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Beta Tester - Expansion Review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 26 / 40
Date: October 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Trials of Atlantis expansion pack for Dark Age of Camelot is a full expansion with all new worlds to explore. The basic premise of the game expansion is to add lore from the lost world of Atlantis, to the already existing lore of Camelot, Norse and Celtic legends present in the current game.

In addition to the new lands of Atlantis the game developers Mythic Entertainment, have revamped the game engine to bring a new level of beauty to the environment. The updated water reflections give realistic reflections of trees, clouds, sun and moon and even your character. The new tree models bring more variety and realism to the landscaping. Creative use of textures allows each expansion engine and video card to see varying levels of realism. The only negative with the new engine is that it is unproven in player versus player combat situations (called Realm vs Realm). Each sucessive engine update tends to be more beautiful but be a bit harder on the player's machines requiring upgraded video cards and memory. This one is no exception and you should verify your computer meets at least the minimum requirements.

If you are a story driven MMORPG fan, you'll find plenty to enjoy as you unravel the mystery of Atlantis. This expansion is unlike previous ones in that it is highly quest and story driven. The worlds are designed to be played from level 20 through level 50 and there is plenty to see. The bulk of the main areas are islands and at first glance are really beautiful but somewhat thin on monsters to fight till you remember that this expansion is about an underwater civilization.

Submerging underwater leads to much of the new content in the closer in areas, and completely new fighting experiences for those of us who were weaned on land. Without getting a magic potion to assist in breathing you have about 30 seconds to look underwater. Various potions can be purchased with vendors, bounty point vendors and alchemists allowing you up to 30 minutes to explore without surfacing for air. There are atlantean equivilents of mermaids and mermen, sharks, rays and other sea creatures - some aggressive and some not. You can survive most underwater encounters as a single level 50 character and if younger bringing friends would be advisable.

As mentioned before, the heart of this expansion though is for the storyline and quests. The goal is to complete 9 Master Levels and gain new abilities that can be used in battle. Mythic is very tight lipped about what the master levels are but will be releasing information on them just before the game ships. Even the beta testers got very little exposure to the master levels other than testing the encounters and partial quests so everyone gets an equal chance to discover for themselves what the rewards are. What I can tell you is that each master level is made up of a series of quests that require thought and strategy to complete. I was able to complete some of the quests and they were quite fun and challenging to figure out. The end encounters were even more difficult and require many players to group together into battlegroups and use strategy to solve each puzzle. Each battlegroup can contain up to 200 players in one team broken into groups of 8 (regular groups). Some end encounters appear to take UP TO 13 full groups of 8 players. Experienced players should be able to make do with significantly less, but be prepared for new challenges in strategy. Zerg mentality approaches will fail and you must be creative to solve them.

Speaking of rewards, the expansion adds a whole new type of armor and weapons to the game. These new armors obtained through quests are of the highest quality and add interesting new stats to your character. Your armor may contain + to your Caps, + to melee skills (as in ALL melee skills at once), + to your fighting speed, and more. These + abilities are new and will cause many experienced players to rebalance their character to take advantage of the higher caps. It has been speculated that the master abilities will take advantage of these new higher caps allowing your level 50 character to be more powerful than before. Only time will tell.

For more information on the game, visit the following official websites or your favorite player run site for DAoC.

http://www.trialsofatlantis.com/
http://www.camelotherald.com/

See you in Atlantis!
-Toysmith of Bedevere

Very fun game with awesome graphics but....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 29
Date: October 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have been a player of DAoC since release and are still playing. Ofcourse to all the games there's the positive and negative. Let me start with the positive. Of all the mmorpg games i've played and beta tested (i've played alot from Ultima Online to Everquest to Asheron's Call etc.) this have by far the most beautiful graphics gamewise. And with all the expansions that came out it gets even better. Trials of Atlantis will just make you go in awe seeing the Underwater City of Atlantis and it's surrounding inhabitants. The second great part of the game is the PvE or player versus engine. It's basically where you participate to kill or confront the NPC's (non player characters) in the game. Be it by questing or just roaming with your friends in groups to find riches and treasures. I have tried and played all known characters from all 3 different realms in the game and i have stuck with Albion because i believe they are the most fun for me and are more balanced in terms of magic and melee. I think people who have lots of patience like me will like the "tradeskills" part of the game. One of my character is a Legendary Tailor and I like the idea of being able to make profits from my crafts and sell it to my consignment merchant or vendor that is placed outside my own house in the housing zone.

The part i cannot recommend this game for is the PvP (player versus player). PvP in this game pretty much goes for Realm v. Realm in which you run in massive groups and just "zerg" everyone. It's very repetative and it's so not fun at all. When you get zerged you just trample people and the battle usually lasts in about 1 min or less. Quick deaths or quick kill. I find this game to be very imbalanced when it comes to PvP. Alot of people have exploited the fact that they can use another account to set up a "Buffbot" to magically enhance their other characters for battle and have a massive advantage that those who don't have one. It's pretty much whoever can afford to keep another account for a buffbot are the ones that usually wins in PvP. I shy away from this part of the game and it's very frustrating. I don't believe Mythic will ever fixed this imbalance since alot of people have voiced their concern about this and for 2 years now it has never been fixed or talked about by the developers.

Apart from that negative part of that game I would recommend this game for the fun PvE, great graphics, quest rewards, house ownership and player interactions. Too bad the PvP really lacks balance otherwise I would give this game 5 stars but im leaving one out.

Great Game with Frustrating Endgame

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 29
Date: October 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing for two years now and will have my third level 50 in a few days and I like the realm of midgard the best and I have tried all three. If you want the easy win, play Albion, if you want a dark, snowy environment that is melee oriented choose midgard, and avoid Hibernia like the plague unless you're up for a challenge. Each expansion makes the game look even better - and it wasn't that bad to start with. I highly recommend researching how to spec your new character before you even install the game! You'll save yourself a lot of grief. And if you want to play the most overpowered classes possible be sure to make a mana chanter(Hibernian caster with a pet that is stronger than their fighters) or an infiltrator (a stealther assasin that can out mellee a tank - ridiculous!) And whatever you do do not roll a champion! The player versus environment aspect is a lot of fun, meeting nice people and grouping to kill huge monsters and seeing a wide variety of environments. What is also fun is the Battlegrounds where you can face enemies of your own level on an equal footing (ranges are 15-19, 20-24, and 30-35 - for some reason noone goes to the 25 -29 battleground). It's in the high end Realm versus Realm battles after level 50 where the game is no longer fun and its very frustrating leveling a character to 50 that even performs well in the battlegrounds only to find out that you are completely useless in the end game. This is where over the top class imbalances become apparent. This is where the power gamers who have saved up staggering amounts of gold to pay crafters to make them the best gear can kill another level 50 character in two blows while being completely immune to everything the hapless loser throws at him. They also get realm points for killing enemies and with enough realm points a player gets realm skills that give the power gamers an even more unfair advantage in battle. Succeeding in the end game requires a large amount of time doing things that aren't a lot of fun, like repeatedly killing the same mobs to "farm" enough money to buy nicer equipment and then you have to "farm" realm points very slowly at first in a large group of people until weeks and months or even a year later you have enough points to get the realm skills to to become competetive enough to face the other elite players in 8 vs 8 battles to go even further over the top in realm skills. I have no problems paying Mythic for the fine work they have done in providing a beautiful online game world that works, I just don't like how you have to get ripped off for imaginary money in game by other players to get the gear you need to be competitive and the amount of tedium involved in farming money and then having to lose obscenely more battles than you win in hopes of getting realm skills required to play the endgame and have it be fun. A game that has held my attention for two years because I have tried many different classes in all 3 realms would normally deserve five stars if the end game werent so frustrating. So i had to remove a star for the horribly unbalanced endgame, but I hope this new expansion adds a lot of fun new quests and areas for us level 50s who don't want to participate in realm vs realm combat.

Trials of Atlantis review?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 27
Date: October 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Is this a Trials of Atlantis review or a rant and rave section about Dark Age of Camelot?

Plain and simple this game is great. Everyone has said the expansions make it better and better and that's true. But please people stick to the subject here.

Trials of Atlantis is supposed to have some of the best graphics of any MMORPG to date. From what I have seen from the beta I would have to agree. The new underwater system is a trip along with the new tradeskill recipies. I am looking forward to playing this expansion the moment it arrives at my home.

Why only 4 stars then? Because I have yet to actually sit and play this expansion. I was only able watch someone on beta testing. But, from what I have seen and read it is going to be a great expansion just like Shrouded Isles was.

Has good and Bad.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 21 / 28
Date: November 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First of all, unless you buy and account from ebay or have a top level character, this expansion won't give you much. This is designed for high level characters and even with that, has several major problems.

1st) You need about 30 people to advance in the master levels. The trials are so hard and take so long, even when your level 50 with perfect gear and big groups of people, your frustration level may go through the roof.

2nd) This will have a dramatic impact on the very cool "RVR" component of the game. With TOA, dark age has changed dramatically. For example, a breed of fun classes were "Stealthers". TOA introduced an element which destroyed all stealther classes (6 of them total). If you have DAOC now, you have no choice but to be affected by this XPack.

3rd) On the good side, underwater is gorgeous!

4th) Some (below 40%) of the trial and artifact quests are enjoyable. The others require mass groups huge wait lines for re-spawns and are just plain not fun.

5th) They put a lot of work in this xpack. The downside is its changing the base game dramatically and while its still new, from what I've seen, its not changing it for the positive. Who knows what it will be like 5 months from now.

6th) The game is chuggy on 512 ram... I added 1 gb and it runs much better.

Recommendation: If you play DAOC now and have a lvl 50.. get the xpack, you'll need it to compete. Do it soon, because these trials require huge groups. You and a couple of friends won't be able to pass these trials, so the sooner you get in with the zergs the better.

Only time I'd say DON'T get the xpack is.. are you thinking of returning to DAOC? Well, if your a stealther, 100% no, stay away. If your a caster, well, this is a caster-love Xpack, and as for tanks.. hmm... some things help and hurt you in this one, so why not come back! =)

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

Unfun. Unenjoyable. Too late for me to get a refund for it.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: November 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Visually stunning...but this is as good as it gets. It gets very downhill from there on in.

From a substance standpoint it took everything you HATED about Everquest and dumped it into the quests for Trials of Atlantis. Matt Firor assured players that the Master Levels would not unbalance RvR in DAOC and it would only be an "horizontal" instead of "vertical" strengthening of characters in RvR. Whatever that means. But as witness the furor over the level 2 Master Level, Prescience Node, it had stealthers up in arms..and I'd admit that it was an overpowered "master level" But the *single* greatest turnoff about TOA is that you have to kill more and more mobs just to progress up the Master Level tracks which detracts from DAOC's main selling point. Hello Mythic ? We came to RvR not to PVE some more after that 1-50 leveling grind and yet another grind to get effective Realm Abilities to compete in RvR. This is simply another grind that we can do without.

Simply put, in the last year or so, Mythic has devoted nearly all of their attention to the PvE aspect, slowly turning DAOC into "Everquest Lite" and basically ignoring RvR and it's associated issues.

Suffice it to say, there's been a significant jump in cancellations as a result of this poorly thought out expansion..if you don't believe me, go to www.palomides.net and see for yourself just how many people cancelled their accounts as a result. Then go to www.camelotherald.com and see how many "mea culpas", patches has been posted for TOA alone. What's especially insulting is that Matt Firor assumes that it's because we can't tell the difference between an "complex problem" and a "bug". *snort*

I can not honestly recommend this "expansion" to anyone.

And lastly, all of my accounts were cancelled as a result of TOA after playing 2 years of DAOC.

This should tell you something about TOA and I'm not alone in my sentiments about TOA.

This destroys the game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 11
Date: November 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When I first started playing DAoC it was great. But This xp pack does not help at all it makes it so to compete you have to buy it otherwise in rvr you will be decimated. So mythic is just finding ways to get more money

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!

Tortures of Atlantis

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: November 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you enjoy EQ camping this is the expansion for you! Riddled with bugs and unbalancing the RvR endgame, this expansion should not have got out the door. There should be a warning label "Required a large unusually supportive alliance and 40+ hours per week to devote to PvE." On the plus side the artwork/models are beautiful and there are some very clever level designs. Unfortunately it takes DAOC in a direction many are unwilling to go. Casual players beware.

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