After feeling frustrated (and dare I say a little bored?) with World of Warcraft (WoW), we picked up three copies of Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs at the local Best Buy–one for myself, my wife, and the bot.

Surprisingly, Catacombs runs on all three PCs, including the aging Dell Inspirion 8100 laptop, with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce 2 Go 32 MB video card. Admittedly, on the laptop, it’s using all old graphics–but that’s a good thing!

New classes, new mechnics, same old DAOC
My wife was eager to try out a Valkyrie. They sounded like a lot of fun, like a Thane, but better. It turns out that the Valkyrie is a class very much designed to be used in a big group or RvR, as her best abilities only shine in those situations. Solo, she’s a mediocre Thane at best, and the Reaver is a much better hybrid melee class for many reasons (especially the weapon proc buff).

Disappointed in the Valkyrie, my wife next rolled up a Lurikeen Vampiir. It’s a very interesting class, challenging to play and a much better implementation of the “Rage” mechanic than that found in WoW. Of course, she likes the Vampiir best when the level 50 Shaman buffbot can tag along, but the Vampiir solos well in the instance task dungeons, even if some of the fights are a little close. (“How often did you miss on that fight?” “Over half the swings.”)

Where did that dungeon go?
“The dungeon is to the west of Howth.” Umm, the only thing over there is Spraggon Den, right? Well, the instance in Spraggon isn’t the special task dungeon. It turns out that the dungeon is up on a hill, west and a bit north of Howth, but not obvious unless you’ve (a) been in the beta or (b) been checking the fan sites. And the fan sites are drying up for some (WoW) reason. The NPCs, I suppose, were somewhat helpful, but the dungeon still remained obscure to us for half an hour, until I broke down and looked at the Vault board.

Overall, trying to find instances and just go to someplace interesting to kill stuff is not well done. I wandered through the Abandoned Mines in Midgard for 30 minutes before my wife finally told me to go to Jordheim and start over, that what I entered wasn’t the instance, but was a different dungeon. How was I to know?

Now that I know what to look for, I know what the instance should be. But I still don’t know how to get to Dark Spire, or many of the other interesting places. I’m sure those will come with experience, but I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction from the start. I think Mythic’s printed and website documentation are sorely lacking when it comes to getting you pointed in the right direction to finding your first instance.

I double dare you to aggro funny
Many aggro mobs in the old world dungeons didn’t attack us. In the instanced dungeons, mobs would come through walls, path oddly, and attack for no apparent reason. My wife’s hunter pet decided to loop around the room before attacking the mob.

I think the worst of it was the end mob in the Spindlehalla instance. We’d happily fought our way through almost every other mob in the dungeon. The boss mob, purple to 50, was at the top of one of the ramps we hate so much, but we had no clear line of sight to pull him, or even count the number of adds that came with him. We had to deal exclusively with proximity aggro, and since he is an arachite, he has the fun arachite logic of “Well, you’re rooted, so I can ignore you and go focus on the healer.” We had no real chance to find a good spot to pull from: once the arachite rooted my wife and I, he retreated. When root broke, he came back with two red friends (that, of course, we couldn’t see nor could we pull.) Our buffbot went down, then my Paladin, then my wife’s Hunter.

Instances reset if you’ve been absent (from a death, for instance) for more than five minutes. We made it back into Spindlehalla in record time, less than eight minutes. The dungeon we’d spent the last two hours clearing had completely repopped.

I logged out in disgust.

Oh my god, my character is ugly now!
Back when I rolled my Paladin, I created her as a Brit female because I hated the way the male Brits looked in plate. I’ve been happy with her appearance and performance until last night. I haven’t bothered picking a new face for her, which might help, but then again, everything looks kind of wrong.

Worse, though is what has happened to my wife’s Valkyn Hunter and her Hunter and Druid pets. Back when Gaheris started, we created Valkyns to play together, Jackal and Cheetah. Cheetah always looked very catlike to us, and we enjoyed the way she ran, fought, and appeared to the rest of the game.

It took five minutes to try to find the most catlike combo for the Valkyn, and she still looks like a human. It’s very disappointing.

I’m afraid to log in Jackal.

When rolling up her Lurikeen Vampiir, my wife had to face difficult choices in hair and appearance. She noted that it was very tough now to pick out something that looked nice. I’d thought WoW had some ugly character choices, but Catacombs has outdone them! No other game that I’ve played has come close to EQ2 in character customization options.

It’s the little things that count
We can hardly believe Mythic let this game go gold–there must have been some serious pressure to get this out on time, both from the production schedule and from competition (EQ2 and WoW–DAOC is down around 10,000 players in prime time from six months ago). As it is, the game now has a 53 MB patch after install (on four CDs), with more patches on the way to fix everything from animations to wierd polygon and texture placements.

• Valkyn cloaks flap when they run
• When you draw a bow, it sounds like you’re sitting on a leather sofa
• When you fire the bow, your character turns 30 degrees to the side to release the arrow–it makes pulls quite confusing even with /assist
• Block and parry both sound like a block of wood hitting a metal trashcan lid
• Running through shallow water sounds like running on wet plastic
• Vampiir don’t have long, pointy teeth
• Hunter, druid wolf pets, and Mad Scalars wolf form look simply horrible and run like they have hip displasyia

I’m sure you can find a much longer litany on message boards and fan sites. I understand how difficult it is to update the art for a game as large as DAOC, and to go through and fix skeletons and motion models, update the sounds, and still do it on a deadline. However, I feel strongly that we’re paying for a Catacombs beta–this is not what I expected from Mythic after over three years of successfully running DAOC.

I’ve got to like something, right?
I like the concept of instances: I have about two hours to play a night, and being able to go into a dungeon with my wife and bot for two hours and clear the place is fun. I wish the mobs dropped loot in addition to auralite. Both my wife and I have come to believe that instances in DAOC are hurting the game, and she wonders how a truly new player in the game could get along–there’s no one to talk to, no one to group with, and most of the lowbies are rerolls or alts of the new classes.

DAOC needed an engine update, and the PvE players needed a little attention after a year from the Trials of Atlantis release. Catacombs, though, is only a mediocre offering. The new character and mob models have, in many cases, removed a lot of the charm from the game (and certainly hurt my frame rates!), while offering little for characters who are at the end game.

I would have liked to see more end-game instanced dungeons, with chances to improve and replace pieces of my equipment, than what we received. And I definitely would have liked to see end-instance encounters that had clear lines of sight and rules of engagement: I don’t want the game trivialized, but I don’t want my investment in time wasted because of bad design or an unwinnable situation.

I give DAOC even odds of having us renew our subscription in December.