The Catacombs of Camelot
Previews

Played it or not, you've probably heard about Dark Age of Camelot at some point or another. The fact of the matter is, this game has been around for quite some time now. It has seen countless upgrades, patches, and expansions (as is the trend for MMORPGs, it seems.)

Upon initial release, we had what is now known today as "Classic" DAoC. This was the first retail release of the game, and was a tremendous breath of fresh air to those who had been shackled down by the first EverQuest for years on end. The truth was, up until the release of DAoC there was very little variety in the MMORPG market as a whole. The genre continued to grow, and Mythic Entertainment has been adapting their game as such.

A brief introduction to the evolution of Camelot

The first expansion, named Shrouded Isles, introduced 6 new classes, 3 new races, and 3 new ‘continents', all spread out equally between the three realms. Also, graphics upgrades were included, most advertised being the shiny water effects (think Morrowind.)

After Shrouded Isles, we had two expansions released in close chronological proximity of each other: Trials of Atlantis, and New Frontiers. Trials of Atlantis introduced Master Levels (Essentially experience past level 50), and Artifacts (More, experience past 50, but in this case equipment that gained levels), to name a few of the features. New Frontiers, being a free download, then changed the entire look at feel of Realm vs Realm combat. If you liked the change or not, that is up to the individual.

Into the Underground, or not?

Now, present day DAoC, we have the new expansion: Catacombs. In Catacombs, we find ourselves with three new, I'd like to call them Planes. Along with these (more detail below) come 5 new classes, a new graphics engine, and new character models.

The new character creation steps are much more complex than the original. In "Classic" Dark Age of Camelot, you chose a race, size (large, medium, small), head and hair color. In this new way, you're able to change things such as nose length, eye height, ear size, etcetera. While the new system is definitely more in depth than the old, the looks from Catacombs are essentially non-transferable from your classic look. Your choices are either to get a new look for your character, or try as hard as you can to get close to the old one you had.

One very helpful thing Mythic has added, are tooltips to the character creation screens. For example, if you're a new player and are confused as to where you should put your starting attribute points, you can hover your mouse over the stat for information. This also applies to classes and such.

Once you're in the game, you wont immediately be in the new Catacombs areas, but instead a starting city outside of the capital of your respective realm. You do have the option, however, of going directly to the capital and diving in to the Catacombs as the Catacombs offer tasks and more for every level. Before we go in to the three Catacombs areas individually, let's touch on some of the things to make life a bit easier as a newbie in an already abundant max-level population.

I'll touch on two main things. The first of these is the Task Masters. In Classic Dark Age of Camelot, you could either kill things (ala nearly any MMORPG), or find a guard and ask if they had a task for you. These ‘Kill tasks' were created to break the monotony of slaying the same creatures hundreds of times, by assigning you to hunt a specific creature, destroy it, then return to the guard for an experience and money reward.

These tasks were pretty fun for me, I wasn't bound by the typical quest guidelines, where I would need to travel to X and find Y then do Z. Instead, if I was told to kill a rattling skeleton, I could find any rattling skeleton, and dispose of it appropriately. Then, I would either frolic, march, or charge (depending on my realm) to my reward.

The only downside to this, was that the guards who gave these quests were split up, and only certain ones would speak to you depending on your level. So, if you were level 2 and talked to guard A, at level 3 you would most likely have to go speak to guard B, but there is a chance it could also be guard A. . . if that makes sense. In Catacombs, we have a clearly marked NPC who can dispense the tasks to keep us busy.

Secondly, we have a term most MMORPG players are quite familiar with now: Instanced Dungeons. It's good that Mythic has added this feature to their game, as having an option for an already established group to traverse their own labyrinth, rather than entering the dungeon and finding corpses strewn everywhere from a group who arrived ten minutes before. The Instances are well done, and range from single-player experiences to large group encounters. You will stumble across the first instance possibilities early in the game, but they are not overly present and so the impression of a seamless world is not destroyed by them.

Now, to the actual Catacombs. In each capital city, there is an entrance to your realms' Catacombs. Let's try to break this down.

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