I WISH I could write something about the game. But the fact is that I’m still here trying to make it run and despite I probably won’t have the nasty hardware issues that others are facing (here, here and here).

To begin with, the installation was confusing (beside having a pixelated splash screen with an ugly figure resembling to an evil version of Firiona Vie and reminding me that EverQuest I do not want to play). Firstly it asks me to locate my “Catacombs” install directory. Then it pretends to install itself somewhere else arbitrary. Why? Wasn’t this a “patch” to apply on the old client? And then when I try to install it somewhere else it tells me it needs at least 13 GIGABYTES! What the hell! I downloaded an installer that was 830Mb and now it asks me 13 gigabytes free (while DAoC’s client is barely above 3 Gb)? And what the fuck does it have to do with all that space?

So I go shuffling my files and delete old, unplayed games taking lots of space like The Sims 2 but then it still doesn’t want to install itself in the new directory I pointed it because, apparently, the installer cannot tell the difference between “DAoC” and “DAoC2”. Finally, after solving all these quirks, it starts to do its work. A *long* work which consists of copying the files ALREADY ON MY HD from the first directory to the second, plus adding the new files in the patch I downloaded. All time (and space) wasted for a simplistic operation that could have been done in a few minutes.

Finally, the result: the expansion is taking 600Mb on my Hard Disk. With the files uncompressed. No, really. 230Mb LESS than the installer and 12.4Gb less than the space it asked me to free.

Obviously, as I tried to connect, there was already a 13Mb patch waiting for me.

I also wonder if WoW’s 1.8 patch has more interesting new features then the whole DAoC expansion. Surely it was easier to install.

Now I go play (I hope).