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See: Dark Age of Camelot

Rend’s Jeremy Wood on how Frostkeep borrows from Blizzard, Dark Age of Camelot, and PlanetSide

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GameDaily has an interview with Rend’s Jeremy Wood this week that covers a bunch of meta topics of interest to MMO players and watchers of this oddball hybrid title. While Rend has no plans to suddenly become a battle royale title, Frostkeep is very much watching what the MMO subgenres and companies are up to in order to “fill the same psychological needs that are being filled by those games in [Rend].” Specifically, Wood says his team learned a lot from Blizzard and the MMO genre.

“Our biggest takeaway from our Blizzard experience is you can make a fantastically unique product without really inventing anything new,” Wood explained. “Blizzard got where they are by taking inspiration from all sorts of different great pieces of games in different genres.”

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Leaderboard: Must MMORPGs revolve around grouping to be MMORPGs?

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It would be easy to dismiss Saga of Lucimia’s pervasive “group-based or go home” ideas as mere rhetoric, but the reality is, there exists a small segment of the veteran MMORPG population that genuinely believes an MMO is not an MMO if it doesn’t focus exclusively or near-exclusively on grouping, and there are going to be games that cater to those folks.

I wanted to bring up that recent tweet because it seems like an extremist, maybe even revisionist position to take for a game in our market, and I don’t just mean in 2018 when plenty of non-MMOs have called themselves MMOs and even more MMOs have shunned the term. I mean in terms of the historical games being used as a touchstone for these ideas. Yes, some early MMORPGs like EverQuest emphasized group content; while you could level up on some classes and in some cases alone, for the most part, you needed to group up to get things done, whether you were taking down a dragon or just trying to squeeze out a few more bubbles of level in the midgame.

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Global Chat: The ‘We Don’t Play World of Warcraft’ Club

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What do you do when you don’t play World of Warcraft but everyone else all around you does and won’t stop talking about it because there’s a new expansion coming out? You try to find like-minded souls and start up a club, that’s what!

“If you do not play WoW or at least have some sort of history with it, you can find yourself in some kind of quasi MMO community minority group. It’s an ‘odd’ phenomenon,” said Contains Moderate Peril.

“I really don’t even know what the story other than Alliance vs. Horde,” admitted I’m Not Squishy. “Sometimes it can feel like I’m there’s a big gap in my gaming vocabulary.”

Believe it or not, this whole column isn’t just about World of Warcraft today, so dive in to read some gamer essays on Wizard101, Dark Age of Camelot, Elder Scrolls Online, and more!

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Dark Age of Camelot answers player questions about damage reduction and defensive actions

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When a game has been running as long as Dark Age of Camelot has, it stands to reason that the players remaining are going to be deeply invested in the game and quite familiar with its mechanics. So if you approach DAOC’s most recent grab bag, understand that you will be entering a zone in which deep and granular questions are asked and answered.

Among the community queries this past week include the issue of whether or not Kertom still drops black weapon enamel (he does, whew), the stacking proc effect of a Howling Predator Vest (why would you want your vest to howl?), and the order in which defensive actions resolve in the game.

By far, the longest answer revolved around players’ Base AF and how that affects damage reduction. “Armor quality affects both the chance that your armor will absorb the blow at all and if that roll is successful, how much damage will be mitigated,” the devs said. “Armor condition also affects how much damage is mitigated.”

Source: Dark Age of Camelot

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Perfect Ten: The best MMO debuts by year, 1997-2006

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By now, many of you probably know that I’m the curator of the MMO Timeline on my personal blog. On this page, I’ve attempted to catalog the launches, expansions, business model shifts, reboots, platform transitions, and sunsets of MMOs by year. It certainly helps me to get a high-level overview of certain eras of online gaming history as well as to trace the development of certain titles.

For fun, because that’s a lot of what Perfect Ten is about, I wanted to start with the year that MMORPGs really took off and select one title per year over the next two decades that I felt had the best debut and was the most exciting title to launch that year. Some years it’s going to be really easy to pick, while others… man, I am setting myself up for some hate mail, aren’t I?

Let’s turn our time machine back to 1997 and get this show on the road!

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Dark Age of Camelot delays its free-to-play shift to 2019

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While we reported in December 2017 that Broadsword was aiming for a free-to-play option for Dark Age of Camelot, we haven’t seen a lot of movement on that front — until now. A recent producer’s letter informed the community that the Endless Crusade update with its business model shift has been delayed to the first part of 2019.

“Once patch 1.125 has released, we’ll be shifting our development resources towards the Endless Conquest update,” the team said. “As mentioned in some previous grab bags this option will now be made available to returning and new accounts rather than just newly created ones. This change does increase the scope of the Endless Conquest update considerably but we strongly believe it’s the right way forward for Dark Age of Camelot!”

In addition to working on the F2P version, Broadsword is busy focusing on this summer’s Patch 1.125 (which includes RvR currency, RvR reward streamlining, and two new class/race combos per realm), a new fall harvest event, and a new website.

Source: Dark Age of Camelot

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The MOP Up: Fractured Lands has fun in the apocalypse (June 3, 2018)

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The MMO industry moves along at the speed of information, and sometimes we’re deluged with so much news here at Massively Overpowered that some of it gets backlogged. That’s why there’s The MOP Up: a weekly compilation of smaller MMO stories and videos that you won’t want to miss. Seen any good MMO news? Hit us up through our tips line!

Maybe you’ll discover a new game in this space — or be reminded of an old favorite! This week we have stories and videos from Rend, Armored Warfare, Wakfu, Elsword, H1Z1, Conan Exiles, Dauntless, Sea of Thieves, Fractured Lands, Magic: The Gathering Arena, EVE Online, Orbus VR, RuneScape, Foxhole, Shot Online, Dark Age of Camelot, PixARK, TERA, and Final Fantasy XI, all waiting for you after the break!

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The Game Archaeologist: Warhammer Online

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When it comes to notable years in the MMORPG genre’s history, 2008 stands out as one of the most significant. World of Warcraft’s debut onto the scene in 2004 caused an upheaval in ways far too numerous to go into detail here. Suffice to say that its overwhelming popularity drew the attention of game designers who looked at the staggering numbers of players and found themselves envious of the potential to grab a slice of that money pie.

Many projects went into high gear following WoW’s launch, with plenty of them trying to copy the formula and structure that Blizzard established in the hopes of making it at least partially as big as that game. So-called WoW clones began to pepper the market and there was a sense that gamers were ready to move on from World of Warcraft to the next generation of MMOs. In many players’ minds, this would be either 2008’s Age of Conan or Warhammer Online, two big-budget MMOs with strong IPs that carried a lot of the weight of expectation.

Little did anyone realize that 2008 represented a bubble that was about to burst on the industry and the WoW clones that followed — including Warhammer Online. Today, we’re going to take a look at “bears, bears, bears,” the high hopes of Mythic Entertainment, and how WAR became a casaulty on its own battlefield.

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Dark Age of Camelot’s killer bunny will make you soil your armor

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Oh crap. You weren’t good this year, were you. Instead of getting the Cadbury Bunny, with all of its chocolate-sugar bomb goodness, your indescretions have summoned the killer bunny to Dark Age of Camelot. Woe is you! Woe is us!

Returning for the game’s spring event, the killer bunny can be fought by a group of knock-kneed knights (holy hand grenade sold separately). If you can manage to kill him by April 16th, you’ll get your choice of special items.

For the faint of heart, DAoC is offering egg-collecting quests, event vendors, and an array of XP, RP, BP, and crafting bonuses in various areas.

Source: Dark Age of Camelot

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Ultima Online’s F2P trial is coming in early April while DAOC hotfixes classes

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The Ultima Online team is hard at work “crushing bugs” and preparing for the launch of Endless Journey. The free-to-play Publish 99 is being tentatively planned for early April and will be followed by a strong push to eliminate as many bugs as possible with Publish 100.

Adjustments are still in the works for Ultima Online’s free trial: “We know there has been a lot of discussion related to the amount of storage that Endless Journey accounts will have access to. We are still actively developing means of allowing Endless Journey accounts access to some level of secure storage.”

Also worth pointing out is that all existing accounts have been upgraded through the Stygian Abyss expansion, even if you never paid for any of them. Awesome.

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Global Chat: Elder Scrolls Online’s disguised gameplay

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It seems as though some players’ attention has shifted back to Elder Scrolls Online this spring, especially with the recent Dragon Bones DLC drop. Telwyn over at GamingSF documented a bit of fun in which he enjoyed infiltrating a camp in disguise versus having to do it in stealth mode.

“I find ‘disguised’ gameplay is more relaxed and better paced (since stealth is slower movement),” he wrote. “It’s especially nice in ESO when you need to take time out of fighting-all-the-things in a hostile to read the many books and quest-related texts – having a pause in the action makes it more enjoyable to read these.”

It isn’t all rainbows and puppies, however. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril expressed some frustration at ESO’s leveling gear, or lack thereof: “The One Tamriel Update removed the level restriction on content, scaling everything according to the player, which obviously didn’t help the gear situation. With delves and story quests scaling to your level, there isn’t the surplus of gear generated by content fixed at a specific level. The lack of a server wide auction system is also a major contributor.”

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Dark Age of Camelot lays out the groundwork for new and more frequent RvR events

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Another week, another grab bag community Q&A with the Dark Age of Camelot development team. This edition’s pressing issue was the promise of more frequent RvR events — and what these would look like when they arrived.

“It will be a combination of existing and new events,” the team said. “We aren’t ready to start talking about the details of the new events quite yet, but the big picture idea is a system that utilizes in-game leaderboards. These events would likely run for 1-2 weeks on a rotating schedule and would incentivize various aspects of the game (mostly relating to RvR).”

Other topics discussed included pet-class adjustments, a server select button, and a change to the damage potential of the Mercenary.

Source: Dark Age of Camelot

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Dark Age of Camelot hints at future class/race combos

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Dark Age of Camelot has a busy February planned, starting with a new patch that includes a mess of class, RvR, and battleground changes. Broadsword promised “more frequent events” going forward, including a pair of new RvR frontier activities.

Speaking of events, Jack Frost’s Frozen Cavern and the Ghost Keep are both open for business through February 13th. After that date, the game will switch over to swooning with a trio of Valentine’s quests.

The studio also published its first “Grab Bag” Q&A of the year, tackling some of the more nitty-gritty questions that players have about the game’s mechanics. One interesting tidbit from this past week’s grab bag is a hint of future race/class combinations.

“Yes, we are planning to open up a few more pairings when the new race respec feature is in,” Broadsword said. “The recent server and client stability issues have pushed back that feature a bit, but it’s still on track for the first half of this year.”

Source: Dark Age of Camelot

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