) must have been among the first luxury to get the axe. Players wouldn’t see any boats for another 13 months (Shrouded Isles), and player-controlled boats were a full 2 years away (Trials of Atlantis). This didn’t prove to be much of a problem, although yeah, some boats would have made the Midgard experience a bit more pleasant. Pronounceable town names would have been nice too.

Once again, the world developers made attention to detail the phrase of the day, and anyone familiar with Scandinavian motifs and architecture will appreciate what’s been done here. At some point one wonders how many hands the artists have, because at no point is there evidence of corner cutting. You know what I mean - buildings cut and pasted, nothing changed but the scale and the colors. None of that going on. I look forward to turning my eagle eye on Hibernia, with its Celtic roots.

Of course the reason Sanya wasn’t permitted a look at Hibernia was because Hibernia was far from complete, and would remain in that condition long after launch. Buildings (mostly mushrooms—mushrooms for Christ’s sake!) cut and pasted, nothing changed but the scale and (rarely) the colors. Walking through Hibernia was like walking through a dream deferred. In some kind of Hy Brasil parallel, if you stood in just the right place at the right time of day, you could catch a ghostly glimpse of what might have been had Mythic not run out of time or money or both. Hibernians complained bitterly of the lack of distinctive content, and rightly so. For whatever reason, Hibernia never really got the attention such an intriguing setting deserved. The expansions made up for a lot of this, but the core lands remain neglected to this day.

Mythic keeps talking about their monster generator, and how it’s Different from the other contestants for your gaming dollar. So, how is it different? I asked.

The answer is deceptively simple - everything about it is dynamic. No one’s hunted a certain stretch of forest for awhile? The monsters there will give out considerably more experience until the area becomes inundated with hunters. Then the exp will drop off. Small areas can be hunted into temporary extinction, but the more people in a zone, the more monsters that will spawn. Hunting parties are thus encouraged to keep moving, keep exploring.

The xp bonus system worked out really well. The longer you camped an area, the less xp bonus each kill had. Eventually the bonus dropped to zero. The key, I believe, was that once you exhausted a camp’s xp bonus, there was always another camp within reasonable travel time. I’ve played other (newer) MMO’s where there’s pretty much one or two camps in a zone befitting your level, and it sucks if you’re not one of the two groups camping it already.

Unfortunately Mythic seemed to have contracted some kind of game design amnesia when they implemented task dungeons. I’ve ranted about this before, so I’ll spare you another tirade. Suffice to say that Mythic lost me completely after players (who had Mythic as their enablers) stopped venturing out into the world in favor of the TD-BG shuffle. With one fell swoop Mythic cut the size of their world by 90%.

At the heart of all conquest beats the motif of “What’s in it for ME?” Answer: Mythic’s planning more than just titles. Like…horses for conquering knights. Perhaps the ability to call a ship to transport your horde. Easier communication with large raiding parties, as befits a commander of an army. The possibilities include anything that might make movement and raid coordination better, faster, and easier.

followed by:

If giving their victorious warlords horses would mean delaying the game by six months, it ain’t gonna happen.

and this gem:

Oh, and they said 80% chance on the horse thing.

Much to the chagrin of the player base, Mythic rolled low and mounts didn’t make it into the game until much later. If you ever wanted to start a flame war on a DAoC board, all you had to do was mention mounts. And housing. But mostly mounts. I’m sure Sanya could go the rest of her life without ever hearing the phrase “I want a pony!” again, and still consider it a life well lived.

[Travin, the world developer] tells me that Mythic has essentially turned him and the rest of the quest team loose, with no limits. NPCs will interact with you, the player, as an individual. If you, as a young character, encounter another young “person” and interact with him, he will remember you. You will both grow and mature, and “years” later he may have something to tell you. Another player, who took no notice of the boy, will never hear a word from the man that boy has become.

If horses and boats made the short list of cuts, I’m guessing “NPC’s who remember and grow with you” topped it. DAoC never saw anything close to such a system, which is a crying shame. It certainly would have added a unique dimension to the game. So unique in fact that six years later we still have seen nothing like it in any other MMO.

Items will also interact with you. It’s a magical world - there is no reason you couldn’t encounter a weapon or a jewel that talks to you, tells jokes, or warns you of danger.

This would have been SO COOL! Forget the frickin pony, I want a sword that warns me when steenking hibbys are right around the corner, in between “a Shaman, a Friar, and a Champion walk into a bar” jokes.

Sanya ended the article with this hopeful quote from Matt Firor:

“Our team here has taken the attitude that backstory is EVERYTHING! Forget the small petty story you see in the manual! Turn your eyes away from the 120 second .AVI intro telling you how hopeless the situation is! We plan to implement our story “through” our quests (before the manual is written). You can forget about “reading” up on the game to grasp the storyline… As you progress in levels and venture further and further out into the realm, our (your) story will grow! I continue to push the angle that a player should “know” why he or she is a member of Albion, and why someone in Midgard is such a hated enemy! When the two meet on the field of battle, both should know what brought them to that point and why they dislike each other so. That is my backstory, my goal…”

I know I’m probably in the minority of MMO players, but to me the storyline is everything. If I can’t get into your story, I can’t get into your game. The Dark Age of Camelot back-story really sucked me in from the beginning. For the most part, quests were well written, and at least the first time through I read every bit of quest dialogue with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately somewhere along the way they must have either changed writers or simply decided to focus their resources elsewhere, because the post-Shrouded Isles story line was often boring, at times confusing, and became increasingly irrelevant as everything but the end-game became a mechanical grind to 50th level. Even as the storyline should have been more interesting (I mean they found freaking Atlantis already!) it seemed to become more of an afterthought.

Despite some missteps, I’ll always look back on DAoC with the most fondness. I was lucky enough to be there from from the very beginning, and the time I spent in the lands of Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia will always hold a special (possibly rose colored) place in my heart. At a time in the industry when the only way to compete against the 8 million pound gorilla is to throw vast sums of money at it (or retreat slowly into the console market), it’s nice to have been part of something made from truly inspired hearts and minds. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

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¹Also her porn name.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 5:07 am and is filed under MMOs - DAoC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.