Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis Wrap Report

Key Strengths Key strength one: art. The art team did an amazing job learning new techniques for the graphics engine upgrade and producing stunning monster models, terrain, buildings, underwater environments, dungeons and all the other stunning graphics that are displayed in Trials of Atlantis.

Key strength two: solid technology. It has long been Mythic's strategy to always build on our already existing, tried and true technology when we develop new games and expansions. Because of this, our games are almost always rock solid from a stability and connection point of view - Camelot essentially runs on server and messaging technology that we've been working on for almost 10 years.

Key strength three: listening to the community. We have an excellent communications team at Mythic that keeps all the developers up to date with what the fan base is thinking and saying. Soon after Trials of Atlantis shipped, it was obvious that we needed to make some changes to the expansion, especially the difficulty and complexity of the encounters as well as the time it took to complete the Trials, and we made appropriate changes. Without this emphasis on keeping in touch with the community, their all-important feedback would have never reached us.

Areas for Improvement Area for improvement one: content development testing. Trials of Atlantis shipped with a number of encounter bugs that, while not game-breaking, prevented players from completing some Trials. This never would have been a problem had we taken more time to think logically about how players would attempt these Trials, and to test them more fully. It took us weeks to work the kinks out of them.

Area for improvement two: withholding information during the development process. Part of the plan for the development and launch of Trials of Atlantis was to withhold most information about the content from the community. Why? We wanted players to have a sense of discovery as they adventured through the expansion. In pre-release interviews, I compared it to a tabletop role-playing session; you never know quite what you are going to run into. For this reason, our beta testers were forbidden to talk about specific encounters and we didn't have them test everything in order. Of course, this turned out to be a big mistake. Because the game shipped with some bad encounter bugs (see above) and very difficult clues and puzzles, players were never sure when they were presented with a problem if it was a puzzle or a bug. In most cases, it was a puzzle that they simply hadn't figured out yet. In other cases however, it was a bug. The difference didn't matter to most players - it simply didn't work. Fortunately, we scrambled quickly to make amends; within weeks, we made encounters less challenging and fixed outstanding encounter bugs, and are continuing to address issues as they are reported.

Lessons Learned Lesson one. Keep the development process as open as possible to the game's community so they won't be surprised by design decisions after release.

Lesson two. Be careful about how you implement monster encounters that players aren't used to, especially ones that utilize new, relatively untested AI.

Lesson three. No matter how much internal testing is done, no matter how much we test individual components, we cannot possibly test as thoroughly as thousands of beta participants can.

Looking Ahead Dark Age of Camelot will continue to see retail as well as free expansions over its lifespan. The next big event for Camelot is Dark Age of Camelot: New Frontiers, a free expansion that will revamp the game's Realm vs. Realm endgame. New Frontiers will add newly designed frontier terrain with strategic elements, faster travel time to battles, a revamped Realm Ability system and much more.

Personal Thoughts The really interesting lesson that we learned from developing Trials of Atlantis is that you have to be careful when you think you are giving players what they ask for. Since Camelot's release, we've been bombarded with requests to make monster encounters more challenging and have quests that are harder to figure out. Of course, when we did this, there was a huge outcry that we made it too difficult; players enjoy knowing their characters' capabilities, especially when it comes to fighting monsters, and when you change that dynamic, they understandably get upset.

We learned a lot from this, and we'll put that knowledge to good use when developing New Frontiers. Already we've made the decision to have the New Frontiers development process as open as possible - no secrets, everything laid out during development so that the community can comment before launch.

Matt Firor, Executive Producer, Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis Mythic Entertainment

[Since introducing them in November of 2003 to offer post-release viewpoints from the respective teams, it has been our pleasure to publish Wrap Reports on a number of other titles. Lists of the previous ones on both RPG Vault and Action Vault may be seen on the next page. - Ed.]