An adventure gone horribly, horribly right.....

King Arthur is dead, and with him the binding force that held together three disparate and mighty Realms..... Old tensions rise to the surface..... And so the conflict, adventure and online addiction in Dark Age of Camelot begins....

Character Creation/Leveling your ass up

As I entered the game and started to create my character, I was quite impressed with the sheer number of options you have to customize your in game avatar. In DAOC there are three seperate Realms. Avalon (Based on the Arthurian legends) are the humans. The humans are basically (As usual in RPGs) a good mix of magic and might. Hibernia is the realm inspired by Celtic lore, and most of their characters can cast spells. Midgard takes it's background from Norse/Viking mythology, and are your brute force/melee characters. Each realm has strengths and weakneses, and there should be something in here for everyone's playing style. You can have up to four characters per server, and there's a crap load of servers. :)

Once your've chosen your realm you then have a choice of class. Each realm has multiple initial base classes you can play as. For instance Avalon has Fighter, Caster, Rogue, and Healer. Each realm also has mutlple races, each suited to a certain role. Highlanders for the Avalons are strong and big. Good Armsman or Paladins. You also chose your sex and face. (As an amusing little note, it's amazing how many people playing the Highlander chose the face that looks suspiciously like Mel Gibson.) Once you're done here, it's off to divide up your points into such things as charisma, strength etc.... Be carefull here! Once you make your choices, you're stuck with them unless you create a new character. If you end up with a buffed up, stupid Wizard don't come crying to me. There's tons of guides all over the interweb on building the perfect character in DAOC, Dopper's collected one hell of a lot of links to different guides. Check 'em out here.

(Oh, as a sidenote, if you're playing with some buddies make sure you pick the same server as them. There's quite a number of them out there, with different rules/gamestyles.)

You play your first 4 levels as the base class. Once you reach level 5, you visit a trainer of your choice and choose your career. In my case, I chose to start out as a Fighter, and when I leveled to 5 I chose to become a valorous Paladin. Defender of good, righter of wrongs, carrier-offer of young maidens. You know the routine. Each time you level up (You gain experiance in typical RPG fashion, running errands, completeing missions, and killing tons of monsters. Most named NPC and merchants will have a task for you.) you must visit a trainer for your class. Trainers are scattered throughout the lands, and knowing where the closest one is located will save you one hell of a lot of running around. The trainer will allow you to place the training points you've accumulated into the different abilities and skills for your class. What new skills and spells you aquire, and what new gear you can use effectively will depend on what you train in, so again..... Go read the help guides.

One of the very interesting twists in the game is the ability of a player to become a merchant. You can actually choose to embark on a career as a tailor, blacksmith etc. I've never heard of any other games with this option, and it's an interesting one, especially if your guild has some skilled craftsmen with them.... It's nice to be able to get high level armor and weapons without having to pay insane amounts of money to the NPC for the gear... Also, the player created equipment tends to be of much better quality than the found or purchased stuff. The smith also gets experiance for creating items, and lots of money if he sells them to people.

One of the first hard lessons I learned in DAOC is... get a group. Once you reach level 5, gaining levels becomes very difficult unless you have a group to help you out. Hell, you even get a bonus for being in a group during combat. Also, it's much easier, and alot more fun to play with your buddies... And if you have healers they can resurect you when you die, and save you a long run back to your tombstone to pray for your lost experiance.