Dark Age of Camelot

Originally posted by logangregor

Sorta bugs me that most of you dont even own the game, youve played a bit of beta and you think you can make a review.

Its not like WoW

Its not like DAOC

Its like WARHAMMER

And for whatever nub that thought WARs graphics were SLIGHTLY better.
Your either A-Blind or B-Blind. Warhammer has great graphics.
Not cartoony and not too realistic.

For a game that hasnt been released for very long there arent any game breaking bugs atm.

This really frustrates me. Because a lot of WoW noobs or MMO noobs in general will call any new game a WoW clone, it has now come to a point that if you say ANYTHING relates very closely to WoW then you are one of those noobs. Let's not be ridiculous. Go play WAR and compare it to WoW and you'll find a LOT of similarities.  It's not just minor things, the game FEELS like WoW in a LOT of ways when I play it.   I won't cover all of the similarities here since I've done it before, so I'll just leave it at that.

As a DAoC vet I'll tell you that I had to force myself to try and enjoy Warhammer. I would play it and be extremely bored with the watered down and dull combat and the constant BG grind. Ya, BG. Scenario is just a fancy word. I would probably rate it one of the worst game's this year that I have played, and that's no joke. I had such a god awful BORING time playing this game that it was ridiculous. Mythic disappointed me. Give us fucking Origins or do the world a favor and burn your company to the ground.

 Too many instances, too many scenarios, not set in the British Isles, and not enough RvR. 

Originally posted by SignusM

 Too many instances, too many scenarios, not set in the British Isles, and not enough RvR. 

Hmm... you must have been an alb *spit*

If the game ever comes back to what it used to be or Origins comes along I will raid your king Arthur homeland with my berzerker or runemaster!

I wanted to like Warhammer Online. I tried to but I came away from it being bored. The thing that kills it for me are the scenarios. Which really are closer to WoW's battlegrounds then DAoC's tiered RvR battlegrounds. They take far to many people out of the normal game world. Which as a results effects the population for the RvR areas and public quest. It spreads the player base out to much.

I didn't like that all the talk about each class being different turned out to be like. You can see the matches on the other side (granted it might not be a Empire to Chaos match but it's there). Only slight tweaks at the end. However even with the mastery system (Which I don't think actually works.) there isn't that much of a difference. The delay in combat was annoying as well. Someone else mentioned it earlier. I didn't like doing an ability only to go through the motions and it not actually work.

Experience at the beginning needs to be addressed. It comes at you far to easily so that when you do finally end the next tier by pure comparison it's as if you drop to a slow crawl. The drop off is to big.

However population and the affect scenarios have on the game is what made me leave in the end. I was tired of playing alone. I wanted to do Public Quest but I could only do stage 1 by myself as there was no one else around. Open RvR only happen a few times and when it happens it's very unbalanced at times either on your side or the other due to people being in scenarios.

Certain things in WAR definately outshine DAoC (and we played it for over four years).

Scenarios beat BG hands down. Open RvR which I have done at rank 5. Better graphics, much improved questing. Public quests, and Tomb of War. Oh and RvR you don't die in two seconds (having never been able to take at least one swing at the bad guys).

DAoC definately has more to it. More classes, more zones, more epic; but let be fair, WAR is barely a toddler at the moment. The differernt pairing zones spread players out a bit for PvE in WAR. WAR classes are good, but on the whole I preferred the complexity of DAoC (if fairness, maybe WAR has just presented the complexity in a more understandable manner rather than dumbing down). There has been a degree of criticism that the high end content lack polish (compaired to the low tiers stuff), and would suspect that there could well be a degree of truth in that. The moral of the story is never to level too quick in a new game :)

Where WAR wins (IMHO) is that having a (relatively) blank canvas, they have design classes that work well against each other. Take stealth, imagine the scream from DAoC stealth class if their ability was on a timer :) This added to being thrown into the deep end and killing the "bad" guys right from the start (rather than various bugs, animal, and lowly skellies) make WAR a better experince, at least to start.

Obviously, the community has yet to settle down, but there are signs (at least on the Role play server) that mature guilds and allience are out there.

Graphics and sound are better in WAR (but you would expect that). Should you play it? Hell yes, take a holiday from DAoC, even if you don't emigrate, you will enjoy it I'm sure.

Originally posted by Effect

I wanted to like Warhammer Online. I tried to but I came away from it being bored. The thing that kills it for me are the scenarios. Which really are closer to WoW's battlegrounds then DAoC's tiered RvR battlegrounds. They take far to many people out of the normal game world. Which as a results effects the population for the RvR areas and public quest. It spreads the player base out to much.

I didn't like that all the talk about each class being different turned out to be like. You can see the matches on the other side (granted it might not be a Empire to Chaos match but it's there). Only slight tweaks at the end. However even with the mastery system (Which I don't think actually works.) there isn't that much of a difference. The delay in combat was annoying as well. Someone else mentioned it earlier. I didn't like doing an ability only to go through the motions and it not actually work.

Experience at the beginning needs to be addressed. It comes at you far to easily so that when you do finally end the next tier by pure comparison it's as if you drop to a slow crawl. The drop off is to big.

However population and the affect scenarios have on the game is what made me leave in the end. I was tired of playing alone. I wanted to do Public Quest but I could only do stage 1 by myself as there was no one else around. Open RvR only happen a few times and when it happens it's very unbalanced at times either on your side or the other due to people being in scenarios.

Yeah, I agree with these sentiments. The world feels so damn empty because everyone is in scenarios. BG victories in Dark Age meant something, because at the very least you kept control of the keep. In WAR it's just like WoW with a crappier combat system. The energy system is also a massive failure. It basically meant there had to be a cap on burst healing and damage, making fights feel like even more of a grind. Combine this with the solo centric PvE and characters lacked that defining quality they had in old MMOs. PQs were nice, but the total lack of dungeons and people kills the game. I won't even go into the total lack of meaningful character progression. I got to tier 3 before I asked myself, why am I playing this?

Originally posted by Illius

Originally posted by SignusM

 Too many instances, too many scenarios, not set in the British Isles, and not enough RvR. 

Hmm... you must have been an alb *spit*

If the game ever comes back to what it used to be or Origins comes along I will raid your king Arthur homeland with my berzerker or runemaster!

British Isles includes Ireland :P Only outlier is Scandanavia, but no one liked Midgard. 

I'd still play DAOC if there we're enough people playing it! Thats enough to compare?

Graphics: WAR wins hand down, if you have a good graphics card that allows you to run it on high res with 8x AA and all the other bells and whistles. Really beautiful looking game.

Gameplay: Well, WAR is more evolved and I appreciate that you can get groups fairly easy (in theory, anyway). Scenarios are fun, for a while. BUt many people seem to be stuck in the "need to level up asap" mentality which really hurts the game, imho. Open RVR is fun in both games, tho DAoC seemed to have more features (like destroyable keeps).

Combat: DAoC wins, hands down. Nothing like running around in a fg with speed, fully buffed and suddenly spotting an enemy group coming from the left... real adrenaline rush. Also, the general mechanics in DAoC felt more mature. On the downside, DAoC had no collision detection - which I think adds a little to the complexity of a fight.

Community: Hard to say, really depends on the server. DAoC only has very few people left playing and always had a very elitist mentalit