I got stuck in the last step of the “baron” quest (The Race to King’s Crossing) because I wrongly clicked and an object and destroyed it. So I miss the letter I have to return to continue and THERE IS NO OTHER WAY to get it back (because DAoC design is that great). I have no other choice than filing an appeal and wait four hours that it gets answered.

I did that. Wrote down the quest, the object I need and started to wait. Then, after an hour, my appeal is deleted without even a notice:

Thank you very much. I tried to file another but they just delete it without telling me anything.

We were saying not long ago that devs should pass some time with the support guys to learn from the game. I wonder if the CSR guys should spend some time as players to figure out how what type of service they are offering and what’s wrong with it.

I’m lucky that in four years this was only the third appeal I sent.

EDIT: I have to rectify:

I squeal too much too quickly :)

I pass time photographing stuff like a japanese tourist and the result was that my group was at the end of the task when I still was at the beginning. So now I go solo…

This time more environmental pictures, those I like more.

Stony DAoC. I simply love these textures. It feels almost if I can touch the cold stones. If a game can give me these feelings, I’m happy.

(screenshots)

I passed some time to port over DR functions and maps on my “tiny” UI remix. As publicized:

—
This is my own simple mod. It is based on the standard “Midgard” UI look that was released with ToA. The goal is to add all the new features (all dungeon maps, new windows, tooltips etc..), show on screen all the informations that can be useful and still maintain a “clear” look that keeps the UI as simple as possible without cluttering the screen.

I consider this a “light” UI because it’s directly based off the standard one, just reorganized to be more practical and usable, saving space where possible.

This last version is updated to the 1.80 patch and should have full support to Darkness Rising.

NOTE: This UI fits best at 1024×768 (not easily readable at super-high resolutions) and is tailored for the Classic servers. All the references to ToA were cut.

A simple screenshot from the previous version is here:
http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/storeroom/daoc-repository/tinymid.gif

It has map support to DR and all the dungeons, excluded the task ones. Most of the maps and features come from random UIs, Derida in particular. So thanks to the original creators, I just remixed some ingredients to have a simpler UI with the functions I needed without the added disorder.

You can go here to download the .zip
http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/daoc-repository

The expansion is rather unpolished and clunky in most parts. It’s kind of obvious that it was rushed out even if Mythic has never been known for its attention to the detail. Despite my gripes surpass right now the good parts, there are a few touches here and there that are outstanding and show what Mythic is able to do if put in the proper conditions and if there was more support for this game.

The rough highs and lows in the expansion show how they ran out of time and resources as Mythic’s interest move to new projects, sacrificing DAoC and its ambition. In particular the art assets show this ascending and descending quality and also show the difference from all the attentive work that was put in Catacombs and the lack of time, instead, about this last product (and *lots* of reused assets everywhere). The new art assets in the city of Camelot in particular are rather disappointing (missplaced textures, holes, badly joined polygons, lightmaps completely broken, fill-in textures, some uncomplete details and more, but i’m picky. I’ll show screenshots later.) while some of the new character models used for NPCs are mindblowing (even if rare). They are absolutely awesome and already showing an impressive difference in quality even from the models added in Catacombs less than a year ago (which I didn’t like, by the way, and still bugged and unpolished). If you press the “read more” link you can see some examples showing the king of Camelot (I actually hoped he was sitting as the Midgard’s king but I guess they ran out of time to do the proper animations) and one of the NPCs used in an instance which could surpass the photorealism of Half Life 2 and the upcoming Oblivion even at close distance.

Congratulations again to whoever textured and modeled them, that’s some quality work. With “Catacombs” they showed an unmatched art quality with the environments and the textures (that in this last exp are a bit deluding), instead with this expansion they show what they could be able to do even with the models.

Beside the art, there is a lot more I want to talk about. Some of the quests are pretty interesting and curious even if they always leave you wanting some more and digging a bit deeper in the interaction. Despite it’s not a big expansion and despite it could have even been pushed out as a “free expansion” if we were a few years ago, it shows interesting elements and some creativity. So lots of “pros” and “cons” as it always happen with this game :)

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).

For those searching it, there’s already a direct link to the expansion patcher. You can dig here to find it:
http://mythic.fileburst.com/downloads/

I’m already at 27% with Bittorrent and my powerful dialup, so I’m not going to restart from zero even if I probably could finish faster.

They are keeping changing the file name, that’s why I said you’ll have to hunt for it. Right now the name is:
figure_this_name_out_h4x0rz_catacombs_to_darkness_setup.exe

If you are unsure about the validity of the file you could always download a chunk and then load it in bittorrent to verify it. The best feature of that clunky program is that it verifies and repair the files automatically.

EDIT: Both links died long ago. There’s also a rumor about WoW patch being released and I still have to download Rag Doll Kung Fu. Too much goodies these days…