Mythic’s Matt Firor on Dark Age of Camelot

The guys at GameZone Online were able to participate in Mythic’s recent Roundtable event and have posted an article that includes commentary from executive producer Matt Firor about the upcoming Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs expansion and the MMORPG as a whole. An excerpt to follow:

DAoC was one of the first games that prohibited trash talking between the realms. Simply put, those in Hibernia cannot understand what the people of Midgard or Albion are saying. And players are not allowed to have different realm characters on the same server in a single account. If anything, that speaks of a solid game plan for DAoC. But with the expansions like Catacombs, are these parts of the original plan, or have the expansions evolved out of what the community wants?

(It’s ongoing,) said Firor. (We have a rough plan that we follow, but obviously in 2001 we had no idea that we would be this successful, so we didn’t plan it out. But what we do is when an expansion launches we look at the game as a whole and figure out what players like and what they don’t like, what other games have that we don’t, what we have that other games don’t and we need more of, and we put it together as ‘˜here’s our plan for the next expansion.’ With Catacombs it was obvious. The dungeon content in Camelot has always been lackluster . it’s obvious that our dungeon content has lagged behind our above-ground content. Obviously ToA (Trials of Atlantis) had some nice dungeons, but just in the strict underground, evil area, we’ve never been as good as any of the other MMOs, and Catacombs has been a direct target at that.