A nice article about Catacombs

[Flimgoblin]

Catacombs wont effect RvR.

It does bring new bonuses such as +block%, +parry%, +evade% etc. but they're all PvE only.

I haven't seen drops from Darkspire and such yet, however, so far I've not even seen anything with the ToA bonuses. Good in that it likely means Catacombs will make 0 difference on RvR, bad in that it still doesn't solve the problem of everyone's artifacts decaying away - I haven't seen the durability repair stuff that Mythic originally planned for Catacombs so I'm almost certain it's been axed

heh love the way "rumour on VN" turns into "original plans of Mythic" after a few months (along with buffbots having ranged buffs dontchaknow which we got 4 patches ago if some people are to be believed)

incidentally Catacombs won't affect RvR except for the new classes which is an important distinction as having 5 new classes in Rvr is going to change things.

 

[Draylor]

incidentally Catacombs won't affect RvR except for the new classes

Really?

In that case assuming I dont want to play one of the new classes why would I buy it?

Previous expansions have always had a reason (whether it was a GOOD reason or not was debatable) for everyone to buy it: whether they were primarily playing low level PvE chars, PvE, RvR, or whatever.

Sounds from this like Catacombs is for low-level PvE only - yawn

 

[Vaar]

And a bit for high lvl PvE encounters which are semi-interesting and definatly challenging But it is a helping hand out to the poor leftbehind levelers even more.

However Film IS wrong on one point. Effect on RvR. There will be an improved engine which testers say actually gives better gfx with much less lag. Reports of 150 in Camelot square, jumping up and down and strafing, and little or no lag give me some hopes

Those with lowend computers may suffer, but all in the medium/high end range claims that it is a huge improvment. Check VN camelot Catacombs for details.

 

[Jobil]

please stop comparing WoW pve with DAoC pve, not remotely the same thing. not once was i forced to farm the same mob for 2 days /played in WoW, not once did i spend over 2 hours at one mob camp, the quests in WoW removes the grindtastic PvEeewww of DAoC

 

[Rep]

Really?

In that case assuming I dont want to play one of the new classes why would I buy it?

Previous expansions have always had a reason (whether it was a GOOD reason or not was debatable) for everyone to buy it: whether they were primarily playing low level PvE chars, PvE, RvR, or whatever.

Sounds from this like Catacombs is for low-level PvE only - yawn

Catacombs: A Closer Look by: Maia
Tuesday, November 16, 2004


Recently I had the privilege to spend the day with the fine folks of Mythic Entertainment to learn about their up and coming Dark Age of Camelot expansion, Catacombs, and to get a sneak peek at their next MMORPG endeavor: Imperator. So, brace yourself for a lengthy write-up, because when you spend the day with people who have a passion for what they do and love to talk about it, you're in store for a real treat. This article offers an in-depth preview of exiting new features of the Catacombs expansion, and a brief preview of Mythic's upcoming game, Imperator.


The Catacombs Expansion

Overview

In the past, Mythic's President Mark Jacobs has stated that he has neither plans nor desire to create a DAoC 2. However, with this summer's successful RvR renovation through the Frontiers expansion, and the soon-to-be released Catacombs expansion, Mythic has successfully reinvented DAoC with new experiences for both die-hard and casual players.

Some of the new features introduced in the Catacombs expansion are pretty well known at this point, including the detailed avatar appearance customization options and five new classes: two for Hibernia (Bainshee and Vampiir) two for Midgard (Warlock and Valkyrie) and one for Albion (Heretic). Two more character slots have been added, bringing the total number of characters per server to 10. Catacombs also brings a major graphic update to NPC's, monsters and equipment for previously existing areas of the game.

New Zones

There are 30 new static zones added to the game: each realm gets nine new zones and a new major city. The majority of the art for each realm is unique - just zoning into Midgard's Burial Grounds, Hibernia's Veil Rift or Albion 's Roman Aqueducts gives an immediate impression of the unique feel for each realm.



The new zones are laid out to draw players into the ultimate level 50 encounter in Catacombs, the Dark Spire. The Abandoned Mines provide a link between existing dungeons and new areas, and are found in all 3 realms. The mines are geared toward level 20-30 players, and also introduce a new way to travel using mine carts Indiana Jones style. (Don't miss the cart race!)

All three realms get new large underground zones where characters of level 1-50 may adventure. These areas are inhabited by the possessed races for their realm, a major part of the story behind the Catacombs expansion. In Midgard zones such as Frontlines, are inhabited by possessed kobolds. In Albion , the Deadlands is a large underground zone where the possessed Inconnu reside. The Deadlands has sort of a “ New Orleans ” feel, with crypts and tombs all about the area, all in some degree of disrepair. For Hibernia the large underground zone is known as the Otherworld, haunted by possessed Shar. The Shar roam an area marked by ruins, with tears in the veil revealing pulsating veins flowing to the Queens Labyrinth. These zones have been set up to allow lower level characters to pass through and survive as long as they keep their wits about them.

New ways to Gain Experience

The 30 new zones are described above as static to differentiate them from the other major new addition included in Catacombs: instanced dungeons. Instanced dungeons are one of the 3 new systems introduced in Catacombs geared to helping casual players level their characters quickly and with variety. The other two systems are task instanced dungeons and mini-quests. It is these three new leveling systems that I think deserve the most attention, so I spent most of my interview with DAoC's content lead Destin Bales discussing them so that I could glean a good bit of information to pass on to you.

There are over 100 different types of instanced areas in Catacombs, broken down into two main types: instanced adventuring wings and instanced task dungeons. Instanced adventuring wings are dungeon areas which are spawned repeatedly, allowing a group of players to have their own copy of the area to themselves. Instanced task dungeons are similar, but are only accessible through tasks. Task Dungeons are available for levels 1– 50, and unlike regular tasks, there is no limit to the number of tasks allowed. Theoretically one could level 1-50 by just doing dungeon tasks.



Instanced Adventuring Wings

Instanced adventuring wings are dungeons that are spawned to allow a player or group to have their own dungeon all to themselves. Instanced dungeons may be explored solo or with a group of up to 8 players. You can find portals to Instanced adventuring wings in all the old world dungeons, as well as in the new Catacombs static zones. All you need to do is find a door, click on it, go in and clear it out. While you are in the Instanced adventuring wing you may invite others to join you if you wish. There is no need to worry about the monsters in the dungeon re-spawning on you; once they are dead they will not spawn again. Instanced dungeons also introduce a new form of currency to the game: Aurulite, which is similar to the seals found in Darkness Falls . Aurulite may be used to purchase special equipment from vendors inside the new major cities of each realm.


Instanced Task Dungeons

Dungeon tasks were created for the solo player; but may be completed with a group. They are an expanded version of the existing task system. The existing task system requires you to find a guard, which may be difficult, because you have to find the right guard who offers tasks of an appropriate level. New players generally don't know about this task method. With this in mind Destin mentioned that “ One of Mythic's goals with this expansion was to make this expansion much more user friendly.”

In each starting classic world city you will find an NPC called a taskmaster. In fact, your starting trainer will tell you about the taskmaster. When you click on the taskmaster they will offer you a task, as well as inform you of the regular task system. When the task master assigns you a task, such as clearing out a mob in an instanced task dungeon, it will appear in your quest journal under tasks. So if you were given a task to kill 6 skeletons in the instanced dungeon the journal will keep tally of how many of that mob you have left to kill before you complete the task.



There are three different types of tasks the taskmaster can give you: 1) clear the entire dungeon, 2) Kill a named boss and 3) Kill a set number of a particular type of mob. For each range of 10 player levels there are 5 possible task dungeon layouts, with 100 different types of monsters which can spawn in each. You'll only see about 20 or so types of mobs in any given task. This opens up about 25 different variations of tasks you might get per level. So, where one person may be tasked to kill 25 bear cubs another might be sent to eliminate 20 skeletons. If you are grouped when you speak with the taskmaster, those in the group will be given the same task as you, and all will receive the same reward of coin and experience.

New Quests

Another addition to Camelot with the Catacombs expansion is the introduction of over 400 quests, the majority of these being mini-quests. Mini-quests are geared toward the solo player, though you may do them in groups if you wish. They are much shorter than typical quests and offer additional routes for players to level their characters.

About 80% of the 400 new quests are mini-quests, with the remainder being lengthier and more like the quests previously in the game. Mini-quests offer experience and a bit of coin as a reward with no item rewards. The standard quests offer the full package of, item, coin and experience reward. Standard quests require much more time than mini-quests, and may require you to bring along a friend or three, depending on your level. Mini-quests take only a few minutes to complete: in fact some of the dialog for these quests takes more time to read than it does to complete the quest. However it is worth the time to read the dialog for all the new quests, as they are very well written and reveal much of the back-story of the Catacombs expansion.




High Level Content

There has been concern that Catacombs will not offer anything to the level 50 character, or to folks who like participating in large-scale raids. The Dark Spire zone, an instanced dungeon is aimed at these players. The Dark Spire is the toughest zone in Catacombs and is geared towards a solid level 50 group of eight. With your party of eight you will have to fight your way through the Underground Forest to reach the Dark Spire. The Dark Spire itself is the same for all three realms, with only the monsters being different. The eye candy in this zone is amazing, and the difficulty level is fantastic. Completing such a fiendish dungeon with only eight players requires skill and strategy, unlike the zerg rush tactics of raids held in ToA for master levels.

Destin shared a bit of insight on how the encounters for this level 50 instanced dungeon were designed: “ When you enter Dark Spire with a group you are faced with a choice at each stop, there will be a crystal that spawns monsters that will work their way up to you, actually there are 3 of these crystals that will be spawning monsters at about 7-8 second intervals, so your group will have to act fast and decide how they want to tackle this encounter. Depending on your group make up you may want to destroy the crystal to stop the monsters from spawning. But by destroying a crystal you will trigger different traps in the zone, so then you will want to go disarm the trap as your next step.”

“Basically Mythic is hoping to gear this encounter so that depending on your group make up, say if you have a full group of tanks for example you would not worry about disarming the crystals you would concentrate on fighting your way down in the dungeon to the throne room. Where as if you had a group that was mainly casters, where you would not want to get into close combat you'd want to destroy the crystals and then work your way down disarming the traps set from destroying the crystals. The final battle for this dungeon occurs in the throne room.”

After picking Destin's brain for information on instanced dungeons and tasks, there was still time for a few wider ranging questions:


Q&A with Destin:

Maia: How did you come up with the idea for this expansion?

Destin: We wanted to get back to the roots of Camelot, Trials of Atlantis was way out there, it was a totally separate entity. So we started to think what races can we start building these underground cities off of. And we came up with the Kobold, Shar and the Inconnu, and we began to build up off of that.

The rest of it was basically we started with an over arching story. We wanted to give the players purpose to be down here, we wanted to get them involved, that sort of feeling of a life below Camelot, Jordheim and Tir na Nog.

So we wanted to create a bad guy, so we created the bad guy off of the lore of the three realms. And from there we started thinking about what type of zones we wanted to have. We actually wrote a back story, or actually our quest lead Jen Hicks wrote the back story for each individual zone, we've got over 80 pages of back story. Which we've never done before. Camelot at launch did not have this many pages of back story written to this extent.

We did of course gather information from Celtic lore and Albion and Midgard.

Maia: Where did you get the idea for a Kobold Buddha?

Destin: The Kobold Buddha was a surprise by the art team. One artist just thought it would be nice, so we worked it into some quests. But no, we did not find any sort of lore or anything to come up with that. He's really not a Buddha, he just looks sorta Buddha-ish. He's the founder of the Kobold Undercity.


Maia: What's next expansion wise? Next one is the spring free expansion?

Destin: Most likely, but a smaller scale. Frontiers was massive, and took a lot of time and resources. Catacombs really had an accelerated development time due to Frontiers taking up so much of our resources.

The art team had to bear the brunt of this expansion, Catacombs is all dungeons and had to be hand built, every zone was built in 3D Max. Typically above ground terrain zones are a lot easier to build and a lot faster.


Maia: Will you allow folks to /level the new Catacombs classes at release? Or will folks have to rough it?

Destin: No, they will have to rough it. There will be no /level for the new classes.


Maia: With this expansion, will there be new skins introduced for armor and weapons? And will existing armor and weapons receive some graphic upgrades?

Destin: There will be some new skins for some new armor's in Catacombs. All of the armors in the entire game had to be touched up, in order to fit the new player models. So unfortunately the team that would have been building hundreds and hundreds of new armor and weapons had to do that. So there's not a lot, but there are some that will be out at release. Definitely will be some added post release.


Maia: Any new emotes being introduced with this expansion?

Destin: We'd love to have a lot of new emotes. Unfortunately all the existing emotes had to be completely redone for the new models. One new emote that we are going to have is smile. We have an angry face in the works, but I'm not sure it's going to be an angry emote. The goal for that is to have it fire off when you're in combat, but we don't have that quite worked in yet.


Maia: Any new sounds?

Destin: We have all new sounds with Catacombs, every sound has been re-mastered.


Maia: Will there be area's to get respec stones in Catacombs?

Destin: No. If you are looking for respec stones Catacombs will not offer that, dragons are still the best place to get those.


Maia: Is there anyplace in Catacombs that offers the ability to hold huge raids like with Shrouded Isles?

Destin: Actually, no, not at all. Every single thing in Catacombs takes eight players or less. Now of course you can get a large group of people together and go slaughter some guy, you can do that. But the Dark Spires , the final zone, you can only have eight people .


Maia: Factions? Are they in this expansion?

Destin: We actually did not do a lot of faction work in Catacombs. Wasn't any real reason why, they just didn't turn up. Basically you got the good guys, the players, and the bad guys, hordes of possessed and so forth.

Factions are something that we generally set up if we have an underlying goal for quests, or something along those lines. We could always add them if the players want them, we could certainly add them. It's not difficult to do.


Maia: Besides instancing and new dungeons, what does Catacombs bring to the players?

Destin: Basically we want Catacombs to the best place for players to level. ToA is the best place to get gear and artifacts; Shrouded Isles has a lot of large scale guild epic dungeons, so Catacombs we want it to be a nice easy spot for players to level. You never have to find monsters, they're right there for you. In addition that, there are the mini- quests, which are also there to help accelerate leveling, and then the dungeon task system.

Catacombs is basically the complete opposite of Trials of Atlantis. Everything can be completed quickly; most things can be completed solo or with a friend.


Maia: Any concern that power gamers, and those who live for raids, might not be happy with this expansion?

Destin: They might and they might not. Shrouded Isles, while it was content for levels 1 – 50, the majority of it was high level stuff. A lot of it was large dungeons that required raids and so forth. ToA is entirely that, so I can see for some people it may not be for them, but I think this will hit an area of players we have neglected for a while.




---------------------------------


sounds like fun to me

 

[Rookiescot]

FAO Rep

When you finished fanning Mythic .... kinda hot over here too so me next

 

[Flimgoblin]

In that case assuming I dont want to play one of the new classes why would I buy it?

Previous expansions have always had a reason (whether it was a GOOD reason or not was debatable) for everyone to buy it: whether they were primarily playing low level PvE chars, PvE, RvR, or whatever.

Sounds from this like Catacombs is for low-level PvE only - yawn

there's high level PvE in there, and there's toa bonuses on the items - just because the new bonuses are pve only doesn't mean the loot from somewhere like Dark Spire won't be worth using. It's a zone designed for 1fg level 50s and to be challenging...

and the new models look cool too

 

[Morchaoron]

Sounds very promising, makes DAoC a even harder nut for WoW to crack.

or it just cracks the nut! (looks like more of the same to me )

 

[Anar]

Silly question maybe, but when it out?

 

[izikiel]

dec 7th in the US... summer 2005 in eu?

 

[Flimgoblin]

dec 7th in the US... summer 2005 in eu?

I'm hoping end of february - that's standard release time for paid expansions

 

[Hansmoleman]

they should try thier level best to make the release date the same, because thier will be sites from america with everything written down making it easy meaning less fun and exploring when it arrives in the uk

 

[Flimgoblin]

they should try thier level best to make the release date the same, because thier will be sites from america with everything written down making it easy meaning less fun and exploring when it arrives in the uk

don't look at them?

they won't get the code to start translating till after it's released in the US I imagine so it'll be hard to get released on the same day unless they've invented time machines at GOA

 

[Chrystina]

they should try thier level best to make the release date the same, because thier will be sites from america with everything written down making it easy meaning less fun and exploring when it arrives in the uk

correct ... ToA was kinda ruined for europeans because there were already websites up with full walkthroughs, tactics and stuff ... it didn't leave anything to explore for us so instead of something new that needed to be explored ToA was just a race for the ML's and Arti's from day 1 of release here in europe :touch:

 

[Dakkath]

it'll be hard to get released on the same day unless they've invented time machines at GOA

You mean GOA doesn't care enough about us to invent the time machine!?!?!?!

What I pay you what must be a few pounds sterling a year (or used to until I retierd) and your company refuses to rewrite most, if not all, of the known laws of physics???

I'm gonna have to complain to RightNow...
Maybe I could treaten to stop paying the subs I don't pay anymore...

Nah, I'll go whine on the customer service treads instead... I'm sure that will make GOA invent one for me...

Damn you Filmgoblin!!!

 

[Danamyr]

It will be very funny to see all the 3-day-pled noob warlocks/vampiirs that haven't the slightest clue how to play their characters

Well you should have plenty of easy targets to smite silly then, because you won't be healing poor Thep will you?

 

[Flimgoblin]

What I pay you what must be a few pounds sterling a year (or used to until I retierd) and your company refuses to rewrite most, if not all, of the known laws of physics???

Erm you don't pay me anything and GOA is not my company unless FH has started taking donations for mods and in which case where's the money Deebs?

 

[Dakkath]

Erm you don't pay me anything and GOA is not my company unless FH has started taking donations for mods and in which case where's the money Deebs?

Pfft...

So picky...

 

[Flimgoblin]

Pfft...

So picky...

anyway go phone GOA phone support I hear a fellow called Jeff is waiting for your call

 

[Lumikki]

Kobold Buddha....

 

[[e]]

It will be very funny to see all the 3-day-pled noob warlocks/vampiirs that haven't the slightest clue how to play their characters

but even if you hate pve (if so why WoW?) then you can get one of these, get it pled and go pwn in RvR instead

Funny, how?
If you have a lvl 50 char, have played daoc for a while so you are not new to the game itself. I can't see any reason to call a PLed alt "noob this or that".
There is not a single class in this game that takes more then 30 min to learn, 2 hours to master - if you are not n00b to the game and the controls.

 

[Flimgoblin]

there are enough people out there that can't run a buffbot nevermind a vampiir.

 

[Hansmoleman]

don't look at them?

they won't get the code to start translating till after it's released in the US I imagine so it'll be hard to get released on the same day unless they've invented time machines at GOA

true.. but these time machines you say, they intrigue me

 

[Shadoo]

this always happenes ppl are already saying how bad its gonna be god give it a chance. Whens it coming out in the uk?

 

[Helme]

Woud guess in feb like ToA, maybe mars

 

[frogster]

Nah, 1.71 wont be here till the new year, and Catacombs will be atleast the size of ToA/NF to translate (read 100+ days if NF is anything to go by) We aint getting it till April/May/June at the earliest. i'll eat my chainmail hat if otherwise.

 

[Icebreaker]

please stop comparing WoW pve with DAoC pve, not remotely the same thing. not once was i forced to farm the same mob for 2 days /played in WoW, not once did i spend over 2 hours at one mob camp, the quests in WoW removes the grindtastic PvEeewww of DAoC

I tell you something. Not once was i forced to farm the same mob for 2 days /played in Daoc, not once did i spend over 2 hours at one mob camp, etc.

Never, and i still get the stuff i want. Isn't that funky?

I think you are doing something wrong.