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The product is just plain BAD

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: April 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Reading the review written below this one was rather amusing. The writer seems to think that the reason DAoC: Trials of Atlantis has been reviewed badly on here is just because disgruntled people are upset and have an axe to grind, so they came here.

The reviews written here at Amazon for Mythic's other Camelot products, the original DAoC game, and the Shrouded Isles expansion pack, both received 4-star reviews here. The poor reviews Trials of Atlantis is receiving here is NOT due to sour grapes on the part of some people who play DAoC, because this same community came here to sing the praises of the prior 2 Camelot products which were well designed and well received.

The reason Trials of Atlantis is receiving bad reviews here is because it is *just plain bad*. The new artifacts and master levels that you need to acquire in order to play the game competitively are not designed with FUN in mind, and fun is why people play a GAME. Instead, the process to acquire them is a painful, tedious process similar to having teeth pulled.

New players are well-advised to *stay away* from DAoC if they don't already play, because the time needed to expend in order to catch up to where other people already are is beyond your wildest dreams. The expansion is chock-full of bugs and frustrations to boot. This expansion was so bad, though, that it managed to anger a good portion of the people who were already playing, and drive them to quit.

How to ruin a game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: November 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

It's beyond my comprehension how anyone can shill this abomination unless they are a mythic employee.

You've already seen the complaints, let me assure you they are not ill founded. Mythic is totally out of touch with its player base. For two years I played this (formerly great) game, had 50's in all realms, and tried to get my friends involved.

Now I'm telling everyone to run, not walk, away from this game.

DAOC is nothing but an exercise in futility now. Wait for World of Warcraft and save yourself a lot of time, money and unnecessary pain.

Trials of Atlantis heads your 50 back to the grind of PvE

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: December 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This is a disappointment for those who expected just a good time and maybe something like SI where you could take any tune and find new places to level. If you like EverQuest, you'll like TOA because that's what you'll be reminded of. Spending 12 hours waiting for certain mobs to spawn and then someone else coming along and killing them.
Bugs, the expansion is full of them and /appeal does nothing, a CSR will tell you "try again".
One poster states he spent 16 hours waiting for a spawn, didn't get the article, then spent another 16 h waiting for a CSR who told him to do it again.
Think you can just ignore all of that? Well, TOA adds master levels to 50's and that would give you an advantage in RvR.
Thought once you hit 50 you were done with the PvE grind, not with this expansion, this sends you right back to the same thing and you can't even do it solo. Many you can't even do with a small group. Often you need battle groups with a lotta people and now you have to find them. Oh yes, that's after you've spent all kinds of time trying to get where you need to go and then you find you need to wait for hours and hours.
Some of your group gets antsy, some just have to get on with real life and leave.
The low population servers are out of luck from the beginning, and once you've done the trials are you going to go back and do them again with your alts? These trials make epics look like a piece of cake.
I don't understand what this company was thinking, no one at DAoC plays in hopes of finding an EQ or AC environment.
DAoC is founded on realm wars and RvR is what draws people to this game. At one time realm abilities were introduced.
People racked up realm points that gave them an advantage in RvR HOWEVER they did that while RvR - something that was enjoyable to those who play this game.
Moral in the game is low because people are up against the wall to find someone to help with the ML and many people are looking for people to RvR with, but they find most are in Atlantis (NOT because they want to be-but you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.)
Atlantis could have been a lot of fun, it could have held a lot of fun for lowbies and anyone who just wanted new places to level. It COULD have added dynamite quests for all with great rewards.
I don't think the expansion is as bad as the idea of the master levels, and because so many people are upset about that entire idea, people I know are totally disappointed overall.
If mythic can pull of the next expansion "frontiers" in which they supposedly fix RvR play, they might keep customers, but right now the game is just going downhill and TOA was a shot in the foot.

Dark Age of Camp-a-lot

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: November 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This expansion is an enormous, unimaginative PvE timesink. Clearly, Mythic is trying to copy Verant's formula for success -- long respawn times, long travel times, long "farming", long XP treadmills, and lots of raid-scale encounters. The idea is to make PvE "challenging" so that it takes players many months (of 12.95$) to complete. I say "challenging," but the truth of the matter is that ToA will not test your skill, only your patience.

For anyone who plays DAoC for RvR, Trials of Atlantis is a crushing disappointment. Not only is it entirely PvE-oriented, but it introduces a multitude of new (untested) abilities and equipment. Early indications are that many of these new abilities/items are "must-haves" if you want to remain competitive in the RvR end-game. So unless you are willing to buy the xp, spend hundreds of hours on mindless PvE treadmills, and wait months and months for patches to fix all the bugs & balance issues, you might be best off cancelling your DAoC subscription now! World of Warcraft looks pretty nice!

Highly disappointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: December 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I checked out the customer reviews before buying this product, but decided to take a chance anyway. BIG mistake.

I am so disappointed in what Mythic has done to Dark Age of Camelot by releasing this exansion.

The expansion assumes you will have 8 or more friends online running with you, or you can't really do anything.

The quests and objectives are tedious, take a lot of time, and highly frustrating. Expect to spend most of your time waiting for other players to group with you, or waiting on steps to reset, or recover from dying again and again. You will stand around a lot doing nothing but wait.

Hats off to the power gamers that put up with all of this, but it isn't for me. Next time I will listen to what others are saying about a game before I buy it.

Purchasing "Trials of Atlantis" has led to me canceling my account with Mythic, yes it was that bad.

Mythic has painted themselves into a corner with ToA

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

On the positive side, the graphics upgrade in ToA was nice, and the addition of a new race to each realm was nice as well. The new treasures and complex quests are also nice. What wasnt so nice was the GIGANTIC and necessary time sink that was built in with this expansion to characters that were already level 50.

Mythic assured everyone that the Master Levels and Artifacts would have little effect on RvR. This is not true at all. There are all sorts of occurances happening daily in RvR and Mythic has begun "balancing" the Master Levels and the artifacts.

The problem with this is, Mythic has had a horrible time trying to balance classes and realms. Huge gutting, sweeping and often un-thought-out changes to a class or skill can seem to happen at any time. Many people just "reroll" and start a new character. Because of this, many servers have realms that are lop-sided when it comes to RvR because many people move to a realm with a class or combination of classes that are viable in RvR therefore unbalancing the realms.

Since the classes were never "optimally" balanced to begin with, Mythic added Realm Abilites to attempt to balance the classes and make RvR more balanced. Well, this didnt work either, Many of the realm abilities are overpowered (just waiting for "adjustment"), and many are useless (ToA is the ONLY reason anyone would waste points and spec in Mastery of Water).

Now the Master Levels and Artifacts (that have "effects") are proving to be "difficult" for Mythic and changes have already begun.

All of this really would not be a big deal if it wasnt for the time involved. Getting to 50 to begin with is not horribly difficult, but it will take some commitment. Most classes can even eventually make it to 50 solo.

Getting Realm Abilities can take a little longer as it requires Realm vs Realm participation and the amount of "Realm Points" needed to gain "Realm Abilites" goes up with each level - Basically more leveling. This by itself is not a big deal, many people still RvR'ed having low realm abilites and are slowly building them up.

Now add Trials of Atlantis. The majority of the content in Trials of Atlantis is for toons that are level 50 although there is some stuff that is a little lower in level, it should also make a good area for groups in the 40's.

ToA basically turned this game into EQ light. This would be cool too, if I hadnt left EQ because of the time sink involved in the game. I will never have the time needed to achieve some of the Master levels and artifacts that WILL be needed in RvR.

Some Master Levels and Quests can actually be solo'd but many require huge groups. Many of the dungeons are "locked" meaning you cant enter without a certain Master Level. There are still "pathing issues" and other bugs that havent been removed since beta and because of the "riddle-like" nature of ToA, it isnt always apparent that it is a bug.

Again, the problem is not really just the time involved, but the combination of the time involved and the necessity of actually doing it if you want to RvR and stay competitive in RvR.

At this point Mythic has painted itself into a corner. Casual players are mad because of the time sink involved, many are leaving. They really cant take away the time sink now as many people have actually trudged through some of the master levels. People that just enjoyed the RvR aspect of the game are mad because now they have to spend hours in PvE again to stay competitive in RvR. They are making many of the powergamers that have put the hours into ToA mad because they are nerfing the master levels and artifacts.

Mythic has announced that they will be redoing all of the Realm Abilites now and giving "redone" versions of popular realm abilites like Bunker of Faith to every realm. Because of the foundation of this game with different classes in different realms having different stats and skills as well as how the specific realm classes team together for utility, this is bound to change the balances again, leading to more class and realm specific changes which up to this point Mythic has not been the best at handling.

If you have the time, this game can be a lot fun even with the problems it has. The Player vs Monster and Player vs Player(RvR) balance of the game is truly unique and a lot of fun. I would expect what you have "worked" for in-game to change though as this has always been the norm. If you are just looking for something to pass the time before WoW or EQ2, I would consider the gold edition first and not bother with the ToA expansion until you feel you are truly commited.

Great Ideas - Horribly Done

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 10, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The launch of DAoC was beyond words. They seemed to know what a player base wanted... until they released Trials of Atlantis.

Pros: The ideas behind this expansion were great. And the graphics they implemented are awesome. Five new zones to explore, and areas more driven to the players who have been around for a long long time.

Cons: The concepts that actually made it into this were horribly done. The time it takes to complete any one thing is at least 1 - 5 hours. ( Some take multiple days of that much time. ) Those who are new to DAoC, will find this expansion completely useless until they have reached their highest levels.

All in all, I've been playing this since it's release - and ToA is far more frustrating then fun. There is a reason a great deal of the fan base has moved on to other games.

If you enjoy months of killing critters over and over - to get to the highest level - to find 29 other people who are willing to help you do something they've probably done 6 or 7 times already - just so you can have a chance at competeing - then this is definately for you. Otherwise, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

Don't bother

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: November 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

They managed to take all the things bad about EQ and stick them in one neat expansion. The need for groups. The need to camp spawns. Only one person getting an item from quests.

In short all the things I started DAoC for. They seem to have forgotten.

Save your money

What were they thinking?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: January 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I am going to make this short and concise. Mythic released its dark age of camelot game two years ago. It was touted as being the next great mmmorpg. For a while it was. Everyone was extremely excited to get into the game, level up and then go rvr. Mythic marketed the game as an rvr centric experience. Their website and the games box were filled with neat information bits about the fight to defend your realms. Two years and two expansions later the game has just become an everquest clone. There is absolutely zero depth to rvr. All you can do is farm realm points day in and day out. Granted, farming realm points is a very fun thing to do, but now with the release of trials of atlantis you are REQUIRED to participate in pve. You fall too far behind the curve if you lack important artifacts and items.

I really cant in good conscience recommend dark age of camelot to anyone anymore. Mythic took a great game concept and completely screwed it up by catering to people that wanted a pve experience. If people want pve they should go play everquest. Dark ages of camelot pve is by far one of the worst pve games out there.

If you are interested in moving to a new mmorpg i would highly suggest you either stick with whatever you are playing or wait for the next generation of mmorpg's on the horizon.

It was supposed to be an expansion, not a new game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: November 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Most of the other ranters have hit the flaws with this game on the nose. My point is simply that if Mythic wanted to totally change game dynamic, perspective, and approach, they should have made a new game instead of trying to do it with an expansion pack. Expansion packs are designed to do just that, expand on the game in place, and not dramatically change it. As a result they have alienated their players who came to love and applaud the game they signed up for, not the one Mythic tried to change it into. If you want a different game, why don't you make a new one? It would have been much nicer to see Mythic address class and realm balancing issues as well as clean out some long term bugs with the new XP rather than add to them. As a result, Mythic is frantically updating their XP to try and accommodate for the drop in subscriptions.

On the plus side the graphics really are quite impressive!

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