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Dark Age of Camelot with a Current Graphical Engine
I believe that if Dark Age of Camelot was updated to a current graphics engine, keeping the game play the way it is, I think it would be a top MMORPG.
1. DAoC has a great class system where each one of the 3 factions have different classes and races. That is very unique, and I think that by keeping the classes/races different in each realm, you create a sense of realm pride. Plus, it was difficult to tell who you were fighting against, since you were not immediately familiar with the enemies spells and skills.
2. Darkness Falls is a great pvp dungeon where, if you command the pvp area, you had access to Darkness Falls. No other MMORPG has created such a unique dungeon.
3. DAoC has a great housing system, where it was in an instanced village, but once you crossed into the village, it felt like a real residential area. The houses are very cool. You are able to decorate your homes with trophy kills, furniture, and other goodies. Plus, you could put a vendor out front to sell you stuff. Players would run around town from vendor to vendor, to find items they were looking for. It was a nice alternative to an auction house.
4. DAoC has great lore. Midgard is the Nordic area, filled with all the Norse mythology. Followed by HIbernia, Ireland mythology, and lastly, Albion, which is the English area and mythology.
5. DAoc has a nice little system where you started out as a minor class, such as Seer. At level 10, you made a choice of which advanced class you would want to continue with. It is a nice little touch, and allows you to get a feel for the class before you make your big decision.
Unfortunately, the graphics are dated and I believe that DAoC just had some bad luck in timing. The game was thriving, but World of Warcraft released, and took a lot of DAoC subscribers away for a while, which made the servers feel empty at the time. But when those subscribers eventually returned to DAoC, it was never the same game. The game relied on large numbers fighting in RvR. But because the people trickled back, the game never got back their population. DAoC started merging servers and it snowballed downhill from there. But I think that if this game was ever to be revived, it would kick ass. People would come back in droves to play true 3 realm pvp, the way it was meant to be played. They created it the right way.
Comments
In truth, I will be playing ESO, but i had some great memories from DAoC. Just to go back to the frontiers one more time, but with an updated graphics engine, just WOW.
I look forward to ESO though, and I hope to get the same good times I had back then, while playing DAoC. I am optimistic though. But I'm still hoping for the DAoC remake. :P
As it is, its still better than most MMOs, but what made DAoC good has long been destroyed.
The last 4 expansions just ruined the game more and more. For DaoC to do well today, it would need to have an environment that promoted people grouping and working together. That means, getting rid of /level 20, and making it so the fastest way to level was grouping.
They'd also have to get rid of instances, quest based leveling, most of the battlegrounds, and several other things before it approached being good again.
Mostly this. The game went downhill beginning with Trials of Atlantis. That's when all the guilds I was with fell apart, and my friends started quitting. Whereas the first expansion (Shrouded Isles) was a gem that you could choose to buy or choose not to buy (you remained competitive in PvP and PvE even without it,) ToA was the start of the massive trend of gear/level inflation that WoW has made such a terrible habit. This was back in the day when expansions were meant to be optional for MMOs. And the systems it introduced were convoluted, glitchy, and not well thought out.
As much as I enjoyed my time playing DAoC, I also remember just how poorly it would've aged to today. I remember massive grinds for crafting that were generally done with bots, due to the absurdity of staring at your screen while that little bar filled up (and could take half an hour to an hour of you going afk while you waited for one item to be crafted.) I also remember that 99% of the quests that you used to level were straight up kill quests (and you could only do them up to a certain level, and a certain amount per level.) And when I say kill quest, it was more like a seek and destroy quest, because you'd go out and find one of the creature, kill it, and report back... over and over.
The dungeons were fun, but not because they were anything special. They lacked heavily in creativity and generally looked the same (assuming they were thematically similar.) The only thing that made them fun was the community/pick up groups, and the extremely variable difficulty. Most dungeons had very wide level ranges... so low levels could go in early, if they dared, and try to see how far they'd get before dying. Also, you often had wandering mobs in these dungeons that varied in level, and if the wrong one snuck up on you, your entire party (as a low level group,) was doomed. This was a very high risk/high reward offering.
One thing they did well, that would age well, is that they had very few skills (two hotbars was -easily- enough,) but you were always doing something so long as you had resources. Pretty much every class had a mixture of very low cd abilities that you'd spam, and several very powerful abilities with much longer cooldowns. This is very much like ESO, and I can't wait to see a return to this type of playstyle. It also made the game very easy to play for a non-gamer, but difficult to master the proper timing/use of skills (not as bad as worrying about 4 billion bars and 20 different add-ons though.)
Another thing they did very well is make every class feel useful, while having very different playstyles. Even within the classes, you could split into very different gameplay. I found with WoW, if you traited down a particular build line, the buttons you pressed might be different, but the playstyle itself didn't very much. With DAoC Enchanter, for instance, you could range anywhere between being a character that charged into the middle of the largest grouping of enemies and spammed your point blank AoE for massive damage, or you could be a long ranged nuker, or focus more on various CC abilities. And while classes weren't balanced 1v1, every class had jobs only they could perform and really excel in. You never felt useless, and the CC that game had ensured that a smart group of players always came out on top of a stupid group, regardless of size. It's debatable whether their approach to CC was a good one overall though, as it certainly wasn't very much fun getting hit with a poison that incapacitated you for 10 minutes (without any way of breaking free,) unless someone healed you or you took x amount of damage.
I don't want to see DAoC with modern graphics. But I do want to see DAoC's community again, some day, along with their approach to difficulty in their dungeons (variable, dynamic,) and the sense of varied risk/reward that you can really pick according to your personal preference. Their community made Open PvP servers work for a long time (at least on the RP-PvP server.) It wasn't until 2-3 years in that griefers started to surface and ruin the experience for people.
Merchants and towns were all extremely plain, bare, and purely functional. They served their purpose, but not much more.
*cough* Camelot Unchained?
Dunno why so many people are hanging all of their hopes on ESO as their DAOC savior when CU has 10x more of the values that made DAOC what it was. Yes ESO has 3 faction siege pvp, but so does GW2, and we all saw how that turned out...
If you really want the DAOC successor wait for the true DAOC successor....
Camelot Unchained sure promises a lot, but whether or not it can deliver is still very much up in the air. The kickstarter rewards were also pretty ridiculous, making me question whether the game is Pay to Win. And their current graphics are worse than DAoC's were at launch (and yes, I know it's pre-alpha, but rather than hearing them say, "Our graphics are going to improve drastically before release," they've instead defended them by saying, "Our focus, and the focus in a game like this, should be the gameplay, not graphics.")