I played Daoc from beta then from retail i was the second guy on Hib excal server to 50 ( hehe just had to say that)
I also agree with the 2 comments here one was that TOA was the straw the broke the camel and i wish all the wow first time players would understand that there was a great mmo called Daoc
I have played only mmo's since UO then Asherons Call and then to many to list here but Daoc remains my fav to this day
The players back then made the game special that included the ppl you played with and against
Yes, DAoC really was one of the best games Ive ever played. Too bad the controls and graphics are outdated nowadays.
But for the article. Its true that DAoC-PvP is run by "elite" players, but these people mostly play for YEARS now. They got their gear, they got the RealmRank, they know how to play their class.
Would you go and do Arena in WoW with a guy who just reached lvl 80 and plays for the first time or comes and with S2 and youre in S9 ? Well, I know that ALL games have these problems. I got to say I always enjoyed the community of DAoC, it was way better than communities in other games.
To the PVE aspect. Yes, its less competitive now...WAY less, because all those crybabies complained and they nerfed all the encounters to the ground ( or buffed classes without knowing what it would cause - 2-4 People doing Avalon CIty Dragon ? ;D )
All the PVE content wasnt really instanced either, which was a great + in my opinion. I mean, people killed golestandt, so you had to wait a few days, because it was NOT instanced and free for all.
I could write a whole othe article, saying what was SO good in DAoC in the old times.. but im not going to :P
I hope there will be a DAoC 2 ... I hadn't lost my hope for Planetside 2 either and it got fulfilled
By far the best MMO i ever played, and i have played too many to list. I played it on and off, (mostly on) for 9 years. The 3 realm pvp made this game great.
If anything contributed to the games decline, besides the massive pve grind of toa, which aside from mls was imo an awesome expansion, was the diluting of pvp with things like battlegrounds and the labyrinth. New Frontiers wasn't as good as old frontiers, but it would have been ok if they had made new frontiers every 2 or 3 years like i had hoped they would.
Still a really fun game, even as old as it is, if i was going to play any of the exsisting games that are currently available, Daoc would be it. Just thinking about it is kinda making me wanna play lol.
3- realms, with PvE areas, and then 3 huge frontier PvP areas, keeps.
Housing system was amazing, taxadermy to stuff the head of that massive dragon that everyone worked hard to kill
World bosses
Open dungeons for everyone to go into at once.
Did I mention 3 sides? Awesome PvP, Open "BGs" that were persistent with a keep in the middle to fight for.
Seige weapons, tons of classes, no class could be on "both sides." (IE WoW you can be any class no matter wether you are horde or alliance.)
The main reason that I believe there will never be a daoc2 is because Mythic no longer "owns" DAOC but rather Mythic is owned by...EA? Or whatever company bought them out and ruined their name.
So I doubt a daoc2 will come because why make a game to compete with thier other games? And as far as selling the daoc rights? Why sell something that could potentially put competition against your products or just blow your products out of the water?
I wish DAOC would go F2P..would be amazing. - Especially Pre-TOA...trials of atlantis ruined "the good daoc".
I am entitled to my opinions, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
I miss DAoC Shame they never ever updated the graphics and ui. It was great, it could have been awesome! Now I'm trapped in Rift with nothing to do but grind c***.
I miss DAoC as well .... best game I ever played. I would still return but for the fact that one can switch realms at whim. Just the thought of that endagers the very feeling of "realm pride" that had me play the game for some odd 3-4 years. I really loved the feeling of being a true Hib and having awesome realmates. Can it be had again?
"It hasn’t yet gone to F2P, which actually surprises me as someone who has returned to the game here and there over the years while testing F2P waters elsewhere. "
For me, Dark age is where my mmo start came from. I could not wait to play that game when I got home from work and would play till the wheee hours of the morning. I still keep tabs on it from time to time. Wish there was a Dark Age two in the works.../sigh
This game was definitely on my "Must Play" list. But unfortunately it always seemed to get pushed back, among others. Now with there being no new expansions and stability issues, I dont think I ever will try it. Either way its always sad to see an MMO pass on.
I played DAoC 10 years ago and it is the only game that I keep coming back to now and then!
The combat mechanics are just great, to put it simply. I came back recently and the best change about the latest patch is that all the gear that you can get in the BGs gets you capped stats and resists, at least up till level 49. Was pretty happy about this.
Twinks will still be running around with ToA and stat cap modifiers, but not much we can do about that. I must say though, the level 50 rvr scene certainly isn't newbie friendly - high RR gank groups all templated out.
According to these guys, DAoC seemed to be a kick ass MMO, shame i missed out. But if the EA brothers decided to make DAoC II I will definately pre-order.
DAoC was the first MMO that I truly bothered to immerse myself into. I had dabbled with UO and EQ, but something about DAoC and its first expansion hooked me through and through... until Trials of Atlantis. I pretty much joined the mass exodus, leaving DAoC for greener pastures. I tried going back once or twice, but the magic was gone.
I still have many fond memories of Prince Raids in Darkness Falls.
And I remember the great and terrible alliance that we Albion folk formed with the Hibernians to take our relics back from the then-overpowered Midgardians. That was a RVR battle of epic proportions early in DAoC's glory days.
It would be interesting to see a great developer come out with a tribute to DAoC in the form of a fully realized sequel. RvR battles in DAoC were unlike anything I have experienced in any MMO PvP warfare since.
DAoC was definitely one of the early MMO's that got things right, with the exception of stumbling blocks like the ToA expansion and the handful of lame Community Managers with piss-poor attitudes.
DAoC rocked. Sadly, what made it great is the exact same thing that the "masses" will cry about if they had to do it today. A major company would not take the risk of a game like DAoC nowadays due to the spoon fed era we seem to be in.
I think DAoC is impossible to recreate, I'm sorry to say. The three-way (hehe) RvR was great, sure. The keep siege aspects were brilliant. The realms, epic quests, dragons, raids... (Caer Sidi anyone??) but what really made it great was the people playing. This is not a jab at the WoW community or whatever. It's just an observation that MMORPG players naturally went about things differently and it's not something that can be maunfactured.
Someone touched on it above, PUGs were just what people did PVE and RVR. They weren't even called PUGs for the first few years the game came out. They were just called groups Once you got into a group, chances were that you'd be in it for quite some time. It wasn't uncommon to get in one or two groups total over the span of a 4+ hour gaming session. What you would see were guild group but even these groups weren't usually pre-made. They just happened to be the guildmates that were online. If they had an open space and you were a compatible class chances were they'd invite you and chat in group chat out of courtesy.
This PUG attitude, meshed with the pre-wow leveling process, made for a very different atmosphere. For one thing, people knew their classes. I'm not saying everyone was a l33t g4mer but if you were a tank you knew you were supposed to be keeping aggro and pealing mobs ff of the more squishy groupmebrs. If you were a caster or a rogue you knew you had to take it easy at first and be sure not to steal that aggro from the tanks... etc. If you didn't know someone would just tell you. It may sound crazy now but the whole group would often stop, explain the tactics, and help bring the person up to speed. Why not? They were gonna be there for a while anyway and it would help the Realm in the long run.
As for the leveling process, or 'the grind', there was a method behind the madness. I mentioned above that groups would stay together for a long time. That has a lot to do with the fact that leveling was not running from quest-to-quest. It was dungeon crawling and camping. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are drawbacks to this and maybe more drawbacks than the quests-on-rails method has, but what it DID do was make it natural to really get to know random people. It's kinda hard not to when you grindin with them for an hour. Plus there was downtime while healers got their mana back etc... People didn't just sit there silently twiddling their thumbs. They got to now each oher. I'm not saying you became BFFs with everyone but you knew who they were. The more groups you got in the more people you knew and by the time you got to your mid-levels you knew your Realmmates. Conversely, you had no idea who those other people in that other realm were but they looked funny, you couldn't understand what they were sayin, they casted weird looking spells and were taking your keeps! F^*% THAT! Not on my watch!
I still hope that some developers really put their heads together one day and recreate some of this magic in a modern MMO with a focus on 'natural' community builders.
I think DAoC is impossible to recreate, I'm sorry to say. The three-way (hehe) RvR was great, sure. The keep siege aspects were brilliant. The realms, epic quests, dragons, raids... (Caer Sidi anyone??) but what really made it great was the people playing. This is not a jab at the WoW community or whatever. It's just an observation that MMORPG players naturally went about things differently and it's not something that can be maunfactured.
Someone touched on it above, PUGs were just what people did PVE and RVR. They weren't even called PUGs for the first few years the game came out. They were just called groups Once you got into a group, chances were that you'd be in it for quite some time. It wasn't uncommon to get in one or two groups total over the span of a 4+ hour gaming session. What you would see were guild group but even these groups weren't usually pre-made. They just happened to be the guildmates that were online. If they had an open space and you were a compatible class chances were they'd invite you and chat in group chat out of courtesy.
This PUG attitude, meshed with the pre-wow leveling process, made for a very different atmosphere. For one thing, people knew their classes. I'm not saying everyone was a l33t g4mer but if you were a tank you knew you were supposed to be keeping aggro and pealing mobs ff of the more squishy groupmebrs. If you were a caster or a rogue you knew you had to take it easy at first and be sure not to steal that aggro from the tanks... etc. If you didn't know someone would just tell you. It may sound crazy now but the whole group would often stop, explain the tactics, and help bring the person up to speed. Why not? They were gonna be there for a while anyway and it would help the Realm in the long run.
As for the leveling process, or 'the grind', there was a method behind the madness. I mentioned above that groups would stay together for a long time. That has a lot to do with the fact that leveling was not running from quest-to-quest. It was dungeon crawling and camping. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are drawbacks to this and maybe more drawbacks than the quests-on-rails method has, but what it DID do was make it natural to really get to know random people. It's kinda hard not to when you grindin with them for an hour. Plus there was downtime while healers got their mana back etc... People didn't just sit there silently twiddling their thumbs. They got to now each oher. I'm not saying you became BFFs with everyone but you knew who they were. The more groups you got in the more people you knew and by the time you got to your mid-levels you knew your Realmmates. Conversely, you had no idea who those other people in that other realm were but they looked funny, you couldn't understand what they were sayin, they casted weird looking spells and were taking your keeps! F^*% THAT! Not on my watch!
I still hope that some developers really put their heads together one day and recreate some of this magic in a modern MMO with a focus on 'natural' community builders.
I really have to agree with you. I remember finding a group in DAoC and sticking it out with them for 3-4 hours camping various groups of mobs in order to level up. My first year with DAoC was by far one of the best experiences I have ever had in a mmo. However, things like overpowered crowd control, buff bots, and the amount of elitism that dominates the community to this day is what ruined it for me.
DAoC got so many things right, but there are still so many more things wrong with the game. Unfortunately, DAoC was a lightning strike, and I agree that it's not going to be recreated, at least anytime soon. DAoC did show that pvp as an endgame mechanic can be wildly popular, as long as it has meaning.
DAOC best PVP / RVR i ever play to bad the LAG made me quite..... i was told the game was build on a to heavy platform to start with even with a new PC / Video card / Ram add etc...
Comments
I played Daoc from beta then from retail i was the second guy on Hib excal server to 50 ( hehe just had to say that)
I also agree with the 2 comments here one was that TOA was the straw the broke the camel and i wish all the wow first time players would understand that there was a great mmo called Daoc
I have played only mmo's since UO then Asherons Call and then to many to list here but Daoc remains my fav to this day
The players back then made the game special that included the ppl you played with and against
Salute Celtic Fist and Nolby pride
Tyler midget nuker
Yes, DAoC really was one of the best games Ive ever played. Too bad the controls and graphics are outdated nowadays.
But for the article. Its true that DAoC-PvP is run by "elite" players, but these people mostly play for YEARS now. They got their gear, they got the RealmRank, they know how to play their class.
Would you go and do Arena in WoW with a guy who just reached lvl 80 and plays for the first time or comes and with S2 and youre in S9 ? Well, I know that ALL games have these problems. I got to say I always enjoyed the community of DAoC, it was way better than communities in other games.
To the PVE aspect. Yes, its less competitive now...WAY less, because all those crybabies complained and they nerfed all the encounters to the ground ( or buffed classes without knowing what it would cause - 2-4 People doing Avalon CIty Dragon ? ;D )
All the PVE content wasnt really instanced either, which was a great + in my opinion. I mean, people killed golestandt, so you had to wait a few days, because it was NOT instanced and free for all.
I could write a whole othe article, saying what was SO good in DAoC in the old times.. but im not going to :P
I hope there will be a DAoC 2 ... I hadn't lost my hope for Planetside 2 either and it got fulfilled
DAoC, best MMORPG of all time!
www.90and9.net
www.prophecymma.com
By far the best MMO i ever played, and i have played too many to list. I played it on and off, (mostly on) for 9 years. The 3 realm pvp made this game great.
If anything contributed to the games decline, besides the massive pve grind of toa, which aside from mls was imo an awesome expansion, was the diluting of pvp with things like battlegrounds and the labyrinth. New Frontiers wasn't as good as old frontiers, but it would have been ok if they had made new frontiers every 2 or 3 years like i had hoped they would.
Still a really fun game, even as old as it is, if i was going to play any of the exsisting games that are currently available, Daoc would be it. Just thinking about it is kinda making me wanna play lol.
Best MMO ever.
DAOC was the best MMO ever by far.
3- realms, with PvE areas, and then 3 huge frontier PvP areas, keeps.
Housing system was amazing, taxadermy to stuff the head of that massive dragon that everyone worked hard to kill
World bosses
Open dungeons for everyone to go into at once.
Did I mention 3 sides? Awesome PvP, Open "BGs" that were persistent with a keep in the middle to fight for.
Seige weapons, tons of classes, no class could be on "both sides." (IE WoW you can be any class no matter wether you are horde or alliance.)
The main reason that I believe there will never be a daoc2 is because Mythic no longer "owns" DAOC but rather Mythic is owned by...EA? Or whatever company bought them out and ruined their name.
So I doubt a daoc2 will come because why make a game to compete with thier other games? And as far as selling the daoc rights? Why sell something that could potentially put competition against your products or just blow your products out of the water?
I wish DAOC would go F2P..would be amazing. - Especially Pre-TOA...trials of atlantis ruined "the good daoc".
I am entitled to my opinions, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
I miss DAoC
Shame they never ever updated the graphics and ui. It was great, it could have been awesome! Now I'm trapped in Rift with nothing to do but grind c***.
I miss DAoC as well
.... best game I ever played. I would still return but for the fact that one can switch realms at whim. Just the thought of that endagers the very feeling of "realm pride" that had me play the game for some odd 3-4 years. I really loved the feeling of being a true Hib and having awesome realmates. Can it be had again?
"It hasn’t yet gone to F2P, which actually surprises me as someone who has returned to the game here and there over the years while testing F2P waters elsewhere. "
{mod edit}
For me, Dark age is where my mmo start came from. I could not wait to play that game when I got home from work and would play till the wheee hours of the morning. I still keep tabs on it from time to time. Wish there was a Dark Age two in the works.../sigh
This game was definitely on my "Must Play" list. But unfortunately it always seemed to get pushed back, among others. Now with there being no new expansions and stability issues, I dont think I ever will try it. Either way its always sad to see an MMO pass on.
I played DAoC 10 years ago and it is the only game that I keep coming back to now and then!
The combat mechanics are just great, to put it simply. I came back recently and the best change about the latest patch is that all the gear that you can get in the BGs gets you capped stats and resists, at least up till level 49. Was pretty happy about this.
Twinks will still be running around with ToA and stat cap modifiers, but not much we can do about that. I must say though, the level 50 rvr scene certainly isn't newbie friendly - high RR gank groups all templated out.
According to these guys, DAoC seemed to be a kick ass MMO, shame i missed out. But if the EA brothers decided to make DAoC II I will definately pre-order.
Screw DAoC2, just give me updated graphics and new UI and I'd be back in a heartbeat!
FG hibs at mg! need backup!
My dream game is DAOC's RvR system, using WoW's engine and overall polish.
DAOC 2... oh how I wish one day it will be made.
Get rid of all stealther classes and I'd play again.
This has been true for the past 8 years. Everytime I go back, I remember how much the stealth classes ruin the fun for me and so I quit again.
Bah stealth is great, just get in a grp if you dont want to die to stealthers, or roll a stealther, duh!
the reason why daoc2 will never be created is that the game designer do not read comments like this. They do not really care about the community.
And we get the next boring wow clone with two sides
DAoC was the first MMO that I truly bothered to immerse myself into. I had dabbled with UO and EQ, but something about DAoC and its first expansion hooked me through and through... until Trials of Atlantis. I pretty much joined the mass exodus, leaving DAoC for greener pastures. I tried going back once or twice, but the magic was gone.
I still have many fond memories of Prince Raids in Darkness Falls.
And I remember the great and terrible alliance that we Albion folk formed with the Hibernians to take our relics back from the then-overpowered Midgardians. That was a RVR battle of epic proportions early in DAoC's glory days.
It would be interesting to see a great developer come out with a tribute to DAoC in the form of a fully realized sequel. RvR battles in DAoC were unlike anything I have experienced in any MMO PvP warfare since.
DAoC was definitely one of the early MMO's that got things right, with the exception of stumbling blocks like the ToA expansion and the handful of lame Community Managers with piss-poor attitudes.
DAoC rocked. Sadly, what made it great is the exact same thing that the "masses" will cry about if they had to do it today. A major company would not take the risk of a game like DAoC nowadays due to the spoon fed era we seem to be in.
This will be the next DAoC: http://www.dominusthegame.com/
3 factions with different classes in each, made by a small independent company.
I think DAoC is impossible to recreate, I'm sorry to say. The three-way (hehe) RvR was great, sure. The keep siege aspects were brilliant. The realms, epic quests, dragons, raids... (Caer Sidi anyone??) but what really made it great was the people playing. This is not a jab at the WoW community or whatever. It's just an observation that MMORPG players naturally went about things differently and it's not something that can be maunfactured.
Someone touched on it above, PUGs were just what people did PVE and RVR. They weren't even called PUGs for the first few years the game came out. They were just called groups
Once you got into a group, chances were that you'd be in it for quite some time. It wasn't uncommon to get in one or two groups total over the span of a 4+ hour gaming session. What you would see were guild group but even these groups weren't usually pre-made. They just happened to be the guildmates that were online. If they had an open space and you were a compatible class chances were they'd invite you and chat in group chat out of courtesy.
This PUG attitude, meshed with the pre-wow leveling process, made for a very different atmosphere. For one thing, people knew their classes. I'm not saying everyone was a l33t g4mer but if you were a tank you knew you were supposed to be keeping aggro and pealing mobs ff of the more squishy groupmebrs. If you were a caster or a rogue you knew you had to take it easy at first and be sure not to steal that aggro from the tanks... etc. If you didn't know someone would just tell you. It may sound crazy now but the whole group would often stop, explain the tactics, and help bring the person up to speed. Why not? They were gonna be there for a while anyway and it would help the Realm in the long run.
As for the leveling process, or 'the grind', there was a method behind the madness. I mentioned above that groups would stay together for a long time. That has a lot to do with the fact that leveling was not running from quest-to-quest. It was dungeon crawling and camping. Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are drawbacks to this and maybe more drawbacks than the quests-on-rails method has, but what it DID do was make it natural to really get to know random people. It's kinda hard not to when you grindin with them for an hour. Plus there was downtime while healers got their mana back etc... People didn't just sit there silently twiddling their thumbs. They got to now each oher. I'm not saying you became BFFs with everyone but you knew who they were. The more groups you got in the more people you knew and by the time you got to your mid-levels you knew your Realmmates. Conversely, you had no idea who those other people in that other realm were but they looked funny, you couldn't understand what they were sayin, they casted weird looking spells and were taking your keeps! F^*% THAT! Not on my watch!
I still hope that some developers really put their heads together one day and recreate some of this magic in a modern MMO with a focus on 'natural' community builders.
SoW and Invis please!
Does my heart good to see DAoC on the main page for a while.
I really have to agree with you. I remember finding a group in DAoC and sticking it out with them for 3-4 hours camping various groups of mobs in order to level up. My first year with DAoC was by far one of the best experiences I have ever had in a mmo. However, things like overpowered crowd control, buff bots, and the amount of elitism that dominates the community to this day is what ruined it for me.
DAoC got so many things right, but there are still so many more things wrong with the game. Unfortunately, DAoC was a lightning strike, and I agree that it's not going to be recreated, at least anytime soon. DAoC did show that pvp as an endgame mechanic can be wildly popular, as long as it has meaning.
DAOC best PVP / RVR i ever play to bad the LAG made me quite..... i was told the game was build on a to heavy platform to start with even with a new PC / Video card / Ram add etc...