Leveling, yes that hated word in MMOs now-a-days. If anyone remembers leveling in DAOC it was simple. Fifty levels maximum, you leveled from 1-40 in a long grind of chain pulling and questing. Then you hit the wall. Leveling from 40-50 took as long as it did to get from 1-40 and it was endless. You maybe got one third of a level a night if you were lucky and did not die, because if you died, then that experience was lost. This is the biggest area that an improvement could be made. Make the leveling faster, the end. The real pearl in the clam of DAOC was the RvR, so let players get there faster. Sure instance scenarios later came to the game, but we are talking about the core game here. With so many classes and races to choose from, there would be no reason to make leveling so difficult. The grind needs to end in all MMOs, but DAOC suffered from the same era as Everquest hell levels, which were much worse. Warhammer Online had some slow areas when you got to a higher level in the game. They still added in elements that made leveling a bit more fun. If DAOC 2 had a public quest system linked in with its realm pride you would see players helping each other much more. Add a reward for helping other players into this system and not only do you cut down on leveling, you give players a reason to help each other. In the end, they still need to take levels 40-50 and cut it by 60%...okay maybe 75%.

The last game mechanic to talk about is RvR. Realm vs. Realm combat is what made DAOC brilliant. The fact that you could enter into zones knowing the enemy was there and fight it out at all kinds of different levels. From huge zergs that clashed on the landscape, to the deadly eight-man groups which almost became street gangs looking for each other, RvR was an amazing system. The leader boards of DAOC gave rise to fame and fortune among players and soon the realms knew their heroes, but they also knew their enemies. In playing WoW, I have killed endless Alliance members. I could not tell you their names. In DAOC, not only did I know the top enemies I fought, I could tell you their names even today. This sort of thing is completely missing in MMOs today, having a sense of fame among your faction and even your enemies. Forget about a statue in town, people just want bragging rights. Another thing that benefited DAOC was keeping the servers small. Having the server numbers max out at five or ten thousand with three factions would mean only two to three thousand in a realm. The smaller numbers would give players a better social atmosphere to get to know each other.

We could go on and on with ideas and elements that would make Dark Age of Camelot 2 a great game. Darkness Falls was not even mentioned and it was one of the strongest tools in the game to promote leveling, realm pride, and RvR alike. There would be no Vault of Archavon in WoW if there was never a Darkness Falls in DAOC. Overall, Dark Age of Camelot did well because it was singular, it did not try to be something different for each player. It was an RvR game with a focus and designs in it to reach that focus. For me, it was never Trials of Atlantis which killed DAOC, although nothing was worse than leveling my epic axe in an underground ocean cave on big fish for six hours straight. Sorry, but Trials had some good points too, just not that one. When New Frontiers came out and RvR suddenly became all about castle sieges, the open warfare of RvR changed. Players went and re-rolled casters and archers in hopes to fight better, and the melee classes where lost. If there was ever a sequel to Dark Age, perhaps more open warfare over ruins or in towns would be fun rather than banging on a keep door for twenty minutes. First person shooters are fun because they create those scenarios, why fantasy MMOs do not is beyond me.

In the end, Dark Age of Camelot had some core game elements that made MMOs great. Those elements have been duplicated, but never in the same way. With MMOs constantly trying to be like World of Warcraft people forget that World of Warcraft was trying to be like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot when it launched. Sometimes looking back into the past can give us a great map to the future. Dark Ages was a great map that has not been used in almost ten years. It is time to start the exploration again.