DAoC’s next expansion – spoilers

As every year Mythic is going to release another expansion even if noone feels the need of one (because the game needs serious attention elsewhere than adding arbitrarily more stuff). Target date is October or December as always. Let’s see what we have:

– Mounts. Probably just horses. It seems that they’ll be customizable to an extent.
– Champion Levels. Like the dreaded Master Levels (quest based), but supposedly doable with single groups and both in RvR and PvE. Five levels in total. Each level adds health, endurance, mana plus points to spend on brand new skills. Similar to the normal levelling but quest-centered.
– Champoin weapons. A last quest to deliver leet weapons with sparkling effects like if Christmas.

Obviously I’m unimpressed (even if this will probably be just a part of the content of the expansion) but also not deluded. I wasn’t expecting anything different, sadly. As I said it seems Mythic grew completely blind toward their game and this limited feature list confirms my doubts. I guess with these “Champion Levels” they are trying to anticipate WoW’s Hero system that may go live around the same period (but for free).

As a returning player I care less than zero about this stuff. What matters for the quality of the game and its health isn’t the addition of more plug-ins. DAoC has its quality and its potential in what is already in the game and that seriously needs work. If this work doesn’t happen or is delayed again, the game won’t go anywhere. This is why everything depends on what they are able to do with the live content. If they start to address more aggressively the problems, they can hope to arrive to the launch of the expansion with a solid game. If this doesn’t happen everything will simply continue to crumble.

The biggest mistake with ToA that caused the whole expansion to collapse was to plan the content without having the tools and a good base on top of which to build. So that content just become terribly frustrating and umplayable. A mix of horrible design and bad planning. The same happened for the boat system that still today it’s the most bug-ridden, jerky and unintuitive part of the whole game. Again because it was created on a system that wasn’t suitable. If Mythic doesn’t get the priorities of the game straight this won’t be anything but another clusterfuck.

On the bright side it seems there will be some work on the guild system as part of the live content. They’ll probably add a dedicated UI for it and carryable banners to provide bonuses in PvP as previously hinted (bah, another of my ideas fleeing).

But again this won’t add anything if the core problems will keep getting ignored and dismissed.

(I also suggest Mythic to give at glance to one of Darniaq’s ideas if they are searching for inspiration that doesn’t suck)

EDIT: Official spoilers were released on the European website.

EDIT-2: Follow-up here.

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