The expansion is rather unpolished and clunky in most parts. It’s kind of obvious that it was rushed out even if Mythic has never been known for its attention to the detail. Despite my gripes surpass right now the good parts, there are a few touches here and there that are outstanding and show what Mythic is able to do if put in the proper conditions and if there was more support for this game.
The rough highs and lows in the expansion show how they ran out of time and resources as Mythic’s interest move to new projects, sacrificing DAoC and its ambition. In particular the art assets show this ascending and descending quality and also show the difference from all the attentive work that was put in Catacombs and the lack of time, instead, about this last product (and *lots* of reused assets everywhere). The new art assets in the city of Camelot in particular are rather disappointing (missplaced textures, holes, badly joined polygons, lightmaps completely broken, fill-in textures, some uncomplete details and more, but i’m picky. I’ll show screenshots later.) while some of the new character models used for NPCs are mindblowing (even if rare). They are absolutely awesome and already showing an impressive difference in quality even from the models added in Catacombs less than a year ago (which I didn’t like, by the way, and still bugged and unpolished). If you press the “read more” link you can see some examples showing the king of Camelot (I actually hoped he was sitting as the Midgard’s king but I guess they ran out of time to do the proper animations) and one of the NPCs used in an instance which could surpass the photorealism of Half Life 2 and the upcoming Oblivion even at close distance.
Congratulations again to whoever textured and modeled them, that’s some quality work. With “Catacombs” they showed an unmatched art quality with the environments and the textures (that in this last exp are a bit deluding), instead with this expansion they show what they could be able to do even with the models.
Beside the art, there is a lot more I want to talk about. Some of the quests are pretty interesting and curious even if they always leave you wanting some more and digging a bit deeper in the interaction. Despite it’s not a big expansion and despite it could have even been pushed out as a “free expansion” if we were a few years ago, it shows interesting elements and some creativity. So lots of “pros” and “cons” as it always happen with this game :)
