Dark Age of Camelot

Launched in late 2001, Dark Age of Camelot is a long-running MMORPG from Mythic Entertainment.

The game presents three realms: Albion, a typical The Dung Ages representation of medieval England which is heavily steeped in Arthurian myth; Midgard, a frosty, fjord-y representation of Norse mythology populated by Vikings and trolls; and Hibernia, built on Irish folklore and legend.

The three realms war in Player Versus Player frontier areas, while each realm's home territory is dedicated to Player Versus Environment play.


 * All Trolls Are Different
 * All Your Base Are Belong to Us: This trope tends to get invoked when one realm's keeps and towers are taken away by the enemy realms. Reclaiming them largely depends on the morale of the realm's population, and losing all of them can be detrimental to many players' willingness to go out there. Since this is a three-way war, whose keeps are taken changes repeatedly.
 * Cast From Hit Points: The "Savage" class.
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Particularly from one player (video NSFW) who felt he was wrongly deprived of his Cloudsong.
 * Critical Encumbrance Failure: Subverted slightly. As you get closer to your encumbrance capacity, you begin to move slower. Once you go past it however, you're unable to move until you lighten your load a little.
 * Critical Existence Failure: Played straight for the most part. As your health goes down, your character's movement slows down.
 * The Dung Ages
 * Dynamic Difficulty: The instanced dungeon difficulty is largely based on how many players are in the group, and it scales up or down as players join or leave.
 * Levelscaling: it's also based onte player's level to an extent.
 * Forever War: Pretty much the entire point of PvP in this game.
 * Gotterdammerung: Albion's time of strife after the death of Arthur.
 * Inventory Management Puzzle: Good luck agonizing over which awesome loot to leave behind so you can stagger back to town!
 * Last Stand: Players defending a keep lord as the room is being breached often experience this. Sometimes they hold off the attack, other times it doesn't go very well for them.
 * King Arthur: Albion's background mythology is the Arthurian cycle, and the titular "Dark Age" your character inhabits is the period after Arthur's death at Mordred's hands.
 * Memetic Mutation: "YOU STOLE MY FUCKING CLOUDSONG!"
 * Mithril
 * Obvious Beta: The Hibernia realm was notoriously unfinished at the time of the game's release. Some of the dungeons weren't even open, most notably the Coruscating Mines. It took about a year and a half before all of the dungeons were opened and populated.
 * Player Versus Player: Called Realm vs Realm in the context of DAoC, but very much the opposite of Player Versus Environment.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The Trials of Atlantis expansion introduced master levels that had a host of repercussions in the PvP side of things, some of which are so despised that there are "Classic"-flavoured servers.
 * Many players consider this the point when the game began its decline.
 * Zerg Rush: The classic Albion attack, although the other two realms use this tactic regularly as well.