AO or DAoC

Cafe Society
1

Trying to see which one I should buy. Vet. Asherons Call player, on:
1.2 AMD Athlon
256 Ram
DSL
10 Gig HD free
GeForce 2 MMX
Lousy Speakers + Sound
52x Cd Drive.

Which is the best and why?

2

If AO is Anarchy Online, I don’t even need to know anything about Dark Age of Camelot to tell you what to pick. It’s like saying, “Should I sharpen a chopstick to a fine point, dip the end in gasoline, set it ablaze, and drive it into my eyeball with a rubber mallet … or should I just order a pizza?”

3

Wacky, I played Anarchy online also in addition to doing beta for DAoC. Anyway, Anarchy Online is still chock full o’ bugs. The city zones are laggy as anything and it is filled with a bunch of kiddies. The best part of AO is that it is filled with a ton of animated emotes which makes it real fun to roleplay in. MY highest level character there just sits around in the newby zones cross dressed in a thong bikini (oh, there is a lot of customization that you can do) dancing and singing songs about transexual and transvestitism. I don’t really have fun in that game playing it how it is meant because quite frankly, it got really boring.

Dark Ages of Camelot is really pretty fun (at least in beta before the servers became over crowded). The game is very stable overall (more stable than AO and EQ both). And with a good video card you won’t get a lot of video lag like I got originally. The questing system works similar to AO minus the custom dungeons.

Both of the games addressed a lot of the problems that EQ has and made it possible to solo regardless of class, eliminate farming/bottom feeding, making money with trade skills through merchants (though DAoC is a lot better in that regard unless they changed it before it went live), etc. Both have really nice graphics, AO has more customization for what your character looks like (about 150 or so faces per race and sex, in addition to heighth and weight customization), DAoC has 8 face per race/sex and 8 different hair colors.

Good luck and HUGS!
Sqrl

4

You’re being too kind to AO.

5

Hey, I really enjoyed AO. I didn’t run into too many bugs, either, but then I played almost exlusively on RK2 which has a much lower population. When I tried playing on RK1 I did run into a lot of lag and disconnects, but on the second server it’s pretty stable.

Unfortunately, I can’t get it to run on either of my new computers, so I have been playing Arcanum instead.

6

Hey, I really enjoyed AO. I didn’t run into too many bugs, either, but then I played almost exlusively on RK2 which has a much lower population. When I tried playing on RK1 I did run into a lot of lag and disconnects, but on the second server it’s pretty stable.

Unfortunately, I can’t get it to run on either of my new computers, so I have been playing Arcanum instead.

7

Dark Age of Camelot, I’d say, because Anarchy Online is still full of bugs. Anarchy Online is also incompetently run, and account problems are daily ocvcurrences. Players have their accounts suspended, cancelled, or just vanished into the ether without any explanation from Funcom, whose customer support is so bad that the Better Business Bureau has a file on them.

Dark Age of Camelot, by comparison, seems to work fine. It’s not a terribly good game, IMHO, and the interface has some truly bizarre and frustrating peccadilloes, but it works, it’s beautiful, and it’s entertaining. I’m not sure how it’s more stable than EQ - since I can’t recall EITHER game ever crashing on me. (Granted I have only four days of experience with DAOC.)

EverQuest is still the best MMORPG you can buy, though. Don’t know how you feel about it. There really isn’t any one game that solves all problems, so it depends on personal preference.

8

I had played EQ for a little over a year and have played DAoC since day one of release (less than a week ago) and AO for a little over a month (I also played UO for 2 years and AC for about 6 months).

So far I’d give the thumbs up to DAoC for many reasons:

  1. The quest system is very well done. Camping for spawns is limited (the closest I’ve seen to a ‘camp’ is for a guy named Mugwort for a quest). If several of you need the same particular quest item and are in a group, you ALL get the item. In addition, the quest system seems almost dynamic in my limited experience with it. My minstrel trainer gave me a quest out of the blue after I had talked to him several times in the past.

  2. Down time is very limited. In EQ you had to find another game or activity to keep you entertained during the down time required to get your mana/health back. In DAoC this is much less the case.

  3. Hi Opal!

  4. Grouping is much easier. In EQ you had to shout for 20 minutes “Level 9 Enc LFG” and hope that someone in your zone is interested in fighting. In DAoC you can click a button to signify you are looking for a group or hit the ‘find’ button to look for people looking for groups themselves.

  5. Realm vs. Realm combat (RvR). If this doesn’t appeal to you, then you can avoid it, but it is nice that the player vs. player combat was considered from day 1. While you cannot ‘gank’ your own realm, you CAN work with them to take out either of the other 2 realms. In addition, when you create a character on a server in one realm, you cannot create a character on the same server from a different realm. This is to prevent ‘spying’ by folks creating level 1 chars and getting information on when and where raids will occur. Plus, when you attack an enemy, you don’t see their name, just “A dwarf raider”. This is to limit the ‘weenie’ factor (aka Azzrap0r).

  6. Limited zoning. The only time you ‘cross a zone border’ is when you enter the major city of the realm (Camelot City or Tir Na Nog for example) or a dungeon or cross realms. The normal outer world is pleasantly seamless.

  7. Death is considerably less painful. You lose exp when you die as you do in EQ. The difference is in EQ you HAVE to go recover your corpse since all your stuff is on it, sometimes a dangerous proposition. In DAoC you take a short term stat loss (constitution has to be bought back however) upon death, but you keep all of your items. You do not HAVE to go back to your corpse (identified by a tombstone), but if you do and pray, you can recover some of the lost experience.

DAoC has a few flaws I’ve noticed and should point out:

  1. If you are used to EQ or AC, you will feel like you are running on sand. I think because the world is smaller, they compensated by slowing you down a bit. Get a minstrel (blatant plug) in your group and that will reduce the pain.

  2. When you cross zones, you lose your grouping. Not always a big deal when entering the big city, but a pain in the butt when dungeon crawling and a group member dies.

  3. Hi again Opal!

Oh, and for the most part, I didn’t compare DAoC to AO because, well, DAoC actually WORKS.

If you play on the RP server Guinevere, look me up. I’m currently a level 9 Minstrel known as Ploppy (son of Ploppy).

9

LlamaPoet says:
4) Grouping is much easier. In EQ you had to shout for 20 minutes “Level 9 Enc LFG” and hope that someone in your zone is interested in fighting. In DAoC you can click a button to signify you are looking for a group or hit the ‘find’ button to look for people looking for groups themselves.

You probably know this, but there is a looking for group option in EQ, just type “/LFG on” (and “/lfg off” to turn it off). To see who in the zone is looking for a group, do a “/who lfg”

Of course, hardly anyone uses it.

Brian
a/k/a Kadfael, lvl 36 Human Monk
a/k/a Quercus, lvl 30 Wood Elf Druid
(both on Xegony)