Dark Age of Camelot

PC review by Philip Morton, published on Sunday 21st March 2004

You tear off the shiny cellophane of the packaging and prize the CD from its case, being careful not to snap it in half. That little feeling of joy creeps in as you place your new game in the tray and send it retreating back into your PC with a clunk. You want… no you know the game is going to be good, you know it’s going to be worth the price and the wait. The machine whirrs incessantly as you take a quick peek at the manual, then up pops an install window. Going through the options, again clicking ‘Accept’ without bothering to read whatever agreement you’ve just accepted, you wait for the little blue bar to zoom off to the right of the screen and finish doing whatever it represents. Yet this is an RPG and an online one at that, and it seems to be taking its time installing.

Ten minutes, a drink and a couple of biscuits later it finishes and the novel feeling is wearing off. You click the little ‘Finish’ button and even more blue bars appear. What’s this? Updates it appears; 16.4MB of them in all. Good thing I’ve got broadband, otherwise I’d be in for even more waiting. Up to date, you proceed to a login screen. What next? ‘New account’, I guess. You click it and a website opens with a login window for subscription information. But you don’t have any subscription login… Another ten minutes pass and as a result of much manual browsing and web page searching, you’re registered and activated. Logging in, you choose a server and create your character from the thousands of possible variations. Select a region and you’re ready to play. Finally.

Welcome to Dark Age of Camelot, another massively multiplayer online role playing game, supporting up to 3,500 players in each of its exclusively European servers. Evidently inspired by the likes of The Knights of the Round Table and various other mythologies, it throws the players back in time to just after the death of King Arthur. His ‘realm’ - Albion - is suffering from a leadership vacuum and now evil types from all around are determined to kill, maim and do generally wicked deeds in Albion. In Dark Age of Camelot, the different realms battle to capture their enemies’ ‘relics’ which have all sorts of powers. The ultimate quest of course is to steal everyone else’s relics for your realm, but that’s only if you survive the initial onslaught.

Forget ‘being thrown in the deep end’, Dark Age of Camelot fires you out of a cannon into the Marianas trench. While games like Halo, Morrowind and Half Life subtly ease you into the gameplay, Camelot just plonks you straight into the game world without a second thought. It seems to assume that everyone playing this RPG is a fan of the genre and is familiar with massively multiplayer games. Fine if you’ve played Everquest or Final Fantasy XI, but otherwise it’s just too overwhelming for the player. All that happens is that you spawn into a location filled with non-player characters (NPCs) who aren’t really that helpful most of the time. You don’t know what to do or where to go, you’re just presented with this world in which you have to find your own way.

Camelot’s gameplay is really a mixed bag. The interface is nicely done, with flexible modules that you can move around the screen and select at will, allowing you to see any information you might need. However, the developer has fallen into the trap that many do; using all the buttons on the keyboard. Now just because they’re there doesn’t mean you have to use them. Morrowind on Xbox manages to use around 15 buttons in all, so why can’t Camelot? You have to constantly look up the controls because there’s just so many of them; another thing that’s discouraging to the novice MMORPG gamer.

The game world in which you play doesn’t feel alive like it should. Sure, goats, skeletons and various other animals roam the fields, but otherwise it’s just a place full of NPCs with the most rudimentary A.I. “But it’s massively multiplayer, right?” Indeed, but Camelot appears to be either too vast or not popular enough, resulting in mostly empty (of real players) areas of land and then towns with comparatively huge concentrations of people in. Most of your time will be spend running from place to place, endlessly hoping to see something or someplace of interest. Thankfully they allowed the ‘run’ function to be toggled on and off - you can just sit back and relax while your character runs on and on through the wilderness.

And that’s the trouble with Camelot, at least from our experience. There’s just too many times when you’re doing nothing or you’re lost in some town where all the people and houses look exactly the same. All the little moments of boredom and frustration just add up and it degrades the rest of the game. It’s hardly encouraging to a new user to have spent ten minutes wandering innocently through the fields to be suddenly killed by a giant bubble of water, and believe me it’s happened. The game’s netcode isn’t the best either, with quite a number of encounters turning into a slideshow even with a decent PC and a broadband connection.

Generally, the gameplay is nothing special. Repeatedly attacking enemies until you level up, running aimlessly around and doing it all whilst being quite aware that none of your actions will affect the world in the slightest becomes a chore after a while. The combat is a simple point and click affair, with a few spells and skills added in to spice it up. Although there are quests and missions, it never feels like there’s much going on and it’s just not engaging. All the usual conventions are here with merchants sells all kinds of armour and goods, the ability to form groups and so on, but it fails to really innovate and excite.

Graphically, many massively multiplayer online games are limited technically because of the complexity of the concept. Visuals cannot be too sophisticated because of the slowdown it would cause on many low and mid end machines. That shouldn’t stop developers from unleashing their imaginations and creativity though, but Camelot simply looks tired and bland. The mediocre textures are used over and over again, with the only visual highlights being little pieces of foliage that pop up as you go along. The animations are simplistic and overall the game doesn’t pack much style at all. Audio is reasonable though, although the atmosphere it creates isn’t backed up well by the rest of the game.

The MMORPG genre hasn’t matured yet and Dark Age of Camelot is a noticeable sign of this. While the non-linear world, character selection and different realms are there, it never feels that exciting or engaging. Apart from the interface, the game shows little innovation and a distinct visual style is nowhere to be seen. I’m sure that in five or ten years time, we’ll look back at Camelot and chuckle about how far the genre has come in that time. The game isn’t really bad, it just fails to motivate or stimulate the player in the way that other titles do.