Dark Age of Camelot, Mythic Entertainment's new online role-playing game, found its way onto store shelves yesterday and seemed to disappear almost as quickly, as fans of online role-playing games quickly snatched up copies across the country. Vivendi Universal, publisher of Dark Age of Camelot, announced earlier this week that the game had already presold around 100,000 copies. But apparently, many fans were just as eager to buy it the day it came out. GameSpot spoke with no fewer than half a dozen major software retailers in the San Francisco Bay Area, all of whom claimed that they'd already received numerous inquiries about the game's status that day. Most also added that their supply of the game was either spoken for or already sold out. The game itself launched without incident--aside from a small patch and a downtime that lasted several hours, yesterday Dark Age of Camelot was fully playable, stable, and already filled with thousands of players exploring its medieval fantasy world.

　　Currently, 10 game servers, sometimes called "shards," are available to choose from. These different servers, named after classic Arthurian characters like Lancelot and Galahad, contain mirrored versions of the gameworld--but once you create a character on a particular server, you can't transfer that character to any other server. At peak hours, most all of these servers contained more than 1,500 players. Dark Age of Camelot's gameplay ran smoothly with this number of players in the game, even with many players onscreen at a single time. The servers can reportedly support about 3,000 players at once. Of note, Mythic launched the Pendragon server yesterday, a voluntary server that will be used for testing new content and game balance changes that Mythic intends to implement in the game. Even this test server seemed quite abuzz with activity.

　　Dark Age of Camelot installed easily, and registering a new player account was simple--the game doesn't even ask for credit card information up front, but instead just your home address, e-mail address, and so forth. Your first month of play is free in Dark Age of Camelot, at which point you'll have various options--including cash--for paying the approximately $12 monthly fee for continued play.

　　We explored various servers and all three of the game's realms--Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia, respectively based on Arthurian, Norse, and Celtic folklore--and found that there was plenty to do in all of them right off the bat. The game's interface, though complex, uses pop-up help windows to help ease new players into the gameworld. Besides this, the printed manual that's included with Dark Age of Camelot offers a good deal of information about many of the game's important features. A colorful map of the realms is also included.

　　Dark Age of Camelot's successful launch bodes well for its future. The game's huge world and its promise of sophisticated team-based player vs. player conflicts, together with its appealing concept, have made it very popular right from the start. And the fact that the game launched smoothly, in stark contrast to other high-profile massively multiplayer games released this year, suggests that players already immersed in Dark Age of Camelot may well stay that way for a very long time. We'll have a full review of Dark Age of Camelot later this month.