Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis Wrap Report

Changes and Enhancements At Mythic, we tend to be very good at changing the scope of projects during development to ensure that we release on time. Trials of Atlantis was no exception, as we had to ramp down the scope of the some of the more advanced AI that we planned on. Other than that, we pretty much hit all of our goals, especially with art. We put a lot of resources into making Atlantis look far more stunning than any other area in the game.

Major Challenges Challenge one: upgrade our graphics engine. One of our primary goals with each retail expansion for Dark Age of Camelot is to upgrade as much as possible our graphics engine; to make the expansion look as good as any of the new games that are launching at the same time. For Shrouded Isles, we upgraded all the monster and player textures in the game, and replaced trees with better looking ones. For Trials of Atlantis, we were much more aggressive; our goal was to upgrade all the terrain textures for the entire game (the original areas as well), and put in an even more realistic tree system. We also upgraded to newer versions of the engine we license (NetImmerse / Gamebryo) and DirectX 9. Of course, the big challenge when you do something like this isn't necessarily the actual technical upgrade - the hard part is coordinating the art so that it conforms to the new standards, upgrading the development tools, etc.

Challenge two: upgrading the AI. As part of the design goal for Trials of Atlantis, we knew we needed to upgrade our monster intelligence to do things like pick players up and fly around with them, perform more intelligent magical abilities, etc. This is especially challenging as it sits at the nuts and bolts level of our game - when you start adding and modifying that, you run the risk of making monsters that are too difficult to kill all together, or act in ways not in keeping with their design. We succeeded in adding new AI to Trials of Atlantis, but we launched with some bugs that caused monsters to act in very strange ways - for example, running away when they weren't supposed to and ending up behind dungeon walls, where players could not interact with or kill them.

Challenge three: content development as a whole. Just coordinating and developing the sheer amount of content in this expansion was a challenge all in itself. We have more content in Trials of Atlantis than in any other discrete portion of Dark Age of Camelot. There are objects that gain strength (artifacts), nine Trials of 10 levels each - each with a quest that controls the player's access to it and tracks each player as they move through the expansion, hundreds of new monsters, new monster AI, new zones, etc. It all adds up to a lot more to do for the player, and a huge coordination effort on the part of the content team. Everyone on the content team worked very hard on Trials of Atlantis, and we certainly are very happy with what they managed to do in such a short amount of time.

Best Decisions Best decision one: upgrading the graphics engine. This was by far the most stunning aspect of Trials of Atlantis, one that got the attention of reviewers immediately. The expansion simply looks wonderful, and the fact that we went back and revamped all the game's original and Shrouded Isles zones as well as added the new Atlantis zones shows how committed we are to keep Dark Age of Camelot fresh to new players and old.

Best decision two: deciding to ramp back the difficulty of some encounters after launch. After Trials of Atlantis launched in late October of 2003, players immediately started complaining (with reason) that some of the encounters were simply too difficult and sometimes not logically presented to them. We went back through each encounter soon after release and made changes to many to make them more fun and easier to accomplish, and to make them better fit into the flow of the expansion. This process continues in version 1.68, which we are working on now and which has many additional tweaks, and will continue in future patches.

Best decision three: having all three Realms share the same content. To some extent, having three Realms in Dark Age of Camelot, where the members of the Realms never see the content of the others, means all content that we develop for the game is split into thirds. For example, for Shrouded Isles, we developed a new continent for each Realm - but that meant that a character in a Realm only saw the content for that Realm; essentially only a third of the total content developed. With Trials of Atlantis, we decided to make one continent, and have all the Realms share it. We came up with a backstory where the Atlanteans made alternate "planes" of existence to explain why players never run into players from other Realms while exploring, and then made one huge land and sea mass that comprised the geography of Atlantis. This means that a character in any one Realm received ALL the new content from the expansion, not just a third.