Monday, May 10, 2010

DAOC - Exploring the Early Levels

Aside from the occasional diversion of Free Realms, Dark Age of Camelot continues to be my only MMO. While I've never been in more than one guild at a time in any MMO, it seems to be a very common practice here, or at least on the Gaheris server. Part of that is because you can have up to 30 alts. Another factor is that most of the guilds on the server seem to be part of one of two alliances. Alliance chat functions just like guild chat and has its own separate tab where you can see who is online. It's one big happy family as everyone has alts spread throughout guilds in the alliance.

When I first returned a couple months ago, I had alts in two guilds--one with a couple members logging in here and there, and the other with no signs of life for the last three years. Shortly after resubscribing I also joined a more active guild with my main. Two weeks ago my husband received an email from Mythic that since there has been no active guild leader, as the most recent character logged in, he had been promoted to guild leader. While I knew it was their policy to do this, with their small staff I was surprised they are still actively managing the comings and goings of guild players. So now we have a guild! And housing nut that I am, the first order of business was to spend most of the rest of my puny fortune and set up a guild house.



With access to a new guild house, guild port stones, and the ability to enable guild bonuses...along with needing a break from farming seals, glass, and scales on my main...I decided to start an alt. Having a level 50, I could have taken a shortcut and used the /level feature which bumps me to level 20 from the start. But I wanted to re-experience the old stuff and without the tutorial. Never having played a class with a persistent pet, I decided on a Cabalist and started my journey in Camelot Hills. The quests here are much more enjoyable than the tutorial and really offers more to get you into the setting of the realm vs. the generic tutorial. Early on there were more quests than I could possibly complete and I was having to delete several as I out-leveled them.



Coming from Camelot, I wanted to focus all my experiencing in Albion. In the mid-teens the quests began to dwindle some so I thought it was time for an old-fashioned dungeon crawl. Mobs spawn a bit too quickly in the open dungeons, though, so it was more of a dungeon camp than crawl.



With bags completely full, I headed back to the city to sell and continued my leveling in the Roman Aqueducts, which is part of The Catacombs expansion. Quests were plentiful once again. The Catacombs are some of my favorite zones. Visually they are really neat to explore and the dungeon instances found within them drop items which you can turn in for armor. I did get in over my head here though, and suffered my first death shortly after taking this shot.



So far I'm having a ton of fun with the Cabalist and revisiting zones. Next stop will be Shrouded Isles.

3 comments:

Blue Kae said...

I'm impressed by the screenshots, it looks like the game has aged better than I feared. While EQ1 was my first MMO played, DAoC was my for MMO loved. My plate is too full right now with other games but I do want to go back and revisit Midgard at some point.

Yeebo said...

I'm in the same boat. EQ was my first, but DAoC was the first one I enjoyed. I'm always impressed by how well the game holds up when I go back to visit. It has aged a lot better than most from that era.

Aspendawn said...

When I first played about four years ago, they had already upgraded the graphics so I never saw it in its original form.

Then and still today I think it's a very pretty game, especially at different times of the day when you can catch the sun rising or setting. You go to the main cities and there's so much detail in the structures. I'm constantly taking screenshots.