Camelot Hits October 9th

Looks like we’re going to be seeing Dark Age of Camelot sooner than expected, according to this press release on the official website. Here’s a direct rip:

An Open Letter to the Dark Age of Camelot Community

Folks,

It is with great pleasure that I tell you that we have now received confirmation from Vivendi Universal that they will ship DAoC on October 9th 2001. Of course, our servers will be open and ready to go on that date even though the majority of the players will not have the game in their hands until a few days later. We thank the community for the patience that it has shown regarding our reluctance to announce this date until we were confident that the game would be shipped as planned.

Let me take this opportunity to also talk about a couple of subjects that the community has asked about for many months. The first subject is what type of different servers will be available at launch. Mythic is committed to setting a new standard for meeting the varied needs of our community. Ever since this project began we have been discussing and making plans for the widest array of servers ever seen in this industry. We have heard the community’s concerns and over the next six months Mythic will be launching many different types of servers. At launch, our first server type will be one geared to those members of the community who have asked for a (Role-playing) server. While DAoC is already skewed toward role-playing with its three competing and non-cooperative realms, this server named Percival, will only be the first of many new community-enhancing features of DAoC. Due to the nature of this very competitive industry, we will not make any announcements about the next server type, other than it is tentatively scheduled to debut in early November, until the server is ready to go into beta testing.

The other thing that I would like to spend a little time talking about is what is up next for Mythic after the release of DAoC. Mythic is committed to making DAoC the premier MMORPG in the industry. To this end Mythic will not have a (Live) team dedicated to the product after the game is released. Rather we will keep the entire company working on the game to keep the content, improvements and, of course, the repairs flowing smoothly until we have met and exceeded that goal. What you see at release from DAoC is just the beginning of the product’s evolution, not the end. In coming weeks I will update the community as to what major features and enhancements will be added to game over the coming months. Suffice it to say that we have heard what the community has asked for and we will not disappoint them.

Once again, I thank the community for its support during the development of DAoC and I look forward to seeing you in our shared world.

Mark