Play the best game ever?

Hells yes.

WOW, necro after necro.  Kudos for keeping hope alive.

Anyway, I think anybody who played DAOC during its heyday (myself included) would cheerfully agree that DAOC 2 would be about the best damned thing to come to MMOs since, well, DAOC.  Of course I would play, and pay, gladly.

Couple of hurdles though:

First, you have to get the band back together.  This, put plainly, isn't going to happen.  You take the talented folks who worked at Mythic over the life of the first game--a game that's now eleven years old--and track them all down today, and you'll find a lot of families that have completely relocated, some people in completely different industries.  To be fair, you don't have to recruit every Tom, Dick, and Harry that worked on the original, but you've got to at least get the idea people.  Jacobs has been out of EA's reach for a few years now, and Firor is working on TESO--which is to say, your competition (and that's as good an argument I've seen as to how TESO might actually be a spiritual successor anyway, but that's a different issue), to say nothing of all the talented designers, programmers, artists, writers, community folks, and others who made the game what it was, both good and bad.

But let's assume for sake of argument that as rumored among faithless rabid MMO fans, Jacobs has lost his vision, and no amount of electroconvulsive therapy could restore his competence as a game designer.  So you could--hypothetically anyway--get your dream team of developers and content producers to make this vision the genre tyrant it by all accounts ought to be.  And hey, I'm sure since things went so great the last time they worked on an MMO, let's see if we can get Salvatore and McFarlane on this thing too.  Cool.  Wait; who owns the license?  Right, EA.  So you've got your hand-picked staff who have all left their current employment, relocated cross-country, and assembled in a holy game design cloister, and they can't even turn on a computer until EA gives them the go ahead.  Anybody think they'll sell the rights?  Me neither.  So you're going to have to license it, and that's an absolute best-case scenario.  More likely you're going to end up brokering a kind of McQuaid-SOE eldritch abomination of a deal that puts you basically in the same position Mythic is in today, which is to say, you're EA's bitch.  Can't win'em all.

Well, maybe EA is having a good year, their coffers are stuffed due to all the money they're making from SWTO--um, I mean, uh... ... Madden, I guess. I dunno.  Let's just say they're happy.  So due to the devout consecrations of the DAOC vestals who have been flagellating themselves for the last decade in preparation for this perfect storm of difficulties, God has seen fit to part the waters, and you've actually got a green light to get this thing off the ground.  And why not, let's assume EA throws a big fat stack of cash in your lap to boot.

This game is actually going to happen:  So what does it look like?  If everybody on this one thread on mmorpg.com can agree on what aspects of DAOC should stay or go, I'll sell my house to pitch in on the DAOC 2 kickstarter.  I mean, we pretty much all agree that we want Old Frontiers, right?  'cause it was better, apparently, for reasons that are perfectly clear but no one can ever quite articulate.  DF stays, TOA goes, and really anything other than DF past Cata goes, right?  Surely we all agree that we can't have Vampiirs running around in DAOC 2.  Nobody ever liked them, right?  Too bad DAOC 2 won't have Warlocks.  I thought they were pretty neat... oh well!

So since there's no disagreement, we can count on everybody who ever played DAOC to sub right u--wait, we're having subscriptions, right?  I mean, there's literally no basis whatsoever to figure out how to do a cash shop for this game.  People have expectations based on the first game about what kinds of things should be accessible without additional cost.  And Lord knows we don't want to botch the job like SWT--ow! Shit!  Sorry EA Overlords, I meant, um, some other game with a total PR trainwreck on F2P.  Well... at least we can go the GW2 route, right?  Sell boxes and expansions and then nickel-and-dime folks for convenience in between, right?  I mean, we've got to turn a profit on this thing.  It's the most anticipated MMO in years.  And believe me, they'll pay.  Best case scenario, we hit the sweet spot like Riot did and have a sustainable revenue model that doesn't insult our playerbase.

Now you've got your game, your revenue model, and what do you know, you even made the development deadline the EA gods set for you.  This is going to be the greatest game that there ever was!

Shit, Titan just came out.

This is the good kind of necro.  Hell yeah I would pay for it and play it.  The same core game with updated visuals and interface mechanics would be amazing.

I really miss the time when DAoC was fresh, new and shiny.  I still go back now and then just to play for a while.  You can actually get it to look pretty nice if you force things through your drivers..  But that's still an opinion from someone that started playing RPGs when they were text-only. 

I know we'll never see a DAoC 2, but it's still cool to think about.

I will play it to test the game.

But I don't think Mythic will ever do a good job on DAOC 2.

Just look at WAR and SWTOR lol.

They just have a 1 hit wonder.

I'd play in a heartbeat!

Classic servers were sooo much fun but then everyone wanted to have bots again and they went caput :(