DAOC 2? "Camelot Unchained" Announced

Yeah I also backed. Basic level, will upgrade if beta 1 is ever announced.

I’ll be very interested to see how they handle this. It seems like a catch 22 for me, to keep players interested, the character has to progress and get stronger, but making a character satisfying from a getting stronger perspective, means that lesser developed characters are fodder. I’ll be surprised if they solve that problem.

The other problem I see with no PvE, with a competitive only game, it’s not just how good it is, it’s how many other people are playing it. These type of games tend to sink or swim very fast without another structure to occupy players time while the game attracts a following. Once the player numbers drop to a point where getting matches becomes slow or uneven, the game is toast. The likelihood that will happen is fairly high I think.

Based on the Wiki info linked above, it sounds like your skills will still improve even if you are fodder and getting constantly slaughtered. Also, it seems like you’ll get rewards for mining, crafting and any other stuff you do. It looks kind of interesting, actually. I like the idea of a slow, horizontal progression.

  1. A different kind of Progression System is necessary
  1. The game does not use the typical vertical leveling system, which CSE claims ends up being a race to the top by the best players.
  1. The horizontal system in Camelot Unchained is expected to be much slower than in most MMORPGs - as Mark Jacobs said: “If you are looking for a game with a slower level progression than most of today’s Western MMORPGs, you have come to the right place, that’s for sure.” [7]
  1. The results of actions are not always as important as taking the actions themselves. So, even though a player is killed by a higher level player, that doesn’t mean that the player’s skills don’t improve from the fight that happened.
  1. The Progression System uses more than individual accomplishments but also looks at the actions of an entire Realm, and players are awarded for all the efforts once a day by their King, via Daily Report. This report includes not only PvP but also mining, building, crafting, gathering, trade…in fact any activity that can be considered useful in the Realm`s war effort.

This statement right here says a lot. How many players complain about leveling being too fast and how many complain about it being too slow? Which is the more likely complaint you will hear about any level-based MMO?

I thought Shadowbane handled this pretty well. Leveling was quick and you got most of your advancement early, and when leveling finally slowed the character advancement was just about over and any gains you got were trivial.

You’re comparing apples and oxen. In a traditional MMO, leveling (or otherwise making numbers go up through gear) is the core of the game.

This is technically a MMO (it’s online, it has a large number of concurrent players) but aside from that it’s not really much like what we typically associate with a MMO at all.

They are also not trying to appeal to the MMO crowd. This is a niche game for people that enjoyed DAOC’s RvR and found the PVE aspects a chore/grind. These people just wanted to fight in the frontier and battle over keeps, not grind levels, get artifacts or mastery levels, etc. Trials of Atlantis kind of took the legs out from under that game for those reasons and they’re looking to avoid those mistakes (not to mention building out the PVE portion of the game is outside their scope and budget).

So you’re saying this no power curve. Progression doesn’t really exist? You install, log in and create a character, and you’re as powerful on day one as you are on day 100?

The hook for me in an MMO is that I create a character and over time I see the character improve. I enjoy being able to improve via PvP but it’s also nice to have PvE options as well.

My point is that if progression is slow, and it only happens through PvP, then I don’t see that as a winning formula for anything other than a niche game. So maybe this will be that niche game. No idea.

The most fun I had with DAoC is with the full-on PvP server where anyone could kill anyone. That was a lot of fun, but the numbers dwindled after awhile and instead of logging on to jump into PvP it was logging on and running around and looking for anyone to fight.

Guess I’ll have to watch others play this for a while. Unless I get into a Beta. ;)

All of that stuff is fine, but it doesn’t change the basic problem. People that play more will be more powerful, and that’s a self fulfilling downward spiral. Getting a few stat points, in a game that he himself calls slow progression…how many times to you think the people on the bottom of that chain are going to que up and keep subbing? As I said before, the inherent system is bound to fail. It’s one thing at release, but it’s especially troublesome the longer the game is active. The later you join, the farther you are behind, and the longer you have to be cannon fodder to try and catch up, I just don’t see it.

/shrug, they are caught between a rock and hard place. You need to make people feel like they are advancing in a meaningful way, while also making the people that aren’t that advanced feel like they have a chance. Those two goals are mutually exclusive, and have never worked. The entire point of being at the top of the chain, is so you can faceroll people.

Successful PvP games all have one thing in common, the characters are relatively static, and player skill accounts for the improvements. There’s a reason for that. Losing to gear, with no chance of really winning, is a formula for failure.

Sorry, not trying to be negative, but to me, this is a glaring, obvious problem, with only one possible outcome.

I bought into this just under 2 years ago when ESO pvp started circling the drain. If they can just avoid the wild design swings/weird redesigns that ESO underwent I will be a satisfied customer. Of course if my class (I’m one of those guys who chooses just one class and specializes) gets the continuous nerf bat/game play redesign treatment that it got in ESO, then all bets are off. Here’s hoping that it fills the void that ESO once did. Man that was a great game.

I am pretty stoked that they’re citing SWG’s crafting system as a major influence, especially the concept of variable quality resource spawns, with resource quality affecting the crafting quality, and crafting quality affecting an item’s effectiveness in combat.

I hope that the experimentation options are as deep — especially things like SWG’s notions of assembly success and experimentation success combining to produce the final item quality, with ultra rare critical successes in either (but especially both!) producing notably better stats.

My main memories of SWG‘s crafting system were of jamming a pencil into the keyboard so my guy could mine ore all night. So describing crafting that way doesn’t fill me with a lot of excitement.

Were you doing that because you wanted to make things, or were you doing it as part of a Jedi unlock attempt?

If you really wanted to make things, it was:

  • mine ore manually for awhile so you could make an extractor
  • drop an extractor so it mines forever (or until your fuel runs out)
  • use that metal to make as many extractors as you wanted

After that, competitive crafting started with scouting around the various planets for good (or preferably, the best ever) resources for whatever you were making, and dropping extractors there (meanwhile hoping your competitors hadn’t found out about it). Then putting it to use making a terrific schematic (not trivial if you wanted to make the best equipment / machinery), and then marketing your “best on the planet / in the galaxy” wares.

I had a blast.

Later on, whatever part of the process you didn’t want to deal with you could hire out: scouts, contract miners, famers, ore/metal sellers… it was a diverse economy, while it lasted.

That is interesting. I have really fond memories of being a decent weaponsmith in the early days of SWG. I lucked into a large stockpile of something like 997 quality copper and was in demand for all sorts of pistols and weapons early on. I used to have a few brokers hit me up with orders each night that I would try to fulfill.

This was most evident for me in Warhammer Online. The earlier tiers and early days of Tier 4 were incredible and fairly well balanced, it seemed. However, once the better PvPers and more dedicated players ranked up and got the best gear, and refined their tactics, they would roll the average folks until it wasn’t fun anymore. I also experienced this in other games like Aeon.

Another thing that hurt DAoC, for folks like me, was the birth of the 8-man roaming parties. DAoC was way more intriguing to me when people worked as a realm, and didn’t work so hard to refine perfect 8-man groups and tactics to maximize realm points. I am not, nor have ever been, a highly skilled PvP player. I enjoy realm war combat and chaotic, open-field battles and keep defenses. 8-man vs 8-man is not something I care to ever do and you can keep that for other games that want tightly matched, highly skilled and competitive PvP, like MOBAs or FPS arenas, etc. I respect the folks that do it, and understand the draw; I just would rather not have a realm vs realm game revolve around it. I am afraid I will be in the minority, though, and haven’t kept up enough with this iteration to see how that may be handled.

If it is slow progression, it will be discouraging to players joining six months after launch. The launch players will have a big head start. I think they might have to speed up progession at some point.

People are going to figure out, or at least think, that you have to have abilities A, B, and C to be competitive, and if it takes three months of whatever leveling is in the game, that’s going to be a tough hurdle.

This is a made up simple example, but what if horizontal progression is like this:

-Veteran player does 10% more damage than new player. It’s better, but not enough to singlehandedly destroy an army of noobs or anything. And this is a game of battles, they’re not intended for things to be balanced in 1v1, whether between classes or anything else.

-New player is inexperienced and hasn’t earned any progression rewards. He has access to fireball, which he equips.

-Veteran player has progressed and has the option of equipping the same fireball (doing 110 damage instead of 100) or a heal spell. Not both. He even has a third option, which is replacing the fireball with a fire damage shield around himself. Very useful in some situations, completely useless in others. But he can only bring one.

Does the veteran in that scenario have an advantage? Yes. Is the new player, in the midst of a 20v20 battle, so outclassed as to be nothing but cannon fodder? Not at all.

As Beta hasn’t started, I don’t have any first hand experience myself. But I think you can have horizontal systems that provide a sense of improving your character while not scaling vertically (at an exponential rate) like most MMOs do, where a L1 fireball might hit for 10 damage and a L60 fireball hits for 10,000… which is all pointless anyway, since at all stages of the game a mob in PVE dies in exactly 3.25 fireballs.

I joined at an Alpha level, sort of thinking that there would be a server to test on, but I have yet to see it up. I wonder if they’re through with that.

That roughly explains it, with an addition that veteran will have a number of things “on 110%”(105%?,120%?). Say, if your resisatances,parry chance,hit,crit,dodge,armor,stamina etc. are all on +15%, you can effectively double or tripple yourself over time - it will take years tho.

Years ago, when asked to roughly explain what degree of horizontal progression he is aiming for, Mark said something like (paraphrasing, but the numbers are exact): “Three total newbs should have fair chance against well trained veteran”.

This, a thousand times this. Running Emain at Skald (or Bard, or whatever) speed in an 8-man, looking for another group to spam your melee train macros on, was not fun for me at all.

At launch, I played a mid healer. Mid healers at launch, and for about the first 6 months of the game, had an AOE stun that had a shorter cooldown than it did effect…now I’m sure you can probably figure out why that’s a bad idea in a PvP game, but for some reason, Mythic couldn’t. I spent the first 6 months of that game absolutely face rolling in a 5 person crew, that routinely won 5 vs 20+ fights. The AOE was also huge, you could keep entire groups perma stunned, while your melee train just rolled over the called out targets one by one.

DaoC was a wildly unbalanced game, right up until the end. Hib chanters with perma snare, the alb dot class that could solo a raid force from inside a keep…was fun if you weren’t on the wrong end of it.