No surprises. DAoC follows a quite predictable schedule since it is repeated each year with minimal changes, so we are at the moment of the year when the first details about the upcoming expansion start to be disclosed and the moment when I start to be deluded.
Well, we don’t have much right now:
A note for Camelot fans who cringe at having to read all this: Dark Age of Camelot is great, doing fine, they’re working on an expansion, and they plan on working with you to keep making the game better, more exciting, and more fun to play. There’s a new quest system in the works, a new race and class coming, and most importantly, a new form of RvR gameplay. And their producer said outright, flat out, that Camelot is their flagship product and they plan to keep improving it for years. You guys will have plenty to play for years to come.
Now DAoC is an odd game because each time they announce an expansion you aren’t there starting to marvel and counting days. Instead you just hope they don’t fuck everything up and it’s exactly where my mind goes when I think to “a new form of RvR”. Instanced, I’d add.
I’m not sure my account will survive till the expansion. There are rumors, somewhat confirmed by an in-game survey, that Mythic is thinking about experimenting with voice chat services. If it is going to be a feature for Warhammer they could start to test it in DAoC, probably offering it as a “feature” bundled with the expansion.
As I often wrote I hate the voice chat and DAoC has been one of the very few games where it is not necessary and not even so widespread outside the ganking groups (which I despise as well). You could always say, “so don’t use it”. The point is that when you support it directly, it becomes mandatory for everyone. So you have to swallow it. And this is only the tip of the iceberg since Mythic keeps moving the game in directions I don’t like.
I already log in rarely, and when I do I never manage to get a group. So not only my motivation is very low (and my faith in Mythic below the ground), but I cannot play even when I want. Instanced RvR and voice chat are good enough reasons to quit.
They keep trying something else while what they have already is still crippled despite having still a good potentail. I’d like to see significant changes to the current RvR, not another lame implementation of ideas leeched from WoW.
On the servers the players are decreasing (even if this is the time of the year when every game tends to lose some activity), confirming what I was thinking: it’s not with the class changes that you keep people or attract new players. Class changes and balance tweaks are a “given”. They don’t “add value” to a game nor increase its appeal. Put in a simple way, they are “jumps in the place”. They don’t move forward nor backwards if they don’t go totally wrong. I repeat that DAoC needs to “wake up” its playerbase and start to be more aggressive toward the competition. The game has qualities that need to be brought up, but I think they are destined to remain dormant forever.
A new class? Yawn. A new race? Yawn. A new quest system? *rise eyebrow* It will be surely some automated shit. I bet. With every new expansion they don’t add a new piece. They remove it, and right now DAoC has not much left. PvE is completely dead. RvR is next on the list (and already progressing well).
I think at the core there’s one main issue. Mythic isn’t anymore able to “tune in” with the desire of the players. To suggest them something they want to hear and to play. So the disaffection. This is a broken record for me. But I continue to believe that leeching the “new” Warhammer community is a trick that won’t last long. The problem is at Mythic, it isn’t in DAoC.
Every expansion is a chance and now they are losing the train. But, hey, it was at arm’s range.