Dark Age of Camelot

The Good
The game is relatively easy to get started in, and it is easy to find partners to group up with and kill monsters. Combat is challenging since all the monsters than give you enough experience to be worth your time have a good chance of killing you. The best part is that you are always tempted to go after those oranges and reds for the extra experience even though they can really ruin your day, even if you are in a group.

There are enough different builds for each class to play around with many different playing styles. Most classes have combat and spell abilities so you can focus on one or both when you spend your skill points.

The graphics and sounds are nothing special, but they are good enough so that they don't get in the way of gameplay.

The Bad
The biggest problem with DAoC is that the gameplay is extremely repetitive. It never varies from the "hunt monsters and sell loot" or the "buy supplies and craft stuff" gameplay style.

This would be ok if the monsters were more varied, but for the most part, even though the graphics vary for monster types, the monsters all fight in the same way: charge the characters and kill them. The monsters do not even behave in an intelligent way: they attack the person that is doing the most damage to them, not the person they could kill the fastest. The silliest part of combat is the practice of "pulling" monsters. If I attack one monster in a group, I would expect a group of monsters to come after me, not only the monster I attacked. There are some monsters that do attack in groups, but even then they don't attack with any sort of tactics other than "rush and kill".

Another big problem with combat are the proliferation of combat moves. Even a 10th level character can have too many moves to fit on one quickbar. Switching bars during combat can cost you precious time that you don't have when you have to sprint away NOW. The main thing that fills up the quickbar are "chain attacks" which are attacks that you execute in sequence to do lots of damage. One wonders why Mythic didn't just make the attacks combination attacks (that is, once you earn the next attack in the chain, the next attack automatically executes its required attack first) to begin with so you wouldn't have to use 3 quickbar slots to execute that cool backstab manuever.

There are no healing potions in the game, (or at least I didn't find any and none were for sale) so if you don't have a healer in your party you have to spend way too much time resting after combat. Finding a healer can be difficult at times, and I hate spending most of my playing time sitting around waiting for my health bar to fill.

The worst part of the game is crafting. Crafting consists of buying materials and hitting the "craft" key for that item until you run out of materials. This is not fun. When a game requires you to do something this tedious ( I read an entire issue of National Geographic while raising my tailor skill from 0 to 100) you know it is badly designed. The worst part about crafting is that no matter how much time you waste doing it, it seems that you still can't craft items that are good enough for your character to wear unless you spend a whole day of REAL time crafting to get your skill in the 400's or higher.

My last quibble with DAoC is in character development. Level 1 characters are very weak. You don't really get to do anything interesting with your character until level 5, and it really takes until level 15 or so until you can really enjoy the game. So why not just start the characters at Level 5 so you can skip all the boring parts like wandering around killing worms and bugs and doing silly item delivery quests?

The Bottom Line
DAoC is an online RPG that is fun for about 4 days, but it eventually gets bogged down in tedious and repetitve gameplay that ruins the game completely.