It's pretty stable, it's got fairly decent graphics for its age (the Catacombs upgrades were fantastic!), and it's got an interesting quasi-historical base for the lore that is very appealing vs. a completely made-up fantasy world. It's got a pretty balanced PvP system. All in all, it's a pretty solid game... clunky interface and dated combat dynamics aside. I can understand why it's rated so high -- it still holds up.
While I found DAoC technically solid relative to the competition at the time I DESPISED the game as a whole. Why? The main reason is that the game was marketted with heavy emphasis on the RvR feature yet you more or less had to suffer through 50 levels of class descrimnating grinding to be competitive at it. I can see how some people would like it if they liked the EQ model and some PvP as well.
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It's pretty stable, it's got fairly decent graphics for its age (the Catacombs upgrades were fantastic!), and it's got an interesting quasi-historical base for the lore that is very appealing vs. a completely made-up fantasy world. It's got a pretty balanced PvP system. All in all, it's a pretty solid game... clunky interface and dated combat dynamics aside. I can understand why it's rated so high -- it still holds up.
I wondered the same thing as the OP.
I played the original DAoC, was there at launch. It was horrible. It stayed horrible. After 3 months, I moved on.
Now, I'd go back and start over, on their 14 day trial, but they want credit card info just to play the trial, so they
can start automatically billing you the instant that 14 day trial is over. No thanks.
This isn't to say I haven't followed developments in DAoC after those early days, I have. I just never saw
anything that made me want to pay them to endure it.
Understand, though, that every game has fans. Everquest has many fans, WoW has many many fans.
What you consider the worst, most horrible online game is someone else's nirvana. And your favorite
game is a pile of pixels in someone's recycle bin, and has been flamed, roasted, immolated on some
forum somewhere.
I played AO when it was new. My opinion was that it was horrible. Now it's F2P, so maybe I'll dig up the
old CDROM and load it up. Yeah, I've had 2 or 3 new computers since then, so AO isn't on the HD now.
There are some fun, interesting free MMOGs around. Acclaim has something interesting in 9Dragons, and
2Moons will be even more interesting. The business of MMOGs has gotten big enough that there's something
out there for everyone to love, and everyone to hate.