In retrospect, what were we thinking?
Sure, Dark Ages had a great background, even if it was a melting pot of Nordic and Celtic and a few other cultures we think about when we see a fluffybunny wiccan, but it is goes without saying – and in fact it did go without saying for a very long time, thanks to us – that the entirety of its core gameplay mechanics is aimed at powergamers, grinders, number munchers, script writers and all other forms of players who have as much fun with a spreadsheet as they do with the game itself.
Consider it for a moment. Five attributes, each governing a potentially important part of gameplay: STR for melee damage, DEX for how often melee attacks do hit and how often attacks against you miss, INT for magical damage, WIS for mana and CON for health. But WIS and CON are like compound interest (“Compound interest is the strongest force in the universe.” – Albert Einstein): the earlier you have them as high as you can, the more mana or health you have at the end. They do nothing by themselves, however, save for one or two high level skills based on them, so you will need the other non-compound interest attributes somewhere in your line-up if you want to kill anything bigger than a rat.
Not to mention each skill or spell has a specific requirement in each attribute, which requires raising them all anyway – but never forget every item you wear has the ability to add or remove points and can be enchanted by a wizard or blessed by a god to add even more points. So if you can get your hands on a Leather belt, pairs of Fiosachd Shagreen boots, Ceannlaidir Beryl earrings and Iron gauntlets, Glioca Mythril greaves, Cail Signet rings and a Dwarvish helmet, and manage to get an Acolyte of Ceannlaidir to cast Ceannlaidir’s Blessing on you for that last ounce of STR you need, you may get that next spell you wanted before becoming a master and buying enough attribute points – or, if you are going to sub-path, to get the spell you wanted at all before never having access to it again. Plan accordingly from level 1 and try to collect items as you are being leeched to 99.
But try not to get leeched too fast, or you will need to sit there casting the same spell over and over for hours or days or weeks to level it up so you may learn its next version, and a Ranger may come by while you are doing it (or your computer is doing it for you) and give you a meaningless mark. Ponder deeply about the octagram and the relation between the gods as you do, or draft an essay about the economical impact of the political implications of the continued reign of Loures over Undine in the importing of goods from Oren island.
Dark Ages was always about the numbers, when to raise each attribute for maximum long-term gain, which combination could give you the most spells before subbing, what were the most optimized sets of items and which attributes and levels you would need to use them. Pardon, not level: insight.
I played very few MMORPGs, but I can say with no shade of doubt that Dark Ages was the most complex I ever saw. Even the big names, like WoW and DAoC, were nowhere near that complicated. The analogy “checkers next to chess” falls short: it is checkers next to Go.
The only way to thrive in Dark Ages was with immense charts and tables and calculators, and time for collecting items. We, the True Aislings, picked words instead of numbers and spent our time debating in-game politics and religion and creating stories. Fun can be derived from that, no doubt, but the basis we were given to play was a numbers game, which we failed to see for what it was and complained when the kids who did see it started playing it the way it was supposed to be played. We were the kids in the sandbox wearing frilly clothes that our mothers told us not to get dirty, and we yelled at the other kids making sand castles and mud cakes.
We were wrong. And we sucked at their game.
* * *
Then I remember Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds. It is probably more complex now, but in my time all the numbers in it could fit in the back of a contact card. You picked a class at the beginning, you could learn skills or spells at certain levels, provided you had the items required. And that was it. Attributes could only be raised individually at endgame, when it no longer mattered for anything other than bragging rights and carrying capacity. What differed each character was the player’s skills, not the combination of numbers and items they had. And if they popped in Koguryo or Buya when they used a Yellow Scroll.
I had a Pure Temuairan Grand Master Wizard in Dark Ages, with all spells. My Poet never got past level 93 in Nexus. But I miss Nexus tremendously more than I miss Dark Ages.
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