Tuesday 6 January 2004

Pic of the day: Bot or not? (Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.)

One soul, two Paladins

Yesterday I talked about the background and how I got started. Today I want to talk about the gameplay, and try to explain why I find this so fascinating.

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Paladins are inherently group oriented: The feature that sets them apart is their chants, and these apply to the whole group. A Paladin on his own is slightly weaker than an ordinary armsman. With the same equipment he will do less damage and take more damage. He can use one of his chants to make his weapon or his armor more effective or heal himself somewhat during battle; but if he tries to combine more than one chant, he will rapidly grow tired. If two paladins are together in the same group, however, they can run one chant each without tiring at all. For instance one can do the heal chant while the other does the damage chant. Or if they are both taking damage, they can both run a heal chant and both of them will be healed by each.

Also in Dark Age of Camelot, classes that can specialize in shield have an option to guard one more person in addition to themselves. This means if they are reasonably close -- up to a couple steps away -- they can block an attack against the person they guard. They will also attempt to block attacks on themselves as usual. Shield skill is not very effective early in your career, but it grows better and better as you invest more skill points in it.

I had originally envisioned Pallybot as a nonplayer character, following closely my main character while blocking attacks on him and healing him with the chant. This was not what happened. Instead I found myself switching between the characters, attacking with both of them. Since chants and blocking are automatic, it seemed such a waste to not also use the character for fighting. So pretty soon I had both of the characters attack one monster each. Thanks to the chant each of them was able to handle larger monsters than they could have done alone. When confronting even tougher monsters, both of them would attack the same enemy, and try to confuse it so that it switched between attacking one and another. (Since the heal chant affects the whole group, it is better to share the damage than to have one dedicated tanker.)

Since both characters were now fighting equally, the whole "bot" concept was gone, except for the name of my second character ("Pallybot"). For the casual observer it now looks like a simple group of two players, but two players who cooperate seamlessly as if they know each others' thoughts. The innocent bystanders on the British server Prydwen probably believe we are a man and wife team. (Not that a real wife would know my thoughts, more's the pity.)

***

I have written a couple times before about how I sometimes wish I could have two bodies. I have daydreamed about that from years ago and also written some small fiction on the topic. Well, now I have two bodies. Admittedly those are electronic bodies, and there are a lot of fun things you can't do with those. But to my fellow players and to the unfortunate monsters, these bodies are as real as any in that world. And while the experience is a second-order one, it is still something that my ancestors could only dream about. I don't even know whether they did dream about it; perhaps it is just me.

On my deathbed (or wherever I meet my end) I will probably regret not having spent my life in prayer, meditation and works of charity. But for most of the time remaining until then (and may that be a lot of time!) I expect to be quite satisfied to have seen such an impossible dream come true even in a virtual world.

***

Now for the technical details, in case there is one of you who wants to try this for himself. ("Himself" because I very much doubt any woman would be that geeky...)

I am using a Fujitsu Siemens from 2002 with an Intel Celeron (for some reason my speech recognition software initially rendered Intel Celeron as "interest in the wrong") running at 1,7GHz and with 512MB of RAM. The hard disk is a Seagate ST360020A, and the graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 with 64MB RAM. (Even cheap computers today are unlikely to have so low specifications, except possibly for the graphics card and then only if you buy a business machine rather than a games machine.) My connection is 1024/256 ADSL. The two instances of DAoC are installed in completely different folders but on the same hard disk. I start them one at a time (starting the game is by far the most demanding part) and throughout play I switch between them using alt-tab. The switching is almost instantaneous, except when zoning (which is almost as hard on the machine as starting and closing). The performance is sluggish while traveling overland, but strangely enough not during battle. I assume that Mythic has done a lot of work to ensure optimal performance during battles, which makes sense to me. I have taken part in group battles while other players were fighting their own fights nearby, and there was still no lag even when switching back and forth between my characters repeatedly.

I suppose you could run the game on two different machines on a home network. But actually moving from keyboard to keyboard even on the same desk would probably be more cumbersome than switching between the programs, since it is so fast. I know I am more likely to buy a new and faster machine than to buy a network. Since two new high-end games will be released this year, I will probably buy a new computer anyway. But it is not strictly necessary for playing two characters at the same time in Dark Age of Camelot.