Deliviss
08-17-2008, 03:56 PM
This is a longish post but i hope it will ressonate with the old DAoCers...
It has been many years since we assembled together in the battlefields of DAoC’s RvR zones. Most of us remember those times as the best gaming experiences we ever had. The level of cooperation, organization, leadership, social cohesion, and realm pride were orders of magnitude higher than any game has been able to produce before or since DAoC.
Since then we have been searching and waiting patiently for another game to come along to recreate that gaming experience. So far none has come even close. Some of us have been playing World of Warcraft in the meantime. The trouble is that World of Warcraft calls itself an MMO – it is not. MMOs before WoW were not quite mainstream; I remember having to explain to most non-MMO PC gamers what an MMO was. WoW made MMOs mainstream and it became the standard on which most future MMOs would be based. The trouble was it was not really an MMO game.
WoW is basically battle.net 2.0. When you log onto battle.net you enter a chat room with a bunch of people and you have a name tag with an icon. When you log onto WoW you enter a large animated 3D chat room (like Orgrimmar) with a name tag and a 3D avatar. If you want to play a game on battle.net you enter one with just you and a small group of friends where no one can disturb you while you play in an instance of a certain map while many other small isolated groups of people are playing on in their own instance of it. When you want to play a game in WoW you do the same thing; bring 4-24 of your friends along into an instance of a map isolated from everyone else on the server. If WoW is an MMO then Warcraft 3 on battle.net is an MMO.
Just to be clear, WoW is an incredibly designed, amazing game. It just isn’t an MMO. More importantly because it masquerades as one and is so successful every gaming company looking to make an MMO tends to follow their model, making everything instanced. Furthermore, since it is the game that popularized the genre and brought it to the mainstream, most MMO players think of WoW as the definition of an MMO rather than the game that destroyed the original concept, which was an open ended, socially emergent, massively multiplayer game.
Those of us who played MMOs before WoW, especially DAoC, have extreme painful nostaligia for the days when a single recognized leader could signal a Call to Arms and everyone would glady drop whatever they were doing to defend a keep or relic - not for purely personal gain but for the good of the realm. We miss the days when the sort of dubious characters one sees in WoW on a regular basis – immature, arrogant, obnoxious, egotistical, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, loud mouthed, petulant pricks (is that an exhaustive list?) - did not and indeed could not exist in an MMO game because the game mechanics enforced social cohesion to such a degree that made behavior like that impossible. Anyone behaving like an asshole in DAoC would immediately be unable to accomplish any objectives in the game, they could not come to raids, or get any help in PvP either because they had to be in good standing with the community. We miss the days where virtually every top level person knew every other top level person, every guild leader knew every other guild leader and would be constant cooperation to pursue the goals and needs of the realm as a whole.
I hope that Warhammer does bring back that intense social solidarity that defined our DAoC experience. We have been waiting patiently for long enough. It is interesting too that a game like WoW is a better game in almost all objective measures compared to DAoC. WoW has much better class balance, better interfacing, and so on. Yet everyone I know who has played DAoC with us would give up any game, no matter how good it was if they could get a game that was horrible in all aspects except that it had a) a DAoC style social system, and b) meaningful RvR.
I must say it is also rather romantic that hundreds us from our old server liked our time in DAoC so much that we are trying to reassemble after many years of quietly waiting.
It has been many years since we assembled together in the battlefields of DAoC’s RvR zones. Most of us remember those times as the best gaming experiences we ever had. The level of cooperation, organization, leadership, social cohesion, and realm pride were orders of magnitude higher than any game has been able to produce before or since DAoC.
Since then we have been searching and waiting patiently for another game to come along to recreate that gaming experience. So far none has come even close. Some of us have been playing World of Warcraft in the meantime. The trouble is that World of Warcraft calls itself an MMO – it is not. MMOs before WoW were not quite mainstream; I remember having to explain to most non-MMO PC gamers what an MMO was. WoW made MMOs mainstream and it became the standard on which most future MMOs would be based. The trouble was it was not really an MMO game.
WoW is basically battle.net 2.0. When you log onto battle.net you enter a chat room with a bunch of people and you have a name tag with an icon. When you log onto WoW you enter a large animated 3D chat room (like Orgrimmar) with a name tag and a 3D avatar. If you want to play a game on battle.net you enter one with just you and a small group of friends where no one can disturb you while you play in an instance of a certain map while many other small isolated groups of people are playing on in their own instance of it. When you want to play a game in WoW you do the same thing; bring 4-24 of your friends along into an instance of a map isolated from everyone else on the server. If WoW is an MMO then Warcraft 3 on battle.net is an MMO.
Just to be clear, WoW is an incredibly designed, amazing game. It just isn’t an MMO. More importantly because it masquerades as one and is so successful every gaming company looking to make an MMO tends to follow their model, making everything instanced. Furthermore, since it is the game that popularized the genre and brought it to the mainstream, most MMO players think of WoW as the definition of an MMO rather than the game that destroyed the original concept, which was an open ended, socially emergent, massively multiplayer game.
Those of us who played MMOs before WoW, especially DAoC, have extreme painful nostaligia for the days when a single recognized leader could signal a Call to Arms and everyone would glady drop whatever they were doing to defend a keep or relic - not for purely personal gain but for the good of the realm. We miss the days when the sort of dubious characters one sees in WoW on a regular basis – immature, arrogant, obnoxious, egotistical, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, loud mouthed, petulant pricks (is that an exhaustive list?) - did not and indeed could not exist in an MMO game because the game mechanics enforced social cohesion to such a degree that made behavior like that impossible. Anyone behaving like an asshole in DAoC would immediately be unable to accomplish any objectives in the game, they could not come to raids, or get any help in PvP either because they had to be in good standing with the community. We miss the days where virtually every top level person knew every other top level person, every guild leader knew every other guild leader and would be constant cooperation to pursue the goals and needs of the realm as a whole.
I hope that Warhammer does bring back that intense social solidarity that defined our DAoC experience. We have been waiting patiently for long enough. It is interesting too that a game like WoW is a better game in almost all objective measures compared to DAoC. WoW has much better class balance, better interfacing, and so on. Yet everyone I know who has played DAoC with us would give up any game, no matter how good it was if they could get a game that was horrible in all aspects except that it had a) a DAoC style social system, and b) meaningful RvR.
I must say it is also rather romantic that hundreds us from our old server liked our time in DAoC so much that we are trying to reassemble after many years of quietly waiting.