Okay fine. No permit. See if I care.
And welcome back to part three of my thrilling series on expansions for MMOs. I realize it’s been a bit of a slog – just remember, the longest post is probably yet to come. In Wednesday’s post, I went over the first two expansions for Dark Age of Camelot and the different advantages and weaknesses that they had for MMOs. Today, I’m going to go over the other three expansions that Dark Age released.
The third expansion for Dark Age of Camelot was Catacombs. This was a monumental expansion for the game, because it provided a completely new graphics engine for the game, including new character models and a ton of new art for existing monsters and regions in the game. This is significant because of the drastic leap between what the characters looked like, prior to Catacombs, player characters looked like this. After Catacombs, they had been updated to look like this – the difference is striking.
Catacombs also followed the trend of Shrouded Isles and Trials of Atlantis and added a bunch of new zones to the world. However, these zones were all underground, and disconnected from each other. While the Trials of Atlantis zones were large and sprawling, these were cavernous and filled with tunnels, and you had to load each zone individually. These zones did introduce a lot of new content for players to experience, but each zone was completely disconnected from each other. The overall effect was a lot of new areas to explore without much reason to do so, and the zones never became very popular.
It also introduced the first “instanced” dungeons for Dark Age of Camelot – this is an area that you can go to, and only you and your friends can interact with it. If someone else tries to enter, they are put into their own version of this dungeon. This is usually done to allow players a chance to get to bosses that drop special items not otherwise available to players. However, in Dark Age of Camelot, these dungeons served as the only way to get “Aurulite,” which is used to buy special armor that was more useful than anything else you could easily buy in the game. These dungeons were initially well-recieved, but over time they spread out the population so much that players stopped going into them.
Catacombs also introduced new classes, and this was probably the biggest failing of the expansion. These classes were horrendously imbalanced, and are all still (six years later) so difficult to balance that they are considered vastly overpowered. These classes, along with everything else, meant that Catacombs was viewed as a very lackluster expansion – people were glad that there was an expansion, but there were a large amount of problems with it. The only major thing that people liked out of the expansion was the new graphics engine, and many players still used the older game clients to reduce lag in PvP.
The fourth expansion to Dark Age of Camelot was “Darkness Rising.” This expansion was notable in that it was only a fraction as large as the previous three – only one new zone was added to the game, and it was only available to players doing a special quest that they could pick up. However, it did allow players to finally enter the throne rooms of their realm’s king and talk to him, and they could become a Champion of the Realm. This allowed them to start earning Champion Levels, which you could start once you had hit the level cap. These champion levels were very well-received by players, as it gave them something else to strive towards once they had hit the max level. It also gave you some limited ability to train abilities not usually available to your class, which allowed players a new level of freedom for planning their RvR groups.
This expansion was well-received for Dark Age, but probably was not worth the price that was charged for it. It didn’t have nearly enough new content to justify an entire expansion being dedicated to it – it felt more like a large patch to the game, rather than a full expansion. For many games, this expansion would have been received poorly, but it was one of the most successful for Dark Age where players received a benefit to their existing gameplay without a lot of extra hoops they had to jump through to get it.
The fifth and final expansion for Dark Age of Camelot was called Labyrinth of the Minotaur. It introduced the minotaur race to all three realms. While this race is my personal favorite, most players of the game feel that it is completely thematically inappropriate for the game as a whole. It also introduced a new class that was shared across all three realms – this class is still not very powerful, and since it is the only class that has exact duplicates in the other realms, many players feel like it was thrown in at the last minute.
The Labyrinth zone was also added, and features an enormous dungeon made up of truly labyrinthine corridors and a ton of PvE content. This dungeon is also accessible by all three realms at the same time, and features a central room where players are constantly fighting each other. The Labyrinth itself was a mixed success. It provided players the fastest access to RvR combat in the game – you could teleport straight to the center room, and almost immediately find someone else to fight. In every other zone, you had to run a significant distance, even using some of the teleportation available to you, before you could find anyone to fight. Because of this, a lot of people moved exclusively to the Labyrinth to fight, and there were less people in other zones to keep RvR going strong. Additionally, the PvE encounters in the zone are fantastically well-done, but because of the constant threat that you are under from enemy players, most players don’t even attempt to do these encounters.
Labyrinth was viewed by most as a last-ditch effort to release a full expansion to Dark Age of Camelot, and due to a number of fairly questionable design decisions was exactly that. Players either loved or hated the Labyrinth itself, and this polarized the already divisive community even further. Many players felt like it wasn’t worth an expansion, and like Darkness Rising, it probably should have just been released as a content patch instead of a full expansion.
Overall, the expansions of Dark Age of Camelot give a good spectrum of the things that a game expansion can do. None of them were perfect, and many of them introduced more problems than they solved, but every one had some good features that might be helpful to consider when designing an expansion for any future MMO.
