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Did anyone not like DAoC?
Xemous
Member Posts: 255
If you think about it, DAoC was one of the few (if only) MMORPGS to rarely ever get bashed. The game was so original and fresh in design and gameplay. I started my account last month, and am having a blast, and this game is 8 years old! The game is still going strong after such a long time, and still manages to capture my attention after all these years. And also, no game that has been released can top its PvP, what daoc is notorious for. I have played every MMO there is, and have regreted a lot of them (50$ wasted many times, never buying into hype again).
Early release WoW, and DAoC seemed to me the best MMO's the market had to offer. All I see nowadays, is very linear MMO's with hardly any custimization and diversity. DAoC has 37 clsases, thats not something you see in todays MMO's. The only mmo I know that had anywhere near that was EQ..
My question is, did anyone not like DAoC? And if so, why?
Comments
DAoC was a good game but I hated it as I lived i Europe. As for Bashing it got panned with the Atalantis expansion.
I still have fond memories of scaling the walls to steal the goblet of whatever and pegging it away form the rampaging Mithgardian Horde. rofl.
Me
I like
B,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z
:^)
Back then, if I sunk 6-18 hours into a MMORPG and I felt things were too repetitive or not interesting enough, I quit. And that's how I ended up leaving DAOC. I think I probably sunk a good 18 hours into it and felt things just weren't interesting enough to continue.
..and well, I say "back then" but really nothing's changed since then. I still quit games which are too repetitive/uninteresting at the 6-18 hour mark (Aion/Champions.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yeah, DAoC got its bashing with the Trials of Atlantis expansion, so much so they actually made some of the servers into the "Old School" ones with no ToA on them for RvR.
I'd almost be willing to bet that most who actually played DAoC are still out there trying to find another game that can hold a candle to the old boss. It's a lot like Asheron's Call, if DAoC and AC actually rebuilt (keep the exact same content - just overhaul the graphics) they would be filled to capacity for years to come. I for one wouldn't hesitate to pick my keen stealther up again and hit the frontier once more.
The worst thing they could do to the legacy of either of those games is try and build a "new and better" version for the "II". Just bring it into this decade and slap a "NEW & IMPROVED" sticker on the front of the box, that's what I feel most want from them.
(DISCLAIMER - The use of the word YOU in the above post is not directed at any one person in particular, but towards those who fall into the category itself - there is no personal attack here, neither intentional nor implied.)
Well DAOC came out on european servers about a year after its NA release, so not sure what the other poster was going on about there.
I loved the game, but left before Atlantis so have a rather rosey picture of the game I quess.
what did that X-pac do that was so bad?
Never got to play it=( I started playing mmo pretty late I guess. My first was AoC, then WoW. I tried playing it during the summer but after downloading the client it did not work. Maybe its becouse I had Windows 7 RC. Are there still people playing? I would like to try it.
One of my biggest gaming regrets is not playing this game closer to release. You just can never get that again with MMORPGs because they change so much and people move on. Not like a single player game that you can buy 3-4 years down the road when it only costs $10 in the bargain bin and have the same experience as release day. Its actually better to wait so they can patch them up and stuff.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
DAoC got plenty of bashing in the beginning, it was released with little high end content, some zones didnt even have mobs, no loot passed lvl 25 or so, plus Mythics PvE has always been very bland.
Mythic made several really bad decisions that resulted in finally sinking the game and thoughs decision where made in attempts to quell the forum goers loudest complaints, what MJ never understood was that the majority of thoughs complaints where being made by a small very vocal minority who basically didnt care about the game overall but only their own uber status.
Godz of War I call Thee
I didn't think much of it to be honest. It didn't begin to compare with EQ so far as I was concerned, but of course each to his own.
In the early days we had UO, EQ, DAoC and AC. Whichever of those games you first got into became like your first love in real life, you would never forget it and nothing else would ever quite live up to it at least in your perception. People will defend their particular first title and for some it was indeed DAoC, but not for me.
I didn't feel the PvE was that great, the RvR early on consisted of either being one-shotted by an archer from behind a tree or else he missed and you survived a couple more minutes until the server crashed. Perhaps that was just my experience in the UK but I do recall that over-powered archers and unreliable servers were both major issues in the early days. Later on an expansion drove most of the players away much as the NGE did later with SWG.
I checked it out a couple more times, the last time was when Catacombs was released, but by then the graphics were so inferior as to render the game unplayable for me. Graphics are no substitute for gameplay, but they are an important part of the immersion and therefore the addiction.
I still think the game was hugely over-rated and owed much of its success to the limited competition at the time.
People always point to ToA as the downfall of DAoC but it actually started before ToA.
The reason for the outcry on ToA was that it introduced master levels and artifacts. Master levels was basically an alternative advancement path for your characters (10 new master levels) that gained you some new abilitys (mostly RvR centric abilitys) and Artifacts were items that held some nice RvR based abilitys.
Sounds great right? Unfortunatly in order to get the 10 master levels there was a ton of PvE content that had to be hacked through. The Artifacts? Well you had to farm scrolls (three scrolls per artifact) and get a group together to take down the overly-camped Artifact holding MoB. So after spending hours farming scrolls, then camping and killing the named, you could "activate" the Artifact and begin to level it up to unlock its powers.
So pretty much the reason ToA (Thats Trials of Atlantis) got slammed was because that DAoC was mostly an RvR (PvP) game and ToA forced you to do an arseton of PvE grinding / raiding in order to keep "in-the-game"
Now I said before that the downfall actually started BEFORE ToA and the reason was Realm Abilitys. Theses were special abilitys that you got through RvR (Player killing) that improved your character. Stuff like stat improvements, abilitys, increases to baselines (Improved block / parry / crit ratings etc) Again sounds great but the thing was you could only get them in the RvR aspect of the game .. but lets be honest when playing PvE (Yes DAoC did have some PvE raids and dungeons etc) who would'ent want more block rating? or high crit ratings etc?
So the error DAoC made was making PvE players RvR in order to improve thier characters for the PvE game "THEY" wanted to play. Of course DAoC was mainly an RvR game so the forum outbursts were pretty minimal but there was discontent over this move. Forcing people to play the game your way instead of thiers causes this. When ToA realeased it was more of an uproar because your now forcing the PvP players to go PvE in order to play the game they want.
This is a mistake I commonly see games make. Cross over. If you want to add PvE rewards then make them PvE centric. You wanna add PvP rewards make them PvP centric. Cross over is generally a bad thing because it forced people to play aspects of the game they may not want to in order to stay competitive.
AoC (Age of Conan) initially released saying that it would be doing something along these lines, Heroic defence/attack stats on raid gear for raiding and PvP centric stats on PvP earned gear. I did'ent play AoC too long (Game was kinda dry to me) but I appreciated them trying to seperate PvP and PvvE in this way. Alganon is attempting to do the same by using a duel-skill system (Your character skills have different effects in PvE and PvP allowing them to balance skills based on usage rather than broad nerf / buffing) so I am keeping an eye on that one.
Honestly though its suprising to me that no game has really seperated play styles while equally supporting them to date. The Devs. that can do it and do it well will be onto a gold-mine IMO.
I hated it when I tried it in 2002.
The controls were so bad and the combat was really slow because of it. Everyone just stood still and that made combat so boring. It was like if you were in control of a giant lorry down a narrow street, just so horrible to use. On top of that the UI was nasty as well and I know the Everquest UI was bad but I hated that game when it launched to, it was so frigging dated for it's time and yet everyone looks back at it like it was amazing. I mean not just graphics but you look at the UI of other games or the combat of other games and wonder why they couldn't have done better.
For me mmorpgs didn't become playable until 2003 with Planetside, Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online. However it wasn't until WoW and there hasn't been an mmorpg since that was up to the standard of single player and multiplayer games. Thats why it was so popular and no other mmorpg has been able to compare to it. Just a shame Blizzard decided to ruin their game.
It's funny because I like the mix of PVE and PVP and tbh if an mmorpg didn't have that I would get bored very fast. Like EVE Online it has no PVE worth mentioning and the game just gets so boring because everything is so repetitive, theres no story or quests to get involved in. All they give you is Agent missions which are basically SWG Mission Terms. All I ever wanted in SWG or EVE Online is for them to add story driven content so I can progress my character that way when I'm bored of PVP or in EVEs case I need money to get involved in PVP.
A game like WoW had both amazing PVP and PVE and mixed both of them together which was amazing. Until they launched battlegrounds and ruined all that. I loved doing PVE content and being attacked and proving my skill by trying to kill them. I loved having to guard PVE hot spots for my fellow side so they wern't killed with a group of my friends. If the world had no PVE in it then it would have been so boring and I find foing instances for gear fun.
I just look at them complaints in DAOC and think what a bunch of whiners. The PVE content is something new and fun to do and if you don't like it then just get your guild mates to give you the gear.
When DAOC was popular it suffered from the exact same issues that Warhammer suffers from today.
Population imbalance and class issues.
When the game is supposed to be based on RVR and you're side can field maybe 20 and the other 300+ it means you won't be RVR'n much at all.
When you spend months to get your character to 50th then it gets nerfed it tends to make you want to quit the game and never go back.
It's funny because I like the mix of PVE and PVP and tbh if an mmorpg didn't have that I would get bored very fast. Like EVE Online it has no PVE worth mentioning and the game just gets so boring because everything is so repetitive, theres no story or quests to get involved in. All they give you is Agent missions which are basically SWG Mission Terms. All I ever wanted in SWG or EVE Online is for them to add story driven content so I can progress my character that way when I'm bored of PVP or in EVEs case I need money to get involved in PVP.
A game like WoW had both amazing PVP and PVE and mixed both of them together which was amazing. Until they launched battlegrounds and ruined all that. I loved doing PVE content and being attacked and proving my skill by trying to kill them. I loved having to guard PVE hot spots for my fellow side so they wern't killed with a group of my friends. If the world had no PVE in it then it would have been so boring and I find foing instances for gear fun.
I just look at them complaints in DAOC and think what a bunch of whiners. The PVE content is something new and fun to do and if you don't like it then just get your guild mates to give you the gear.
Ahh you appear to have missed my point.
I too like a mix of PvE and PvP. The mistake DAoC made was forcing people to do one in order to "keep up" in the other.
If you were a hard-core RvR player and wanted to spend your 2-3 hours in RvR playing you would be outgunned by the folks who'd gone to PvE and gotten thier Master levels and Artifacts. So you were forced to go PvE to stay in the game. Flip side was true with the PvE crowd. Going to the raid? You can be sure that the raid leaders prefured to have the RR5+ folks in there with the additional abilitys over the non-RR'd people.
I have nps with games mixing it up with contested zones etc. (We used to hold our keeps for weeks out of sheer pride and stubbonness) What I objected to was the forced crossover. If a person hated the RvR and never wanted to do it, instead was happy to run PvE encounters and raids, they should have been able to do that. The ToA abilitys / Artifacts should have had a direct impact on the PvE game ONLY since they were gained by PvE. Likewise the Realm abilitys which were gained only from RvR should have had an impact only on RvR .. ie Abilitys that could only be used on other players.
Mythic's mistake was making Realm abilitys (gained in RvR) applicable to the PvE game as well .. and making PvE stuff (master levels and Artifacts) have a major impact on the RvR game. Now if the Artifact MoBs and raids were in RvR zones .. I could understand it .. however ToA was all PvE .. so IMO it should have only had an effect on the PvE game.
Of course there will always be crossover to some degree. The sword you get in PvE is still gonna hurt the dude you hit with it in RvR. However the ability you gained in PvE (Master level) should have nothing to do with RvR and the ability you gained in RvR (Realm Abilitys) should have no impact on MoBs.
Just IMO.
Guess it annoyed me because by the time Realm Ranks hit (pretty early in DAoCs life) I already had 5 or 6 max level toons .. some I RvR'd on and some I PvE'd on. The realm ranks going active ment I then had to take all my PvE toons out to rank them up. ToA was an even bigger pain in the arse b/c by then I had well over a dozen max levels that I was running through damm MLs. Believe me I HATED leading 200+ people though ML's after the first few times. I would have much prefured my RvR toons to advance as I played them in RvR and my PvE toons to do likewise ... instead of the crossover.
DAOC was a step up slightly from previous MMOs when it was released, but the PvE was still painfully repetitive and one dimensional. It lacked content & balance at release. I never capped to max level because there were only so many trees I was willing to kill. And the RVR was just a zerg fest, not to mention the nightly server crashes which HURT because you died and lost EXP, which sucked. Defending a keep was pointless because it would be gone at 3am. The relics really didn't matter except that it was a symbol. The classes and overall battle system was simplistic, which no counters or ways to defned yourself. Fpr example, the only thing you could do in RvR as an Armsman was bang on a keep door for an hour. Thats it. You were mezzed, stunned and AOE'd to death otherwise. The dungeons were simple hallways, copy and pasted from realm to realm. The Dragons were boring to fight, just a big zerg. The bosses were all simple tank and spank.
I got about 4 months out of it, quiting in eventual boredom as the guild I was in fell apart and quit. Eventually, the game was just pointless and as an Armsman a total waste of time. I sure as hell wasn't going to level up again, since I knew I'd hit the same wall. DAOC was one of those, "Don't worry, it gets better at endgame kind of MMOs." That was acceptable back then. How sad when you think about it.
i did not enjoy it. Horrible horrible UI and movement. It was one of those games that really has not aged all that well.
Although to be fair it has a very nice selection of classes, the Lore was very awesome and the environment was top notch.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
DAoC has 45 classes.
yeah i coutned up all the clases on the catacombs spell list, forgot about the classes that didnt cast. Still thought there would only be like 40-42 though
Over the years, DAoC has had both its good and bad moments. When the game first released, it frankly wasn't very good. After some initial balancing patches, and especially post-SI, the game (for me) hit its peak. ToA was o.k. to me...not the game-killer as it was to some, but also nothing really that great. As others have said, the quality of PvE has never measured up to EQ in DAoC.
PvP was/is another story. NF basicially killed the game for me. I went back as recently as yesterday, and I still prefer OF.
Anyway, this post is a little muddled, much like my opinion of DAoC. Maybe more than any game I've played, it has had very discrete highs and lows relative to different eras. I.e., somethimes the game was awesome..sometimes it was awful.
ok when I played DAOC many years ago in the UK, it was a 3D game that ooozed with Lore and role play.
The Bad...
1. Impossible to solo as most mobs would bring ten of their friends, grave run...
2. Mobs of same level were near impossible to kill, unless in a group or because of point 1.
3. Leveling was painful, and then some, and there was a list for most major leveling spots, that you usually had to beg to get on.
4. Nobly Pride...God I hated that guild, bunch of stuck up Elite arrrrrses.
5. Infinite spawn rate that just prevented you from progressing in any cave.
6. Awful UI...just awful...key-binding give me a break.
The Good
1. Best Lore and role play bar none.
2. Best PVP experience if you get in a good group, or in a Zerg storming a castle, bar none.
3. Quests that test your exploration skills, and have a fantastic story as a back drop. In DAOC I read every word, in WOW I just select instant quest text, and accept.
4. Best Community bar none.
5. I don't know why, and even though the graphics are dated, I still feel the castles look very realistic, and I get totally absorbed in RVR, I played wow for many years but WOW seemed more like a cartoon to me, where DAOC seemed like the real thing.
6. Crafting again best bar none
7. Siege warfare best bar none
The reason that DAOC nearly died, is because Mythic did not adapt quickly enough to the new competition, however I started playing DAOC recently, and even though people say it has completely changed from it's original, dam good I say, I'm having more fun in DAOC now more then I ever did, the only people I ever see moaning on these forums about the good old days, are the one hit crit hunters who thankfully got nerfed, and the uber elite who don't want people pushing in on their image.
DAOC could be a fantastic game, because to be honest it was never really popular in the mainstream, and it's the loyal fans that are keeping it afloat now, if people want DAOC to be the mega hit that it should have been, then in my opinion it needs to adapt to the casual mass market, as this will increase numbers and revenue, and in the end be best for everyone.
I didn't like it when I played ( a couple years ago) mostly because it felt dated, underpopulated, and laggy. But I did see why it as been so popular in it's heyday for so long
A witty saying proves nothing.
-Voltaire
Coming from EQ, DAoC was like a breath of fresh air. It gave me a sense of purpose lacking in EQ, after all I was part of alliance that could actually make a difference to the world I played in. I remember my first time defending our frontier against the Hib hoards who had already obtained 20th level, and not minding in the least that I was going to die attacking them. it only mattered that I hurt them enough for my fellow Middies to turn the tide and send them back to the black hole from whence they came! To me the game had just the right amount of PVE, without becoming to over bearing. My one big complaint was area control spells as that took a lot of the fun out, after all who wants to stand there waiting for their turn to be ganged! I still rate DAoC as one of my favorite games along with the orginal SWG.