Currently I am playtesting a lot of MMORPGs and today I tried out Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). It just didn’t work for me. The entire moving feels sluggish, the interface feels clumsy and the non-player character (NPC) interaction reminds me of dealing with old-style MUDs. The setting seems promising though, especially the inter-realm warfare, but to me the pleasure was quickly drained due to the highly annoying user interface (UI).

There’s no easy way by default to get to the option screen. I mean, people nowadays almost expect the escape key to be bound to the game menu or options menu. Nearly every game has this. The entire UI handling is slow that it feels like trying to maneuver through syrup or something. Not to mention that the talking with NPCs is grating, you get a window with some text, some word is underlined, you click on it, you get more text and it goes a few times like this, and you wind up with some quest.

The graphics do not look too bad or dated, but didn’t really inspire much. And the weird thing is that I already experienced some strange glitches where one moment I saw a bunch of enemies standing around and next they just disappeared only to rematerialize a few seconds later.

Perhaps the game gets better later but it just couldn’t keep me enticed. The slugginess is compared to World of Warcraft, Ryzom, and EverQuest II.