The Birth of Voice Chat, The Death of Roleplay
Remembering Dark Age of Camelot
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” — William Shakespeare
Picture a proto-goth teenager in 2001 sitting in a dark room in the glow of a cathode monitor. A menagerie of empty soda cans and a couple of dirty plates from microwavable chimichangas litter a giant desk. Suddenly, words from a real-life friend appear in a little text box in the corner of the mammoth monitor:
“You have the pants! Run!”
Remember MMORPGs? They’re still alive and kicking in 2021, but not with the enthusiasm they once possessed. I spent most of my high school days after school glued to a PC playing a game called Dark Age of Camelot. This paragon of the MMORPG world was the first to do most things right.
From its fully detailed world backed on actual folklore from our Earth to the pioneering of the innovative player-vs-player system of realm-vs-realm or RvR (a three-faction system), Dark Age of Camelot developed by then-called Mythic Entertainment, now City State Entertainment, left nothing on the table thanks to a developer’s Mark Jacobs and Matt Firor with its release in Fall of 2001. It paved the way for many MMOs for years, some more so than others.
The teenager in the story was yours indeed, and the words on the screen came from my best friend to this day. My paladin had acquired a particular pair of pants through the luck of the drop at a big raid my friend had got me in. I didn’t do raids; I didn’t like big groups (I still don’t.)
Back then, rolling for loot was a thing, unlike today, where loot is automatically distributed. I got the prized plate pants that dropped, but I wasn't so lucky when it came time to /roll. I had to hand them over. Fortunately for me, I didn’t care. I needed those pants. They were the last and final missing piece of a coveted set.
Twenty years later, I still remember the name of the angry guild, St. Crispin’s League, chasing me off the hill where the ruins stood. The monster dropped the pants, but I had become the monster.
DAoC’s loading screen will forever be branded into my memory. With three figures representing each respective realm. An elf woman for Hibernia (Ireland), a chivalrous knight for Albion (England), and a stout Viking for Midgard (Scandinavia). Keep these three figures in mind as you read further into this story. The artwork is by a talented artist, Terese Nielsen, whose work has been featured in Magic the Gathering.
Over the years, I spent many hours sitting at this screen with the iconic track, “Call to Arms,” playing on a loop. The song brings me goosebumps after not hearing it for decades. Good music can be found throughout this game. Listen to the relaxing sounds of Avalon Marsh in Albion here.
You always remember the feeling of hanging out in a tavern and being your dark-age self. To wander the frontier and lay under a tree to /emote a few words into the area chat channel of a vast and sometimes lonely zone, hoping someone would hear my kobold pretending to be asleep under a tree. This was gaming to me in the golden years of the early 2000s. It wasn’t just a game; it was existing as someone else. In a world full of bullies and social anxiety, being a mythological creature sleeping under a tree was preferable to real life.
Voice chat was not a thing back then. There was TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, but only the sweaty gamers with big cliques seemed to use them. I am grateful for my time playing online games before the age of the microphone. This gave my young love of writing and storytelling a bastion to cling to and a safe space where no one knew who I was and where I could be myself or anyone I please. There are still factions of role-players across all games, but their ilk is a niche.
I remember reading articles about couples meeting in video games. “The first time I saw her was sitting on a roof.” How many fathers can tell their kids they met their mother in a fantasy world? The idea of getting to know someone so well before even seeing what they look like, yet feeling like you are actually with them, walking by crystal lakes, exploring old castles, and walking in a Wood Elf city high in the trees is an experience that is unique to this tiny niche of people in this little plot of time in existence. That time has passed; it’s all open mic now, and with that comes the immersion break.
With the birth of the age of the microphone, look no further than Elder Scrolls Online to see what a modern MMORPG feels like. There’s text chat, but not like it was. The text chat is either trading, trash-talking, or discussing the meta. The area voice chat channel you are thrown into by default often has obnoxious people playing music, arguing, and name-calling. I would not expect to find people role-playing over a microphone. Who wants their wife or family to hear them doing their best dwarf accent into a microphone?
The three figures representing the ESO factions seem somewhat familiar, except for the knight representing Albion being turned into a rogue type, having Deja vu yet? These three characters are the personification of their realms, just like DAoC in the photo above. Speculation for this is credited to Matt Firor, formerly of Mythic Entertainment, playing a pivotal role in developing both DAoC and ESO. Both led to being the only two three-party factions MMOs to date.
What happened to people in online games? Where’s the imagination? DAoC was somewhat reborn under the guise of ESO, yet it just doesn’t feel the same. Why does everyone have to be the best at everything all the time?
What happened to creating your builds and being great in a unique way? Streamers/gurus killed the age of roleplay. No, they didn’t ban roleplaying or take away our keyboards, but instead, they changed the aspect from escapism to hardcore competitive gaming, and the microphone certainly did not help.
With the glorification of metagaming and e-sports by streamers, the world of creative gaming has declined to the point that a build or class combination that sounds so interesting and fun tickles your theory craft bone, but in actuality, none of it is going to work even remotely well.
Why? Because developers constantly have to nerf classes based on the global result of builds promoted by meta gurus. Even though their build might be unique and gold, the problem becomes that everyone knows about it. I will take something interesting over something compelling any day.
This hamster wheel of keeping up with the Joneses on builds in games has taken games like Elder Scrolls Online that offer any class combination your mind can think of and turned them into about four or five acceptable options that vary from patch to patch. The modern young gamer is being groomed to lack imagination, but the sad part is that video games are born out of invention.
Whether it be picking an orc to be a sorcerer even though they don’t have the best racial perks for the job or simply taking an afternoon nap under a tree outside of the Albion border, keep hoping the firbolgs watching you from the tree-line are friendly; gaming should be about creativity and not just following a YouTuber’s guide to being the best like everyone else.
The best gaming memories aren’t made jumping out of a party bus 40 times a day. They’re made in open worlds, deep valleys, dark dungeons, and glacial fields. They are made of stories. Memories I have 20 years later I cling to with fondness as a ten-year-old screams at his mom in my ear as I jump out of this God-forsaken party bus.
If this article has tickled your curiosity, Dark Age of Camelot still lives on in a small community under new management. Check it out at DarkAgeofCamelot.com.
