Daniel Emery finally gets the chance to road-test the game that wants to out-beard EverQuest

While the sane part of the world's population waits for Star Wars Galaxies, Internet and RPG junkies are being spoilt rotten. And the thing that is getting them hot around the collar is Mythic's new MMORPG, Dark Age Of Camelot. But first, a little history.

OK, way back in the mists of time, there was a game called MUD. It stood for Multi-User Dungeon and was a text-based adventure. You know the type

However, what made MUD different from the other games around was that you weren't alone. While The Hobbit on the Spectrum and Colossus on the BBC had you solo in a nasty world, with MUD there were literally thousands of other people playing at the same time. And they were almost all students. You see, MUD was too big for the average micro-computer and instead lived on University mainframes. There then followed a running battle between players and the University IT managers. With the huge number of users, the servers went down faster than a lady of ill-repute, and the colleges were not amused.

Potential MarketIt wasn't until the mid '90s that games companies really cottoned onto the fact that this was a vast, untapped market, and that a first-person graphical way of playing an RPG might be a good idea (rather than using text). Several attempts were made to corner this market ?Meridian 59, Asheron's Call and Ultima Online were some of the more successful. But it was Verant's EverQuest that really set the genre alight. At its peak, EverQuest boasted over 90,000 players at any single given moment. Which is both very impressive and very worrying at the same time.

That was two years ago, and until recently Verant were the unchallenged masters of the MMORPG. But now a David and Goliath battle is raging. Mythic has finally launched DAOC Platinum, and it has taken the gaming world by storm. And unlike all the other games, this one isn't set in some mythical place like Norrath or Britannia. It's set in Europe. Britain, Ireland and Norway to be precise.

The first thing you notice about the game is the graphics. Now, this isn't Unreal II or Return To Castle Wolfenstein, but for an MMORPG it's the best we've seen yet. If you've been playing EverQuest, it does take getting used to. All the other games generally run at 640 x 480, so having a game run in high res (and fast) feels weird at first. But enough of the eye candy. What's the game like?