Third batch of screenshots (previous two are here and here), this time coming from the big dungeon concluding the second chapter of the expansion.
I wrote “pitch black” in the title because that’s what I saw in the game. I had to play the whole session with my monitor brightness turned up because I couldn’t see shit (add Levar Burton and Doom 3 jokes here). The player’s torch is also completely broken as it happens with 95% of the content in this expansion and following an awful trend that Mythic brings on till the release of its first expansion.
This is also part of a huge problem of the whole game that was never addressed. The night is too dark and if you want to play you HAVE TO push up the brightness on your monitor. At a “normal” setting the game would be unplayable and the result is that all the colors are washed out. So, the players bring up the brightness more and more and Mythic makes environment more and more dark, breaking completely the player’s torch so you don’t have even a workaround.
This pisses me off beyond what you can imagine. If I’m given a tool like a button to switch the light on around the character because the game is too dark, I WANT IT TO WORK. And instead it is broken in most of the places you go. Some places are too bright, some places are too dark, some places the torch works, some places the torch works only a little, some places it doesn’t work at all, some places it works only on half of the polygons… MAKE UP YOUR MIND! I want a fucking consistent behaviour. Trying to code the game in a constant way and not with all these different quirks and glitches. If you give the player a way to see when it’s too dark, you have to make it ALWAYS work. Not work in some cases and not in some other in a completely arbitrary way. If you want to set yourself what the player can see, just remove the torch altogether and tweak the values as you see fit, like it happens in WoW where the designer can set which place is dark and which is more bright without COMPLETELY FORBIDDING THE PLAYER TO SEE.
Anyway, the dungeon would be pretty if you could see it. In these screenshots I had to push up the brightness by 30% and I hope I reached a good compromise. If you still cannot see shit just imagine how it could be in the game.
Then we arrive at the comments about the actual content. We have all these great places, and despite they are ridden with glitches (that I try to not show in these screenshots), they show a lot of work and dedication from the artists. Well, all this wonderful art (that in this case maybe resebles a bit too much to Quake 2, it’s true..) is simply wasted. We have this rather big dungeon that would make WoW and EQ2 pale. But it’s just there as a background scenery. It glides by. It has more impact and relevance if shown on a website through screenshots than playing inside it in the game.
Why? Because there is very, very little gameplay in this dungeon. And in particular it is exactly the same gameplay that the game offered four years ago. Most of the dungeon is empty and there are only three four types of mobs casually placed just to make you waste some time moving from point A to point B. The most advanced new thing that vaguely resembled to a scripted encounter is about a group of three mobs that rushes in (buggedly) while you are sitting and medding after a previous big encounter. Nothing else. You have to go south to kill Mob A, go north to kill Mob B and go middle to kill Mob C. With some critters in the way. Dungeon done.
We have new places, the art in DAoC has greatly advanced and I really think that it tops whatever this genre has to offer. Actually I think it’s superior to every other game *by far* (despite the glitches and general lack of polish). But the gameplay hasn’t changed in the slightest. EVERY mob moves and fight exactly in the same way. What changes is the variables attached always to the same dull patters (health, damage, if aggro or not, resists and so on). The pathing is still exactly the same of four years ago, completely broken, jerky and unrealistic. The mobs keep aggroing through walls and are completely unaware of the environment. There is zero gameplay involving the perception of the space. You still fight in a flat field from the gameplay perspective. And also all the encounters are just set in the exact same way. There’s a room, a few mobs randomly placed and all aggroing if you go close enough, moving to you and hitting politely.
Every single mob in the game behaves in the same (buggy) way. You can fight inside a small tower, inside a mansion, in a keep, in a tunnel and so on. You can fight mobs with different shapes and colors but STILL, nothing changes AT ALL. They all behave the same and completely ignore every kind of environment, situation or specific nature.
Now I hate to keep bringing up WoW but come on. This is PvE and PvE needs some sort of identity to be fun. If in WoW you go fight in Gnomeragan it’s not the same if you go fight in Zul Farrak. All the mobs behave and must be dealt with in a psecific way. The places are different and you need to learn the environments. You play in and *with* the spaces. The layout matters in the gameplay and your journey through a dungeon makes sense both from the story perspective and the impact on the gameplay. I’m the first to say that WoW PvE isn’t that deep but at least it offers different types of encounters and situations. Maybe the difference is mild but at least it exists.
In DAoC all these new, fancy environments just sort of sit there. They don’t build a *world* they just decorate the margins. They lack an use.
Look at the second screenshot here. See that tower and the big house? I like them but they are *empty*. No really. The artists put a lot of work on those and the interiors are fully decorated. There are a few screenshots showing the inside of the tower. But, still, it is empty. Nothing goes on in there. You would expect to have fun and involving fights in that complex environment. But there’s simply nothing (probably also because the pathing would crap the whole place if they tried to put something to fight in there).
This is why every player trying DAoC thinks that its PvE sucks. Because there’s zero gameplay. Zero. Or the places are just there to decorate the environment, completely empty and missing *any purpose*, or they have a few critters randomly placed that follow one single, four years old pattern that you grinded for weeks, months and years. OF COURSE we are bored. Mythic is keeping reskinning the same stuff to feed it us again. Some can endure this, some others not. Should I bring up Raph again? We (players) can see past the pretty screenshots. We can see that there’s nothing new past them.
So, I’ve shown what a great art DAoC can deliver but, honestly, there isn’t much more to see in the game than what I’m putting here. I’ve shown some of the new models and still the gameplay is completely dull and forgivable. Those models, despite they look great on a static screenshot, still have applied the same ugly animations that the game had at release and, in many cases, they did not even care to update the equipment they use. And then there’s the craptacular pathing, aggro system and general gameplay that hasn’t even minimally moved a tiny step forward.
Pretty DAoC needs a soul (and new pathing code and animations). But then I’m pretty sure that all the programmers have been moved to the greener pastures (Warhammer). And what DAoC gets is the pretty reskin.
Quick note: the broken pieces of stone you see on the ceilings oscillate in the air with a nifty effect. While the red light coming from the cracks is, instead, fixed. Which is sad because it’s since SI that DAoC has the technology to show animated lights, and still it never uses it beside a few exceptions.
