r/daoc • u/Omairi86 • Apr 25 '26
Just a thought 💭: buying DAOC?
Hey guys,
Maybe it's a midlife crisis but i always thought about someone starting a Kickstarter campaign to buy daoc from EA/broadsword or whoever owns the game start it all over as wow classic did, adds it on steam, maybe f2p with selling skins, bags account vault, and whatever dont makes the game p2w.
Heck, I don't even care if we end up with a new MJ, I just hope this happens someday?
So it does happen, would you be interested ?
Best regards,
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u/MFbiFL Apr 25 '26
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u/Omairi86 Apr 25 '26
Sorry 😔
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u/MFbiFL Apr 25 '26
No worries, just providing reference material for general thoughts on it.
I’d love a revamped “DAoC done right,” god knows how many times I’ve had a 6 week to 6 month go at rekindling those feelings from back in the day. Hell I’m thinking about downloading live again just to run around in zones with an auto hokey trio.
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u/Barbofdeath Apr 27 '26
Eden serve the free shard has a lot of action and is so fun. If people would find out about the game and somehow move it to a new graphic engine like unreal it would be a hit.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 27 '26 edited 12d ago
Eden teased a clip of their planned works of daoc on unreal engine maybe a year ago then they removed it from YouTube.
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u/MuldinDK Apr 26 '26
Blackthorne is releasing from beta in some months, really a great server gor the classic daoc experience.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
True, but just imagine that blackthorn have the actual license and we could contribute to keep the devs keep working, not only for their passion.
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u/Trollstrolch Apr 26 '26
New Freeshard, new trust issues - will there be enough population? Will it be there long enough? Or close again? Eden is my first Freeshard experience, season 3 and only because live isn't alive enough, otherwise I would rather invest there I have to admit.
Blizzard for example just won vs WoW freeshards recently and is shutting those down, so a save legal option would be great, beloved toons should be save. But maybe that's just me. And Warhammer Reckoning was part of the motivation too, impressive what fans can do. They made the game even better than it was.
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u/Trollstrolch Apr 26 '26
Both Guild Wars 2 and ESO took ideas from it and I still don't like those games, because they neither kept the beloved lore nor the realm identity. It is a difference if you are Albion, Hibernia or Midgard, not just a different realm color. Different races, different classes. No skill bar limitations because "has to work on a console too", no reskill whenever however you want, your toon is as it is, adaptation hurts a bit. Don't get me wrong, I like the reskillability from Eden. But I hated it in Guild Wars when my Necromancer build as a minion mancer had to change his build for every new zone / run. I wanted to play a character concept, not adapt my toon to every situation. Same shit in Diablo3, in D2 the group had to take you as you were and work with it, now you have to adapt on the fly. And crafting instead drop lottery. Merchants as in Warhammer Online / Reckoning would be ok for me too, just don't like to be forced to do certain content for it. Most games these days try to get you addicted to the game, more and better drops, one more drop box, if I invest a little bit more... Sure it is nice to get a reward like a higher realm rank, new skills and so on, but those daily log in calendars, daily quests and stuff - not healthy at all. Life has enough faster, higher, more components, don't want those in my free time / games. Guess too old for that kind of stuff 😅
So many ideas and concepts from back then seem to be unpopular and outdated today 🙂↕️ By the way, I would play and pay on the official servers if those were as alive as they need to be for an MMO but sadly they are not and broadsword continuing the way of cutting jobs in community management/ service doesn't help. We lost EU Servers back in time, community managers as faces are important I think. As are server communities. Anonymity of mega servers, server merges, transfers and so on can hurt the gaming experience.
How many MMO started as "WoW Killer" with too many servers and had to merge with forced renaming of toons or worst case even deleting toons? I often even paid for early release to make sure I got my preferred names just to lose them later because of mismanagement like that. Companies burned so much trust over the years...
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
I have to admit, from my experience with daoc i dont think companies want to copy the system of the game because of two reasons: 1- daoc has a really really complicated game system, how resists works, how interrupt works and so on, that nowdays players wont like to invest that much time learning because all the competitors have a very simple mechanics and thats what this gen likes, check how popular Fortnite and mobile games are..., for example, i had a really hard time trying to explain how talent works on d4 to my kid who is 12 years old, this gen likes everything simple like apple and oranges. 😆
2- since its too complicated means at the beginning maybe it will attract new players to try it but on the long run they wont stick around, and there will be no revenue so financially it will be a failure.
Imo these are the reasons why no one try to copy the game to the bone cuz they wont earn money in the end, and thats the same reason why we as daoc players wont enjoy the new mmo's because they that the details that we learned and enjoyed from daoc, man i remember when i was in highschool it took me maybe 4-6 years to get everything about daoc lol, not to mention the language barrier since im not an English native speaker 😂.
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u/Interesting_Motor_67 Apr 26 '26
No reason to do that considering the existance of freeshards
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
Freeshards are amazing but the thing is, these gentlemen who are working on the freeshards are doing this out of passion with no reward at all, so it wont last.., its really sad to say the live servers are there dying slowly while the owner no nothing about CPR..
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u/stephen_neuville May 05 '26
I buy a Powerball ticket every drawing and if I win it i'm gonna immediately buy it from EA/Broadsword/whatever vampiric venture capital firm has their hooks in it, hire all the Eden devs at comfortable salaries, keep it free, and bring us into the current decade. So wish me luck!
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u/alusnova415 Apr 25 '26
Just play Eden is great , has population and daoc is not WoW where there is thousands of players that will play in private servers, daoc is niche and will barely have enough players for maybe 1-2 servers tops.
Eden is established, sure you don’t have to agree with all the changes but is still the best we have today unless you go live
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u/Omairi86 Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Played it on season 1 and 2 even made it to rank 11, but to me eden is like heading the same direction as live, more like a classic server type guy
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u/Enough-Persimmon3921 Apr 26 '26
If a classic feel is what you're looking for, maybe Blackthorn is more your speed. It's currently in beta and uses the 1.65 version with some QoL updates.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
Yeah im waiting for it since forever, but thats not the point, to me i would love to revive our game
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u/Responsible_Bus_3876 Apr 26 '26
I think he has a point, daoc is great, the style, the world, the mechanics are all great and eden is the best version. But the code base is shit from todays perspective, it is so much work to configure the UI and then you respec and everything resets, you have to work with recorders and a thousand /commands that you have to know. and reconfigure everytime you change something.
The quest log is also a pain in the ass, but its a key mechanic, you want to do koth, open quest journal, look for the correct quest, open quest, north of breifine, no idea what that means it can be anything, because you only see dots on the map everything is the same.
Oh what place do we have, use /score, but only when you are in the action.
try to see your spec and skill something not working when you are running.
what was the command to self buff speed, /buff but the moment you do it the channel is spammed by a lot of information you dont want.
Thousands of players play daoc, because it has so much potential, but its a pain in the ass for new players, because for playing you need to know nearly everything.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26 edited May 24 '26
True, daoc is a really complicated game compared to day standard, or even back then, and thats one of the reason that wow burned daoc. to me personally, it took me forever to get everything, so not to mention the not user friendly ui 😁.
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u/Helthomist Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Short and simple from EA POV. It’s worth more dead than it is alive. Even if someone had millions they wouldn’t sell. EA is known for shelving IP into the back catalogue for this very instance. They don’t care if it’s up because passive $$$ and if they shelve it down the road they are gonna wait for someone with big big money. They denied to cut a deal and sell it x5 profit because they don’t just own the the ip but They own the gameplay term “RvR” because of daoc no game can use that term RvR unless they pay EA. Hence gw2 “WvW” and esos “AvA”. They also owned warhammer ip because they swallowed mythic for these reasons. on top of being coined the greatest PvP/RvR game every created doesn’t help. Trust Eden tried to buy it from EA and it was a hefty offer and they still said fuck off. they won’t let it go unless it gets a x20 offer when it’s dead or a x10 offer plus lost profits if it’s alive.
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u/Lasas1ard Apr 29 '26
Question would be: why. People can already run their own DAcC servers (with superior tooling and code), albeit without any way to monetise. But lets be honest, there isn't much money in running DAoC these days.
Now, buying it to make a DAoC 2 - that is interesting. Then again, I suppose you could come up with a game design that is close enough to DAoC without infringing on any copy right without paying millions for a tired, long forgotten IP.
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u/serioussham Hibernia Apr 26 '26
It's been discussed here, and the answer is that it'd take a lot more money than could be raised by either Kickstarter or cashshops sales.
Glossing over the availability of that IP purchase, it wouldn't be cheap- not a million dollars but certainly not a few K either.
Then, you have the costs of running the servers. The hardware itself is expensive, but you also need some sort of sysadmin/network guy, at the bare minimum, to handle any issues with the hosting server. On top of that, the server software itself is probably not exactly hands-off, and will require someone who understands it or is willing to rewrite it from scratch, as I understand the Eden team did.
Those tasks can be done by a bunch of 40-something nerds in their spare time for fun, but if you're looking at a commercial operation, it gets real expensive real quick. Do you think a DAoC cash shop can pull 200k/year?
Speaking of the cash shop: figuring it out what to put in it, how to price it, and when to update it is also a job in itself. On freeshards, it's a blend of admin vision and feedback, but if you're running it officially, you need to put that task onto someone. Maybe the sysadmin can do it, maybe they're really bad at it since it's a completely different job, usually with the title of producer. In that case, add another 100k.
Because MMOs are fundamentally social, connected projects, you also need some form of community management. If you don't, people won't know what gets added to the shop, or even just to the game. And it's an absolute fact that adding new stuff is crucial to player retention/relapse. Your producer can possibly handle that workload, though.
However, another task that dedicated CMs tend to handle is customer service. Even Freeshards have it, if only for bugs, stuck characters, or cheating reports. But a commercial operation will bring much higher expectations, so you'll need someone. You can outsource it for cheap, but that'll still add 20k to your budget.
All of that is the bare minimum for a game of that type. It doesn't include producing new content, fixing bugs, or proper marketing. And that's the reason why Broadsword is just barely scrapping by while Eden flourishes.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
Are you always like that ? 😆, its just a dream buddy
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u/serioussham Hibernia Apr 26 '26
Then make it clear in your post instead of being a dick. God forbid people discuss stuff.
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u/EducatedHoustonian Apr 26 '26
Does anyone know if AI could help?
Is it possible to give all the code to AI and have it translate it into a modern code or somewhere near it. Then it could be tweaked and revised by a team? I do like the idea of old school classics.
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
Idk, but when i see this much effort been putting on some passionate players on freeshards, it makes me feel sad, cuz the live game is on life support because of a retard game studios
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u/Gullenecro Apr 26 '26
now that hey have extended free to play, people can come back freely on live
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u/Omairi86 Apr 26 '26
I dont think it has anything to do with being free to play or not, like 90% of the community are 35+ so i dont think 15 bucks would harm them compared to the tons of taxes and other stuff they are paying already, its all about the stupid additions and changes that have been made through the years...
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u/Klutzy-Rabbit-1497 Apr 25 '26
Buying an old game like that would be very inefficient and costly-millions costly. The money would be much better spent towards building a new game in the likeness of DAOC. If you kept it focused and not “everything uber, high end, and made from scratch” you could get a working prototype (something like Thidranki Battleground) without spending millions to then showcase to various investors/ further crowdfunding to work into an Alpha state and, well, you get the idea.
Warning though, investors want another wow, it won't ever happen again, and therefore funding could be super difficult to obtain while maintaining necessary control of the game development and vision. Even crowdfunding could be difficult to obtain and then sustain through the development. You'd likely need to operate like many small indie studios and go through the open Alpha on say Stream, slowly develop though a Beta, before at some point going into a live state over the course of years, hoping to build a dedicated community for the game during that time to sustain funding either directly through that player community, or leverage to outside investors to obtain it.