Dark Age of Camelot

Dark Age of Camelot, aka DAOC was one of the early generation of MMOs. Launched by Mythic in 2001, I started playing on the US server, Galahad in November 2001. The European servers did not get launched until much later but I remained on the US server.

 

Kallisti the Minstrel was my first character, based in the kingdom of Albion, the Minstrel character class was a speed/stealth/crowd control hybrid which was immense fun to play. Being THE Albion speed class meant we were always wanted for groups. Being also a stealth class meant they were the perfect explorer class and so I used her to explore the world they developers had created. When they released the first expansion pack, I was able to create a set of maps for the new zones added that placed mobs and their levels so people could hunt.

 

In these early MMOs levelling was mostly farming mobs in specific level ranges around your own level, so know where the best XP spots were, was vital. Later, I became known for making vidoes of gameplay and in the days before YouTube, hosted them on the IGN website – I even won a prize for “The Boys Are Back in Town” video… I wonder if the Camelot fountains have recovered yet?

 

The videos are now on YouTube and can be seen on the DAOC Videos page

 

 

Here are some examples of the maps I created from the game data and exploration:

This is an example of one of the maps from the Catacombs expansion that were printed in the Prima Guide. I did the basic mapping, writing my own mapping program in PHP to read a logfile created using macro commands to capture locations and features of each zone.

This entailed Kallisti having to run around the edge of every feature in the zone, while capturing the location data and also targetting mobs that were also captured in the log data.

This raw data was then used by a graphic designer/artist who went by the in-game name of Brasse who created the artwork