Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis Wrap Report

Launched in late October, Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis is Mythic Entertainment's second expansion for its successful and critically acclaimed online world - the third if you count Foundations, which implemented housing and was made available to subscribers at no charge. Set shortly after the death of King Arthur, the underlying game hypothesizes that the idyllic age wherein the Knights of the Round Table stood for chivalry, justice, honor and other noble ideals died with him. In its place is a time of conflict among three diverse domains, each populated by its own selection of races and classes. Albion is where the city of Camelot still stands. Based on Irish Celtic themes, Hibernia is a verdant western region where many lean toward the magical arts, while Norse-influenced Midgard lies to the north, often producing hardy warriors.

In the latest adjunct, each has found a portal to another location of legend, the titular sunken civilization. As told by the game fiction, its citizens, having become aware of their looming fate, created a series of tests, an obstacle course that would await any adventurers wishing to explore the ruins for the secrets and powers lying within. Accordingly, the title is immediately unusual in that it primarily incorporates locations below the waves. That's not all, of course; among its other notable features are a graphical upgrade, one additional race per realm, boat travel, and a system of Master Levels that allows characters to gain new abilities, spells, combat moves and more. In the time since release, we've seen a number of reactions from the player community plus various reviews. Executive Producer Matt Firor offers a third perspective, the team's.

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The Project Trials of Atlantis is the second retail expansion for our massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Dark Age of Camelot. It focuses on high-level player vs. environment (PvE) content, to give long-time, advanced players of the game new lands to explore, new loot to discover, and new abilities to learn. For those that are not familiar with them, MMORPGs are games where you create a character who "lives" in an online world, where he can grow, learn, and become more powerful. In the case of Dark Age of Camelot, the game is set in a mythical time just after the death of King Arthur, and three kingdoms (or Realms, as we call them, each based on medieval lore of Arthurian England, Scandinavia, and Celtic Ireland) are fighting over the territory of the once-strong territory.

The name Trials of Atlantis comes from the fact that, in the game, the different Realms have discovered magical portals to the long-lost continent of Atlantis. When they travel there, they find that the Atlanteans have built a sort of obstacle course throughout their lands - and when the obstacles are overcome, magical powers are granted to the player who successfully completes them. There are nine such trials, so players have the chance to learn nine new abilities.

The Team Mythic Entertainment has been around since 1995 - we are one of the longest lived online game developers in the industry. We are an independent developer, and self-published Dark Age of Camelot (with Vivendi Universal Games handling our distribution). Camelot was our fourteenth title - our other games were all online titles that we developed for different online game portals such as Engage Games Online, Gamestorm, and America Online. Over the years, we developed first-person shooters such as Rolemaster: Magestorm, Spellbinder: the Nexus Conflict, Splatterball, and Aliens Online; online text role-playing games like Darkness Falls: the Crusade and Dragon's Gate; top-down spaceship shooters like Silent Death Online and Starship Troopers: Battlespace; and other miscellaneous titles like Godzilla Online (an isometric-view shooter) and Castles II Online (a strategy game). *whew* We sure were busy in those years between 1996 and 2000, when development of Camelot began!

The Trials of Atlantis team was comprised of approximately 35 people, evenly distributed among artists, programmers and especially content developers - everyone who worked on Trials of Atlantis was a Mythic employee.

High-Level Goals The goal of Trials of Atlantis was to give the higher-level players in the game more to do. Literally. With many new zones to explore, artifacts (special objects that can grow more powerful over time) to find, Trials to overcome, and much more, it was aimed directly at keeping such players interested in the game. Also, over the years since Camelot launched, we received many requests from players to make monster encounters more exciting, quest-based, and exciting.

Development Timeline Trials of Atlantis development essentially started as soon as the previous retail expansion, Dark Age of Camelot: Shrouded Isles, launched in late 2002. Our goal was to ship it in October 2003, and we hit that mark - although in the end, we had to rush testing of some of the major encounters, which led to bug problems in those encounters soon after launch.