Monday 5 January 2004

Pic of the day: Adventures of Pallyboy and Pallybot in The Tomb of Mithra. (Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.)

Pallybot

There is something really strange about meeting yourself, especially for the first time. I guess it helps that it is only in an online game... but even so, it was a remarkable experience. I have also got a new view on the "soul mate" thing. One soul in two bodies. But let us start from the beginning.

***

I have played the online role playing game Dark Age of Camelot almost since it was released. I even got an American copy before the game was officially for sale in Europe. Especially over the last year or so I have noticed a trend: There is the widening difference between the casual gamers and the dedicated gamers. The dedicated gamers not only play more, they also have the latest expansion pack and often have two accounts.

In all cases I can remember, players with two accounts use one of them for a "buffbot". This is a primary healer type, which has the ability to improve another character (or more than one) magically: Making them stronger, faster, more resistant to damage and so on. The buffbot trails along but stays out of trouble while the fighter character is in the thick of battle.

Over time I grew used to the concept of dual account gaming. I even started to play with the thought that I might buy a second account myself. But not to impress my fellow players and get my name in the statistics on Camelot Herald. If I were to pay extra, it must be to have more fun. And an earlier episode had given me an idea about exactly how to do that.

It was one of the first times I visited the dungeon called "the Barrow" in Albion. With our group was a Paladin who was of high enough level to survive in the dungeon. (I was really not... I was just trailing along.) The group set up camp in a good pulling spot. The Paladin positioned himself to protect the healer, started his own Heal chants... and walked away from the keyboard. We stayed at that spot for a long time, and the guy who played the Paladin never came back before we finally left. But even on autopilot he continued to protect the healer, assist in the healing, and draw some of the monsters to attack him -- attack him in vain, because he blocked and parried their attacks for long enough that the rest of us could kill them off.

My most played character, Itlandsen the overly defensive Paladin, was at least in part inspired by this event. But specializing this way, in chants and defense only, made the character very boring to play outside groups. And groups consist of other people with a different agenda. Until now.

***

I stopped by Gamezone, the local computer games specialist in Kristiansand. Here I picked up another copy of DAoC and the Shrouded Isles expansion pack for the European servers. (I would have preferred the American servers, but that version on the game is not for sale here in Norway. I sometimes get American friends to buy me programs and send them in the mail, whereupon I buy something else for them. But I do not want to overextend my goodwill... I expect to need that procedure for two other games this year.) I went home and installed the game on my main computer, where I already have one installation of the European version and one of the American. It is a 1.7GHz Celeron processor with 512MB RAM, and I have an ADSL connection, so I was fairly optimistic that I could run both accounts on one machine. (I had already tried running one American and one European account at the same time. It was a bit sluggish but not enough to give up.)

Installing the software was easy, but creating a second account was difficult. The Camelot Europe web site has a nice enough procedure for doing this, but it complained that the account already existed and terminated the registration process. I asked my fellow players for help on the alt.games.dark-age-of-camelot newsgroup on USENET. It turned out that I needed to have another e-mail address; everything else could be the same. After an archaeological dig in the immense stack of papers on my computer desk, I found an old e-mail account that had almost never been used but was still active. With this I managed to complete the registration. I could now begin to play.

I first made the leading character, a Highlander fighter complete with kilt and bright red hair. I advanced him a few levels (you cannot become a Paladin until level five) and then created the secondary character. I had toyed with the idea of making them identical twins; I had already decided the names: Pallyboy and Pallybot. But I realized that the assisting Paladin ought to specialize in shields so as to guard the primary fighter from attacks. The Albion race with the highest agility is the Saracen. I also decided, contrary to my earlier plans, to make her female. The Saracens start in a different location, and I had to level her a bit first, so it took some time before the two of them met.

And that was when I got this strange feeling. When I came over the hill and saw my other self waiting. I suddenly realized that despite all my theoretical knowledge about soul mates, I had never really known anything. I guess I still don't, but at least now I have a new and better metaphor. That's worth a few Euro, don't you think?