Dark Age of Camelot turns attention to its customers
by Michael Lafferty

Account services and Camelot Campaign key 2007 focus

While Ultima Online is sporting a new graphics engine and Warhammer Online is plowing ahead down that development trail, the EA/Mythic team – headed by Walt Yarbrough – is making more subtle changes to Dark Age of Camelot … well, subtle changes to the way accounts are handled but the whole idea of more campaigns and live updates is a little more robust.

Among the top announcements for the title was that the Catacombs expansion, the expansion that basically upgraded the graphics of the venerable massively multiplayer title, would be free to all players. The Labyrinth of the Minotaur expansion will hit the European  market in February.

For 2007, the game will feed in live game upgrades every two weeks and account services will get a bit of an overhaul.

The live game will focus on realm-versus-realm, the element that DAoC is renowned for. The focus, according to producer Yarbrough, will be to focus on optimizing the RvR experience while reducing some of the inherent frustrations. Other upgrades will touch on crafting (players can now become skilled in all crafting disciplines), the user interface will see some changes and there will be patches to address class, systems, art and content.

When it comes to account services, players will have the ability to split their accounts now, allocating characters from one account into another. There will be a gender respect (it was requested by the community), as well as the ability to transfer characters across servers. Additional inventory slots for banks will be added and there will also be additional vault slots for housing.

Camelot Campaigns will be big for the game. These will be free campaigns and something new will be added to the ongoing campaign every two weeks. The campaign is an in-game story that will go for about six months, with the first campaign involving three dragons (and it will be known as A Dragon’s Revenge). The campaigns will leave a mark on the world.

The content is important, Yarbrough stressed, because DAoC is an “elder” game, and all the changes coming into the game were driven not only by requests from the community, but in order to satisfy those MMOers that have made Camelot a home.

Labyrinth of the Minotaur was the seventh expansion for DAoC, and while EA/Mythic was in the habit of releasing a new expansion at least annually, 2007 will be different in that the focus will be more toward the free elements that players will get in patches and so on, rather than a full-fledged expansion.

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