The Island
Posted By: Jeff Hickman 2005-07-22 16:42:31
In the year since New Frontiers launched, a couple of things have been come obvious. The new keep upgrade system, zone layout, siege warfare, and other new concepts introduced in the expansion have been a success - but it has also become obvious that the Camelot community misses a central battleground area served in the old frontiers by the Emain Macha zone.
With that in mind, we are happy to announce a new island in the Dark Age of Camelot world - an island that physically connects the three Realms. We want this island to provide a centralized area for players to fight in, but put this area in such a place that it is easy to move between the Frontiers without boats or teleportation. We're in the final design stages of the island, but we can give some basic information today (with the caveat, of course, that all information may change based on feedback and testing):
- The island is named "Agramon" and will be tied in to the upcoming Darkness Rising expansion.
- All server types will have this island. Expect to see Agramon hit the live servers sometime in August, depending on beta testing on Pendragon.
- It is roughly triangular-shaped with each point of the triangle pointing towards one of the three Realm's beachhead keeps.
- A wide bridge connects Agramon to the each of these island beachhead keeps via a towerless wide bridge.
- Agramon is accessible by crossing the bridges beginning at each beachhead keep. Mountainous zonewall surrounds the entire island, except for the bridge and a small amount of beachhead access. To alleviate the bridge chokepoints, the bridges can be bypassed by swimming or by boats landing on the beach.
- Once across the bridges, there are fairly large spaces to fight in, before reaching a milewall with two separate gates through the wall.
- The island's terrain is mainly rolling hills of various elevation, with many very wide funnel points, such as in the old Emain Macha zone.
- Many small landmarks and structures are scattered about the island which help to define locations and mark good locations for battles.
- Between six and eight named regions (the final count is not yet determined) are located in Agramon, which help to direct the flow of fighting in a general way by establishing where battles are happening. These names will be easily typed and remembered.
Here is an initial Map of Agramon, meant to help illustrate the concept. Please note that this may well change, and should not be seen as final! This is a "bare bones" map, one without terrain, features, or anything but the basic form of the continent. The three entrance points look as though they are unique, but the actual angles of access and visibility have been designed to be similar (to avoid any realm having a strategic advantage over another). This map may also be tweaked in response to user feedback once we move into testing.
Our teamleads graciously proofread our original announcement, and brought up a number of concerns and requests. Some of those items are still pending (such as whether or not the gates will have climb points), but the most frequently asked questions were variations of these these two:
Q: Won’t the gates and the bridges act as choke points? The most frustrating thing about the old frontiers/old Emain was that eight people could choke off an entire army at specific points.
A: This was one of our top concerns as we designed this new fighting area. Focusing combat into specific areas has long been cited as major factor in a “good” combat zone – you can be relatively sure there’s a fight waiting for you. At the same time, we remember the frustration born of zoning in to the old Frontiers, and never being able to get past the gate. So, with this design, we’ve tried to focus the combat AND provide alternatives. The bridge leads straight to the island, but if fighting on the bridge is too heavy, you can jump off and swim, or pilot a boat. There are two milegates for each bridge/beach landing, instead of one. Even if both milegates are camped, you can still swim or ride a boat around the island to another realm’s beach landing and use that entry point instead. Basically, there are options. We will need your feedback during the testing phase to make sure we’ve got the right mix of channeling the fight and strategic options.
Q: Will the Island be connected to the “regular” game?
A: No and yes. This is supposed to be a fun, central point where people can fight for the heck of it. There are no keeps, control of the island doesn’t count on a scoreboard, and no targets to fight over. It’s like a battleground, but with one key difference: if your realm should come under attack, you’re only a run/swim away from defending it, and it will take very little coordination to switch from informal play on the island to serious siege warfare on the frontier. We wanted to leave the keep warfare immediately accessible, but as we all know, some nights it’s hard to coordinate a war and you’d just rather kill people.
