Dark Age of Camelot, a game review.

Dark Age of Camelot is by far the best MMORPG out on the market. It's also one of the oldest. With a dying population and a lack of enthusiasm on the programmers parts this is probably a dinosaur begging to be put down or totally revived. Unfortunately it's creator Mythic Entertainment is more focused on their newest venture WarHammer than they are on Dark Age.

Consisting of 3 realms; Albion, Midgard and Hibernia, it is a game focused on the never ending battle for the New Frontiers. Each realm has it's own frontier to defend. Each frontier consist of 7 keeps, 4 towers per keep and a outer wall surrounding each keep. In these frontiers they also have 2 relic gates, each protecting a relic of great strength or power. The name of the game is dominance. You want to be able to over throw the opposing realms hold on their frontiers, take at least 2 keeps that have a doc to be able to open the relic gates. Which ever realm holds the most relics is the strongest. Which ever realm controls the most keeps and towers combined gains access to a special dungeon with special loot.

In the wars for dominance players can use trebuchets, battle rams, palitones. These wars can range from an exceptional group of 8 attacking when most of the population is asleep to a full blown siege with hundreds of players participating in the offense or defense for their realm. These are extraordinary fights that can last for hours. In the actual grand scheme, these wars never end. Every minute of every day is a war in this game. There is no time out and no reset.

As you can imagine this can also cause issues with lag. The intense graphics and the over whelming numbers of participants in these wars can cause fatal errors for the gaming servers themselves. Often crashes mid siege drive many players bat shit crazy and tends to flood Mythics complaint line.

The PvE side of the game is barely even a shadow of it's former self. Most of the game zones are empty with little hope for a new player to find friends to play with. Despite Mythic's best efforts, the PvE side of the game has little draw for the battle hardened player. Even epic battles with dragons and ogres can no longer pull the players to these zones.

The crafting system could use a full over haul as well. The time it takes to craft and the amount of money needed to buy supplies makes crafting a very painful ordeal. The one good thing I say is the enchanting craft is the best I've ever seen. It blows everything else out of the water. To be able to custom enchant your armor to be exactly what you need is awesome. It blows World of WarCraft enchants away.

Also, the fighting styles were beautiful. It wasn't a click it and forget it kind of game. You had reactionary styles and chains that you had to be paying attention to for them to work. You had to time it just right, if you dodged or blocked a whole other line of fighting styles would open up. You had to be on the ball to really excel at the fighting skills in this game.

All in all Dark Age of Camelot will be one of the most missed games when it finally disappears. For those of you who didn't try it, you don't know what you missed.