I’ve been thinking very nostalgically lately of the days when I played Dark Age of Camelot.  I miss the fantasy setting.  I miss huge dungeons filled with nasty monsters.  I miss raids consisting of 200+ people.

And, while I’m not yet ready to re-subscribe…  I do want to play some kind of fantasy MMOG.

I’ve been playing Oblivion again, which has kind of an MMOG-ish feel to it…  But it isn’t quite the same.  I’ve gotten to level 30 very quickly, I’ve got more money than I can spend, and I’m basically an unstoppable killing machine.  There’s none of the you need 200 people to kill this thing feeling.

Then I saw that Lord of the Rings Online has gone “free to play”.

I played LotR:O a while back…  Tried one of the trial accounts…  And it was fun, but it wasn’t good enough to pay $15/month to keep playing.

There are plenty of restrictions on the free account.  Plenty of reasons to upgrade to a paid account.  But I’m thinking this might just get me my fantasy MMOG fix that I’ve been hankering for.

If not…  There’s always the Warhammmer Online “endless trial”…

Terri was digging through some old clothes recently, and found her old Dark Age of Camelot t-shirt.  This, of course, sparked all kinds of nostalgia.  We were reminiscing about her old PBAE Lurikeen Enchanter…  And the hours spent in Darkness Falls and the Tomte Caves…  How goofy Tir Na Nog was…

And it made me realize one of the things that is glaringly missing from most modern MMOGs – people.

Yes, of course there are other players out there.  There’ll be hundreds of folks logged into a given WoW server at any point in time.  And you frequently group up with other folks to go accomplish something difficult…  Like killing a big ol’ raid boss or something…

But these days MMOGs are almost entirely instanced.

If you put together a group and go to the Stockades it’ll be just your group in there.  The five of you in a virgin dungeon full of monsters and loot.  You can kill your way to the end, wipe everything out, collect all the loot…then leave, re-set the instance, and do it all over again.

Back in the day everything was a single, shared world.  If you put together a group and went into the Tomte Caves you wouldn’t be alone.  There’d be other groups in there.  You’d have to compete with other people for all the good stuff.  There’d be crowds gathered up around anything named or important.  There were areas that worked better than others…  Sweet spots where the monsters respawned quickly and there was still room to fight them…  And people would wait for hours to get into one of these camps.  And if your group had one of the better camps you’d stay there for hours, just grinding away experience.

Now, of course, that sounds pretty bad by modern standards.  The reason games are the way they are today is because people complained.  Folks didn’t want to spend hours upon hours grinding away in the same place, killing the same monsters.  Folks didn’t want to fight over choice locations, or wait hours for a special monster to re-appear.  Folks wanted a storyline and a feeling of progress.  They wanted to feel like they were the hero in the game.

So, modern games delivered by instancing just about everything.  Everyone gets their own dungeon.  Everyone gets their own cave full of monsters.  Everyone gets their own loot, their own special monsters, their own quest progress.

And at first it seems great.  You don’t have to fight with anyone…  Don’t have to worry about whether your favorite spot is already taken…  Don’t have to deal with people stealing your monsters…

But, in retrospect, there’s something missing.  There’s less interaction with other people.  And the world around you feels less organic.

It used to be that a dungeon housed a whole collection of nasty monsters.  They were fairly big, sprawling affairs.  Usually with several different distinct areas that each housed their own challenges.  You’d enter an area like Darkness Falls and there’d be dozens of people in there killing stuff.  You’d have to make your way past various monsters, threats, and obstacles just to get to the camp you were looking for.

And you’d have to talk to people more…  Find out whether a specific camp was taken, if a group had room for more, if someone knew how to get to a specific camp, how long they were planning on staying in that one place, if the rest of the group could come get, if you had to escort someone to safety…

And, frankly, the mindless grinding facilitated some great socializing.  You didn’t have to think too much about the gameplay mechanics.  You were pulling the same critters over and over again…  Killing them the same way over and over again…  It became very simple, very mechanical.  So you had plenty of time to chat with eachother.

These days you simply mark yourself as looking for a group…  Maybe yell in the LFG channel a couple times…  Then your group goes to the instance, runs through it from start to finish, and breaks up.  I’ve had groups where nobody said a single word the entire time.  Or, if they did speak, it was simply to indicate that they wanted a piece of loot or were ready for the next fight.

These days dungeons are relatively compact affairs.  They exist solely to house a single group for a single run.  They’re fairly linear – you enter here, kill your way through the dungeon, kill the boss, and leave.  They feel more like a plot device than an organic thing.  It isn’t a cave full of monsters that occupy this ecosystem…  It’s the lair of a specific badguy who has to be hunted down and killed.

Again, from a game mechanics standpoint, this is great.  You have far fewer annoyances.  You get all the monsters/loot/whatever you want.  And you can add all kinds of neat storyline stuff to the dungeon.

But from a socialization standpoint, this is horrible.  You used to get to know people that you never actually played with.  Even if you never grouped with them…  You still chatted with them to find out how long a certain area was going to be busy.  You ran past them on your way somewhere else.  You saved their ass when they pulled too much, or they saved yours when you took a wrong turn.

There was more of a sense of community.

These days you only really get to know the people you actually play with on a regular basis.  The folks who are in your group, fighting alongside you, on a nightly basis.  Everyone else kinds of fades away.

We got into EverQuest pretty late in the game’s life cycle.  That isn’t to say that SOE had dropped all support and moved on to greener pastures…  There were several expansion packs released after we started playing…  And the game was around for literally years after we quit…  But when we were just starting out with our level 1 characters most of the server had already hit the maximum level on several characters and they were happily raiding someplace impressive.

And there’s something interesting that happens as the population of a server moves towards the maximum level…  The lower level areas become ghost towns.  Hardly anybody hangs out around the newbie areas.  And anyone rolling up a new character will immediately head towards the greenest pastures there are.

What this meant in EQ is that when I rolled up an Erudin mage, I had the entire island to myself.  There was very literally nobody for miles around.  I did a few newbie quests out there just to get my feet under me, but there was nobody around to group with at all.  So I soon had to trek all the way to Freeport.

In Dark Age of Camelot, I never really saw that kind of migration away from anywhere.  The individual realms were relatively small compared to EQ, and each one only had the one capital city.  Sure…  As folks leveled up the various raid areas became very popular, and folks generally hung out in the capital cities instead of the newbie towns…  But I can’t think of any area that was genuinely deserted like in EQ.

Now I’m playing World of Warcraft, and I’ve started over from scratch again.  My druid is the first new character I’ve rolled up and played from level 1 in a while.  And, since I’m a Night Elf, I’m starting out in a fairly remote area.  And I’ve definitely noticed a migration away from certain areas in WoW.

There were a few people starting up new characters around Teldrassil – a few other low-level Night Elves like myself.  The capital city of Darnassus had a few people at the bank, a few more at the auction house, a few lowbies like me, and that’s about it.  I remember a time when Darnassus was absolutely packed with people.  Not anymore.

Dark Shore – the first area you see on the mainland – was absolutely deserted.  I’d see one or two people on their way through to some other place, but hardly anybody was actually hanging around and doing the quests.  And I didn’t hang around for long either – I went to Westfall to do my questing.

Westfall was a lot more crowded…  Plenty of people there on their way to the Deadmines, but relatively few people actually hanging around and questing.

Red Ridge was pretty busy.  A good number of people hanging around and questing there, but nowhere near the numbers that I saw when I was last there on my rogue.

Duskwood was also pretty empty.  Lots of folks flying into Duskwood on their way to Karazhan, but not so many hanging around to do quests.  I remember a time when you’d hear them announcing Stitches’ appearance every few minutes, but I didn’t hear it once the entire weekend.

It isn’t just the quest zones that are getting empty…  The capital cities are far less crowded than they used to be.  Ironforge is still packed – everyone is running between the auction house and bank.  It is obviously the favorite place to do your shopping.  But Darnassus and Stormwind are both a lot less crowded than I remember.  Darnassus is very nearly a ghost town.  Stormwind has a decent number of people in it…but nothing like it used to be.

Of course this isn’t all bad…  It’s much easier to find the monsters you need to kill for various quests.  You don’t get quite as many people badgering you for random groups or duels.  But it’s starting to feel a little empty…  I find myself looking forward to 70 not so that I can get into raid content or anything like that, but just so that I can see other people.

All of which makes me wonder what things are going to be like after the Lich King comes out…  We’ll have a new area to quest in, a new city to hang out in, new dungeons to raid in…  And the Death Knight is going to start at level 55…  There’ll be even few people hanging around in the old zones, and I doubt if many will hang around in Outland either.  Everyone’s going to migrate towards the new stuff again.

Someone in guild chat tonight mentioned the new expansion for Dark Age of Camelot: Labyrinth of the Minotaur.  Doesn’t look terribly impressive to me…  Yeah, I know, I don’t even play DAoC anymore.  I’ve become a bit of a WoW snob.  But they just added basically one dungeon, one race, and one class for each realm.  Doesn’t seem like much to me when compared with the older Shrouded Isles or Trials of Atlantis expansions.  Or the Burning Crusade stuff we’ve got coming in WoW.

Terri’s been playing with the character creation options in Catacombs for a little while now, and I’ve been peering over her shoulder. For the most part, I’m not terribly impressed. Yes, the characters have many more polygons than they used to and look generally better…but they still don’t have the same life/personality that the characters do in WoW. They seem very cold and stiff…more like a statue than a living person.

While Mythic stated several times over that they were going to update the old world terrain/architecture/whatever to bring it up to date…I didn’t see any signs of that. All the old world stuff I saw (in and around Mag Mell and Tir Na Nog) was the same old stuff I’d been seeing for years. And now that we’ve got the high-poly character models running around all that old-world geography, it just looks even worse. I never noticed how chunky and blocky the stuff was in TNN, until last night when I saw these new character models running around.

As for the character models themselves…well, I’m really not all that impressed. Sure, there’s more options to play with, you can really customize a character. But I just don’t like how they look. Dwarves, in particular, look pretty bad. The basic structure of their body changed. It doesn’t look like a dwarf anymore, now it looks more like a monkey. Valkyns don’t look hairy anymore. Yes, they’ve got some kind of texture to their skin…but it doesn’t look like a shaggy coat of fur anymore. The Sylvans also look far less like trees, and more like humans carved out of wood.

I also think the ability to change your character’s appearance whenever you want to is just silly. In CoH it made sense…you were wearing a costume…go to a costume shop and change it. It works. In DAoC you aren’t wearing a costume – that is supposed to be your character’s real face/eyes/hair/whatever – but you are allowed to change it anyway. I could understand letting people change their hair color or style…but letting people adjust the size and shape of their nose, eyes, jaw, ears…that’s just wrong. What, did DAoC get a shipment of plastic surgeons?

To be fair, I didn’t see any of the new content. Terri was just playing around with existing characters in the old world. I didn’t get to see any of the new classes or new areas. Maybe they’re more impressive than what I was seeing. But, frankly, from what I did see, I’m just not interested. No surprise, really, because I’m absolutely hooked on WoW. But I really thought Catacombs would be more impressive than this.

Terri just got an email letting her know that she’s been accepted into the Catacombs beta… Kind of funny, since she’s not at all interested in DAoC anymore. Ah well, it’ll be interesting to see what Catacombs is actually like, and I know she’s been interested in the new character options.

All I’ve been playing lately is World of Warcraft. I got into the beta about a month ago, and after neglecting it for a couple weeks I’m absolutely hooked. The graphics, the economy, the lack of downtime, the tradeskills, the character classes…all of it is very refreshing after playing Dark Age of Camelot for a couple years. Don’t get me wrong, I still thoroughly enjoy DAoC, but there are things that could be improved on – and WoW has, in my opinion, improved on them.

Unfortunately, this means that I’m basically done with City of Heroes. We wound up buying three copies of CoH – that’s about $150 – for a game that Terri and I really aren’t playing anymore. I do enjoy CoH, and I’d still be playing it, but there just doesn’t seem to be much point. When WoW comes out (supposedly in November) there’s no way I’d keep a CoH account going. Seems like a waste to level up characters in CoH, pay that monthly fee, only to plan on dropping it in a few months. So, for now, I’m just playing DAoC and the WoW beta.