Mythic’s Matt Firor talks about DAoC as a whole, and the upcoming Catacombs expansion

By Michael Lafferty

“…in one swoop we’ve gone through and made it all more compelling”

Dark Age of Camelot is a game with real historical reference – albeit a reference that has only been cast sparingly aside when it conflicted with game play. The world is alive with an ongoing battle between the three realms and those involved in the conflict are passionate about their realms, and their roles in the worlds in which they find themselves.

But if one aspect of the DAoC legacy has been lacking, it lays in the fact that the game has been a little antiquated graphically. There have been tweaks to the graphics engine since the games launch in October of 2001, but those generally pale when compared to the upcoming expansion that not only offers new content, and completely new graphics, but also revisits the older content for a bit of a facelift.

DAoC fans gathered recently in Las Vegas to celebrate the game, their community and to get a look at the Catacombs expansion, which is scheduled to release early in December. The expansion offers new professions (broken down into one new class for the Albion realm, two for Midgard and two for Hibernia), and – of course – a vast new territory to explore. Exploring that new territory also opens up the history of one of the races a little more, allowing for deeper content (underground pun not intended) for the whole game.

Catacombs will boast new environmental looks -
as demonstrated in these exclusive screens for GameZone.com

Catacombs is the fifth expansion in the game’s history. Aside from the sterling graphical attributes of Catacombs, Mythic has also addressed the content side with approximately 350 new quests in the game.

“Everything in Camelot is divided by three,” stated Mythic’s Matt Firor, executive producer. “ And remember that Catacombs is for levels 1, well realistically 5-7, through 50, so when you start thinking about number of quests per level per realm, it’s really not that much.”

However, with the new classes going into the game, coupled with the new quests, essentially the entire game is re-opened to players.

“If they have a level 50 character now that they have been playing for a year, if they go back and play a new Valkyrie, they could actually play all the way up to level 50 and do nothing that they did with the first character,” Firor said.

“The reason why we do it is, obviously, we want to encourage people to play other characters, they get to level 50 and let’s say an expansion comes out, we want them to create a character from level one. And obviously, if there is nothing for them to do, they are not going to do that.”

“We don’t want to turn Camelot into a game that’s full of uber-50 level character, that have all the master levels – we like the fact that we have characters that do that, but that’s not the whole game,” Firor said. “Lots of other characters really don’t want to do that, they want to play five different characters every week, and you can do that.”

Which speaks to the replayability aspect of the whole game. Of course, there are aspects of the game that also keep it fresh. For example, just jump onto the Camelot Herald (www.camelotherald.com) and you can see the status of the realms in the ongoing Realm-Versus-Realm battle. You can see which keeps are held, and what clans are holding territories against the others.

DAoC was one of the first games that prohibited trash talking between the realms. Simply put, those in Hibernia cannot understand what the people of Midgard or Albion are saying. And players are not allowed to have different realm characters on the same server in a single account. If anything, that speaks of a solid game plan for DAoC. But with the expansions like Catacombs, are these parts of the original plan, or have the expansions evolved out of what the community wants?

“It’s ongoing,” said Firor. “We have a rough plan that we follow, but obviously in 2001 we had no idea that we would be this successful, so we didn’t plan it out. But what we do is when an expansion launches we look at the game as a whole and figure out what players like and what they don’t like, what other games have that we don’t, what we have that other games don’t and we need more of, and we put it together as ‘here’s our plan for the next expansion.’ With Catacombs it was obvious. The dungeon content in Camelot has always been lackluster … it’s obvious that our dungeon content has lagged behind our above-ground content. Obviously ToA (Trials of Atlantis) had some nice dungeons, but just in the strict underground, evil area, we’ve never been as good as any of the other MMOs, and Catacombs has been a direct target at that.

“So not only have we added a whole bunch of really cool new dungeons and underground content, we have gone back into the old world and made the old dungeons look better. So in one swoop we’ve gone through and made it all more compelling.”

In regards to the new classes for the expansion, the Albion realm has always had more classes than Midgard or Hibernia, and Matt was asked about an overheard statement about encouraging players to start up Midgard or Hibernian characters. As it stands now, Albions have an almost overwhelming presence in the game as a whole.

“The term ‘overwhelming’ is not quite accurate, although to the players it is obviously overwhelming,” he stated. “But really the split for the number of characters is not than unbalanced – it is like 40 percent Albion, 30 percent Midgard and 30 percent Hibernia, which isn’t overwhelming from a statistical point of view, but from a realm-versus-realm combat view, it is huge. So yes, what we are trying to do with this is encourage people to play the other realms besides Albions by giving them new class options. Is this going to solve the problem? No, obviously, it’s just a way to get people more interested in the other realms.”

As Matt pointed out, working through a new class in a new race opens up the possibility to experience another side of DAoC. Not only will players be facing new territories to explore, but there will be new monsters to fight and even the team dynamics are different.

During the fan conference demonstration of Catacombs, one of the new classes was shown off just a bit. The warlock will have the ability to chamber spells, have them prepared and ready to hurl at the opposition. While this is both good news and bad news – the good news being that the spells are ready to cast with only a minimal delay between launching the spells, and the bad news being that chambered spells appear above the head of the warlock, thereby announcing to the world that it is a warlock and it is ready to rumble – the mere fact that mages could chamber spells had the assembled crowd ooh-ing and aah-ing. Would this progression in the warlock class have repercussions when it comes to tweaking existing classes, and would that be a viable content idea for another expansion?

“I don’t know if that would ever be an expansion, because we would do that as a matter of course,” stated Firor. “The goal of Catacombs is not to introduce five new classes that are better than the other classes. That would be a bad design decision. We want them to be different from the existing classes so people say ‘hey, here is a different play style and I want to try it.’ “

While Catacombs will be in line with current system requirements for DAoC, as the series continues to evolve, there may come a time when players will have to consider upgrading machines to play the next iteration of the title. When the Mythic team sits down to determine the content for the next expansion, what is given the first consideration – content or content within the boundaries of the system specifications.

“It’s not quite so easy as that,” Firor said. “It just so happens that when Catacombs is being launched it is the era of the DirectX 9 compatible shaders, which everyone is going to. If we want to be competitive with other games, we have got to support DX9 shaders. It is not an option, it is a requirement – our screen shots have to look as good as everyone else’s screenshots. But we’ve always been about: A – if you don’t have a computer that has a DX9-compatible card, you can either run an older version of the client, or we are getting really good now at when you run, say Catacombs, it actually senses what hardware you have installed and ramps back or forward the graphics options.

“That’s our goal, give them the give stuff, but support as much as we can.”

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