There is a lot happeneing at Mythic with DAoC. Here is the Fall Preview from the Camelot Herald...

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State of the Game - A Fall Preview from Mark Jacobs 2002-09-04 18:26:25 With Fall upon us it is time to lay out the plans Mythic has for Dark Age of Camelot and beyond... Folks, Well, it’s been a while since my last “state of the game” message so this one will be a little longer than usual (anguished cries are heard throughout the land!, sorry). Now that Fall is upon us it is time to lay out what Mythic will be doing over the next four months in regards to Shrouded Isles, DAoC and Imperator. So without any further ado, here we go. In regards to SI, work is proceeding extremely well. As we have reported on the Camelot Herald, the frame rate improvement resulting from the latest version of NDL’s graphic engine is astonishing. With all the other graphical improvements we are making to the game, I expect that our players will be thrilled with the upgrade from that aspect alone. However, that is not enough for us. Lots of new content is going in and it also looks great – and we are adding our first round of beta testers into the game starting this week. One other thing to keep in mind in regards to SI is even after the expansion is finished, Mythic will continue to add new content to the game, however, we will also have the advantage of using the new engine when we do so. So, think of the expansion as just the first step in Mythic’s continued upgrading and expanding of the game. In regards to DAoC, everything is going great. Currently we have over 250K active accounts (accounts that are LIVE and able to play the game) worldwide as we continue to grow our subscriber base. This week we hit a new worldwide high of 50K simultaneous users (not too shabby for a game that’s not even a year old eh?). Though we are working hard on SI, we are not stopping work on the main game. Over the next four months we are working to implement the following things for DAoC. While a few of these items will be well known to our long-time players, many others will be a pleasant surprise. In no particular order, here is our Best of Fall Plan. :) 1) Encouraging players of a wider level range to group. Over the last few months we have been looking at the affects of changes we made to the grouping code a few months after release. Based on all the data we gathered, we see that the code works a little too well, which has resulted in greater difficulty for some players in grouping with their friends. We are thus making some adjustments so that players of more disparate levels are able to group together without anyone taking too much of an experience point hit. 2)Speeding up the leveling time between levels 41 and 50. As above, we have seen that these levels take longer to go through than we believe is optimal. Thus, we are greatly reducing the time it will take to complete them. 3)Doubling of available character slots. Based on both user demand and the fact that we have an expansion pack coming out soon, it seems prudent to increase the number of slots available to the characters. We have worked out the technical issues involved with this, and thus, we are going from four to eight! 4)Spellcrafting/Alchemy going LIVE. We will continue to work carefully on these two crafting skills, as their potential to change the balance of the game is quite large. While work on them progresses nicely, we will err on the side of caution in releasing them to the LIVE game. They will start testing on Pendragon later this week. 5)Housing is still being developed and we are committed to adding this to the game as part of subscriber content – so it will not require the expansion pack. Like Spellcrafting we are taking our time with housing to make sure that it is done right the first time. 6)Self-evolving encounter areas with changing locations. Okay, this is a little tricky to explain so please bear with me. One of the complaints about most (if not all) MMORPGS to date is that the content tends to one extreme (created by the developers) or the other (lots of randomness). DAoC of course falls into the former group. What we are working on is a way to add intelligent monster groups to the game that will actually evolve on their own over time and based on player interaction. While this type of content will not replace developer-created content, we hope that when used in the right situations (bandit camps for example), we believe this will add a new facet to our game. 7)Continued improvements to the interface. No interface is ever perfect and no interface can truly ever be said to be finished. We are looking at ways to improve the interface for all our users and not just those who buy the expansion. 8)Improved melee classes. More love coming your way now – check out this week's Pendragon version. 9)Improvements to the RvR areas. We are looking into ways to give you more reasons to take and hold keeps. We will present them to you over the next few months. 10)A major new server type will be added to the game. As always, we listen to our users and based on popular demand we will be adding a “Cooperative” server to our game. You will not be able to fight any other player on this server, and, like the PvP server, all realms will be open to all people. This means you will be able to group with any other character and race from the other realms and adventure with them without worrying about being PKd. We are also working on another server type that will appear after the release of SI. We are committed to adding many other types of servers over the DAoC’s lifetime. 11)A special bonus for any player who has a character that attains 50th level. Players who achieve this level will be able to create new characters without being forced to go through all the lower levels once again. You will not have to retire, sacrifice, delete, destroy, spindle or mutilate your 50th level character to take advantage of this system - your new character will simply start at the higher level. We haven’t decided exactly at what level we are going to start at but it will be at least 20th. Two caveats though, first, you will not be able to do this with new SI characters since doing so would ruin all the fun of exploring new class/race combinations; and second your new character, while at a higher level, will start the game as a new character does in terms of money, clothing, etc. You will be able to “skill up” your characters of course, it’s just a money/equipment thing. 12)More information about Shrouded Isles. We intend to begin weekly Shrouded Isles Sneak Peaks on our SI website. Lots of new content will be revealed there right up to the release of the expansion pack. Look for exclusive screenshots and details there as well. So, that takes care of what we are intending to do over the next 4 months for DAoC’s current incarnation so let’s move on to the final point, Imperator. When we first announced Imperator we expected a positive response to the game while also expecting some concern from our current subscribers (and boy were we right on both). We knew that many of you might think that we would either abandon DAoC or simply pull people from DAoC/SI to this newer project. As I’ve said before, nothing could be further from the truth. Design work on the game is proceeding nicely and nobody but myself has done any work on it to date. DAoC/SI is our flagship project and we will not do anything to endanger its continued health and success. We still have no intention of devoting any substantial resources to it till the design is done (next year) and even then we don’t expect to have any net loss on the people/dollar commitment of Mythic to DAoC (I manage to spend plenty of time each week on various aspects of DAoC). After all, we have to start working on the 2003 Expansion Pack don’t we? :) As required by lawyers everywhere, the usual disclaimer that this letter is a guide as to what we hope to have in during this period and not as a guarantee of any kind. And also as usual, this list does not encompass the only things we are working on. We will be working on lots of other things and my letters, as always, are just some of the newer (and sometimes bigger) things that are part of this update. As always we thank the community for its continued support and patronage of DAoC and we will continue to work to improve and add to DAoC. We have lots more content/features/abilities on the way. Mark