AoC, Honeymoon’s Over
Posted June 19th, 2008 by Isobelle
So yeah. Age of Conan is a let down. It was an interesting alternative to WoW while it lasted, but not worth paying actual money to play on a monthly basis. The flood of positive reviews is a result of people suffering from Honeymoon Syndrome. Because the game is new, they're willing to overlook flaws in the game in order to just be playing something besides WoW. Fanboi Syndrome rears its ugly head here, as well, as people who were clamoring on the forums for 18 months before the game was even released refuse to be wrong-in-retrospect, so they cling fervently to their previous (unfounded) assertions, even in the face of shit game play.
I myself am guilty of the first. I had just been banned from WoW, had ordered AoC about 2 days prior to its release, and was really looking forward to something new. When it arrived, and I booted it up, I was initially impressed by the graphics, and how well it actually ran on my system. I have an 8800GTX, and an AMD 5600+ (2.whatever GHz) with 2 gigs of RAM. That the game didn’t outright laugh in my face was reassuring. This was going to be fun! Fuck WoW, amirite?!
Wrong.
While the much lauded climb to level 20 really is something special, the game offers very little from that point on. I’m going to go out on a limb here and save myself from explaining the climb to 20 in AoC. If you honestly have no idea what happens, go and Google “AoC Destiny Quest” and come back when you get it. After your main Destiny quest is completed, and you leave the island of Tortage, the game takes a serious dive into the crap bin. I wrote my last article in the fevered grips of exactly level 19. Reread the review and chuckle to yourself at my naivety. Go ahead, free license. At level 19, everything in the review stands correctly, but MMOs don’t stop at less than a quarter of the level cap (shut up, twinks… you don’t fucking count).
After leaving the island, I was suddenly aware of how much polish the initial zone had, because the rest of the world started looking shittier and shittier the further on I pressed. Quest descriptions and the ‘dialogue trees’ are a farce. You pretty much just keep clicking the first choice until the quest is given, and if you end up back at ‘step 1’ you should have clicked option 2 on the last pane of ‘choices’. "Tell me about yourself" is an option of dialogue for every NPC. That’s the one you don’t click. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect every waking moment of an MMO to be a mind blowing experience that I want to write to a pen pal about. I do expect it to be at least ‘fairly entertaining’ though, and I expect there to be multiple paths to the final destination.
My toon is a dark skinned woman. I'm just sayin.
Take WoW, for example (god forbid). A level 19 horde side toon in WoW will have had the following dungeons already available to them:
Ragefire Chasm – While RFC may be a joke that 70s get tired of getting tells about, at level 10 or so, it’s an honest to god viable dungeon with bosses and quests and zomg green drops. I didn’t see my first “dungeon” in AoC until level 34. Destiny Mode was a very cool quest line, but there’s no “let’s group up 5 deep and go kill that boss in the lava cave” until level thirty-fucking-four.
Shadowfang Keep – SFK is STILL one of my favorite dungeons in all of WoW. I love being that level range on an alt, because I love running that place. It isn’t the most shocking level design, but it just feels… good. You start at the front door, work your way out to the courtyard, fight through the kitchen up the stairs, you on to the parapets, up the tower, and through various upper echelons to reach a showdown with Arugal himself… stopping to vanquish Fenris, the Hound Keeper guy, Odo the Blindwatcher… again, it’s just a clean structured run.
Wailing Caverns – Yeah. Too long. Not very liked, but it’s there.
Look, I’m not trying to turn this into a review of WoW’s lower levels, but just as a comparison of shit that you can do in WoW (and was there at launch) that is mysteriously missing from AoC. Even the gear itself… within 2 minutes of rolling a new alt in WoW, I’m wearing a new pair of dropped leggings that look different that what I started out in. All the armor in Conan is:
1) Brown
2) a Kilt
and
3) Pointless.
Note Yellow Arrow Length vs. Pink Quiver Size. Just sayin.
Stat distribution on items is vague, and never really differentiates one item from the next. People on the Conan boards argue that the game isn’t item or gear based, and that ‘that’s a good thing’. Okay, but … if you aren’t playing the game to get new exciting items, then… well, I dunno. I guess I’m a loot whore. Cool new items are kinda one of the driving forces in “running that dungeon” or “doing that quest”. Plus, oops…(!) the devs themselves have acknowledged that there really isn’t any gear in the game yet, and that they plan to add a bunch more in the future. Hm, so basically, the ‘gear’ part of the game isn’t implemented yet. Ahhh, gotcha. Well there goes the ‘it isn’t gear based’ argument; the reality is that the game isn’t done yet.
As far as graphics themselves go, you may remember that I wet my pants over the water in the starting zone (see what I did there?). It’s true that the first body of water you can leap into is certainly impressive, but then I got out in the world, and found these horribly textured other bodies of water that just made me wonder why they didn’t “10 MAKE WATER” at one point in the game, and then “GOTO 10 IMPLEMENT THE WATER HERE, TOO” throughout the rest. There is honestly about 5 different ‘types’ of water I came across, and the most disturbing looked like they melted down “Metal Form Mario” from Mario 64 and poured him into a lake. All green and silver and seriously what the fuck? Pop-up is horrendous. NPCs disappear and reappear randomly anywhere from 5 feet to 15 feet away. Quest givers are especially awesome because they have a "?" over their head, but if they haven't loaded yet, it's sitting on the ground where they should be. You get to sit patiently waiting for them to appear before you can turn quests in. It isn't my video settings. It's buggy. Not finished.
There’s three other things to touch on: PvP, the whole M for Mature Argument, and guild cities. The first two are both kind of intertwined, though. First is the fact that you can basically take a swing on anyone, (almost) anywhere. There are Shattrath type cities that don’t allow fighting. Funny note: Word just tried to correct ‘Shattrath’ into ‘Castrate’, and it kind of fit with the theme of this section. Outside of these cities, though, you’re free to kill people over and over, and generally behave like a dick, and so that’s what everyone does. Being a dick is fun for a while, and powdered donuts are pretty delicious! However, subsisting on a diet of powdered donuts alone would not be very healthy, and now matter how delicious the donuts, I think you’d probably come to hate the taste of them after a little while. Eventually, you begin to try being a dick in new, clever ways. Knocking people off cliffs with your horse’s Backward Kick maneuver, or just setting leg hold traps on people in town for no reason other than because you can. Sapping people in Gadgetzan without being flagged for combat was cute for a while; but after 20 minutes, I grew bored.
Add to the fact that the entire world uses some Guild Wars-esque instancing and rez point system, and being a dick isn’t even really viable. Killing someone doesn’t force them to run back to their corpse, they just pop up at a “spawn point” some distance away. Corpse Camping solved! Killing people at these spawn points is a bannable offense (crying about GM tickets and reporting people on PvP servers is nothing new here, move along), and if they get really upset, they can just pop over to a whole different instance of the zone itself. There is seriously talk of implementing a PvP Griefing Jail System. Watch this video. At about 6:30 in the video, the dev being interviewed is talking about putting your toon in JAIL for ganking lowbies, and making you do "... boring quests like carry the boulder over here, then carry it back". He goes on to say "... I tried to find things that people hate about MMOs... and implement that as hard labor... like here's a stick, go kill 300 rats in the prison yard" (7:45 in the video). Fucking Awesome, bro! Now THAT'S something I'll pay money to subscribe to!
The world's instancing, while silly, is probably necessary due to the game using collision detection. People can actually group up and stand on a bridge to block passage for others (a new way to be a dick, I’m there! Standing in the road! Woo! More Engaging Gameplay!). The way around this is to change instances to one where the road dicks aren’t blocking the path, but really defeats the whole “we’re all in this together” feeling. Also the fact that I can’t walk from one end of the continent to the other just ruins overall immersion. Load screens abound.
The ‘this game is rated M, so thank god we’re all adults here’ is laughable. The funniest part about it is that I see this EVERYWHERE. It’s on the Conan forums, it’s on any comment threads where the game is mentioned in passing. It seems to be a rallying cry for the ignorant, as apparently everyone playing Age of Conan or Grand Theft Auto is 19 years old and living on their own. I saw a little Japanese kid at the movie rental store yesterday trading Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops and Monster Hunter Portable 2 G or whatever for the PSP version of GTA (Vice City Stories? I honestly have no clue). I wondered why an 8 year old Japanese kid wanted to do drive-bys. Shouldn’t he be playing Pokemon Ultraviolet Turbo or some crap? Is mowing down hookers in an ambulance just as 'rad' to little Kenichiro as it is to Tommy and his little brother Billy in California? Of course it is. WoW is full of douchebags, don't get me wrong, but I daresay the population desity in AoC is more extreme. Like take 100 random players, and in WoW you might have 37 retards. In AoC it feels more like 64. Those are my scientific calculations.
Last stop is Guild Cities. Holy Shit! Player Housing! Am I the only person on the planet that thinks ‘player housing’ and ‘siege warfare’ are Totally Fucking Whatever? I could give two shits about the ability to build a hut somewhere, and even less about the ability to push a fucking catapult across the map to destroy said hut. Wow, this should be fucking sweet, right? Ignore the fact that you actually need to schedule PvP raids (We’re gonna show up next Tuesday at 3:30 pm server time and totally fucking PONE YOU!!1! Surprise!). As it stands, I was in a guild that farmed mats and mats and mats, and donated a metric fuckton of gold to get our ‘city’ built, only to realize that it did NOTHING for us. Yet. The buildings were empty, served absolutely NO PURPOSE, and just sat there, looking stupid. Oh wait, that’s just not in the game yet. That part of the game isn’t DONE.
Plx pay 15 dollars for the month of July, though, k?
No.
I’ll check back in 6 months or so, but I’m not going to pay for a beta. GG.
Who was banned from the AoC forums JUST FOR POSTING THIS PICTURE? A winner is Isobelle!
Maaaan, you almost had me buy it. But I said I'd wait.
And wait more.
And wait a bit more while searching for a Wii fit.
Now I can't find a Wii fit nor want to buy Age of Conan.
My wallet thanks you.
wah quick comment!
reread it again, or at least check the links i put in. i swear every article i write takes about 35 edits to get it looking just how i want ;)
BONUS POINTS TO WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FLAGS AT THE TOP OF THE ARTICLE MEAN :)
Hmm, I cant say AoC was a letdown to me. I enjoyed the Game, and got my toon up to level 43, but stopped when my early access came to the end. It wasn't games fault, but my PC simply didn't had enough power to run it at full graphics, and well, if I cant enjoy AoC at full graphics I might as well just stay in WoW.
But from statistic I seen, AoC was success from others people opinions. On my server 3 Sunwell guilds stopped raiding because they lost more then half of their members to AoC. Says quite much if you abadon your T6 toon for a new game imo.
And well, you cant really blame game which is several month old. Have some patience, wow was lot worse when it came out.
Btw, the flags means Cancel? :P
yes, the flags do mean cancel :)
as far as abandoning T6 content to go to AoC, that's kind of where a lot of people are, but not because AoC is awesome, just because T6 raids are a drag. The more that WoW opens up, the more i believe it isn't going anywhere. Think about it, Kara is the games MOST POPULAR raid, period. Not because it's frikkin awesome, but because that's the commitment people are comfortable with. dragging 25 peopel thru brutalis wipes night after night makes people sick of the game and want to hide on alts on raid nights.
people want to enjoy the game, and if that means that every raid will have 10 man equivalents, then that's where the people will go. I've played AoC for a full month, and you and I are both saying 'it isn't worth paying for'. I never said that about the WoW beta, or the release client.
Unless WARhammer has undergone radical changes since i was banned, i don't see that being much different than AoC at all. It'll launch with big fanfare about initial subscription numbers, then those will trickle back to WoW, as I'm pretty much in the process of doing. Not because i'm a WoWfanboizorz, but because it's the most polished game available, and it's the one i know.
Well I suppose I'll go ahead and be "that guy".
Told you!
Gameplay + concept >>>> graphix & gimmicks.
Iv had conan for about a month now too, I have been pretty busy, so I have only managed to get two characters to 20. My first impression was hey this is pretty ! followed by disgust with popups and other ugly effects when I switched down to low to get good fps. My pc is a amd 64 4400 with a geforce 7600 GT, not the latest tech but good enough for most new stuff on low/medium. So I tried it on a Pc i built for my brother, a amd 6000 with a radeon 1950 XT, I ratcheted it up to high medium, the fps still wasn't that good and there were still stupid glitches.
As for the game itself, the combat system seemed really cool at the start, but now Im starting to miss good old auto attack and the odd button every few seconds. Mashing the shit out of keys maybe all well and good in a 20 hour throwaway game, but in a everyday mmo its gonna cause a case of RSI.
Performance in window mode and the buggyness that alt tabbing causes is also really annoying, I like to look at wowhead and gaming website while autorunning around the place. The ui is a trainwreck, and the lack of support for addons makes me a sad panda, I mean can you even inspect ? I just found out how to actualy check somebodys class a month into the game, and clicking on them, right clicking on there health bar selecting player info, looking at the popup window and closing the thing isnt exactly fucking intuitive.
Zone wise, I really like tortage, but after doing it twice so soon I aint goin back. The greek (cba with there proper names) city was really impressive, but the first zone after that was a horrible wetlands-esque hole that every mmo seems to have, must be standard contract thing. The celtic city was ok, but the first zone after that was really cool, kind of an alpine vibe with steep hills and such.
Comparing it to wow now it doesnt look half as polished, but when wow came out it had some of the same problems, itemization was poo, the only caster stat was intellect. There was no end game to speak of, and there were some holes in questing zones that werent fixed for months. On the other hand the game engine was rock solid, the game never froze or left me at a loading screen.
Armor in wow does look distinctive though, even in the midlevels, stuff like SM gear is distinctive and you can see it a mile off, in conan everybody looks like bob the medieval hobo. I did see a level 80 in some gear with nice gold trim, but it was pretty much the same, but only reason I actualy noticed him from far off was the fact he was doing some freaky shit with blue ghosts and statues (he was a priest of mitra)
City building looks stupid at the moment, you spend a fortune to put some buildings up and spend 24 hours guarding it? WTF its not like you can do much with them, unless you want to RP or have cybersex.
Im levelling on a pvp server too, and I find the instance system retarded, at first I thought it was cool to have a method of escaping gang bangers and over crowded zones. Escaping from gang bangers usually doesnt help because theres usually some in most instances, so all your doing is escaping a bit of humiliation by being teabagged by kiddyxxx twice in a row. On the other hand your loosing the "world" feeling (which is already lost to the fact that the game itself is just instance after instance linked by a bunch of captain placeholders). When your leveling in wow you tend to meet people just by grouping up to kill x, people tend to level at the same pace so you tend to bump into people again which is cool. On a pvp server you`ll probably meet an adversary whos also leveling at the same pace.
My view ? At the moment ill just get to the level cap and play with my mates, ill probably chuck in my subscription after a few months (and maybe ill come back in half a year if they add some interesting stuff). WoW is gonna remain the timesink of choice, conan feels more like a cool single player rpg like oblivion. Hell i could be playing oblivion if i liked protecting some random buildings from random passers by.
Indeed. I canceled pretty much on the third day was able to play this game... 3 days AFTER the 20th of May due to Atari Australia fucking up the Oceanic release of the game... Big Surprise!... NOT!
Anyway, after memory leaks, falling through the earth gawd knows how many times and doing things like climbing mountains by swimming up waterfalls, has shown me that this game is faaaar from complete. I would say this game would be at the start of a 6 to 12 month initial beta cycle.
Then again, if you look at it from a financial/scam artist perspective, the game was a success. I mean do you,
a) Release a craptasic, buggy game now, with a metric arseload of hype, grab a fist full of dollars from box sales, then scale back operations to save money and fix minor issues in an attempt to squeeze what subs you can over the next six months until Warhammer/Warcraft:RoLC.
b) Delay the game and release something half decent, around the time of Warhammer/Warcraft:RoLC, but get annihilated with poor game sales due to these 800lb gorilla games dominating the market.
If Age of Conan didn't release now, then it should have been pushed back to late 2009, when people get over the Warhammer/Warcraft:RoLC honeymoon periods.
yeah, i forgot about that (mentally blocked it out?)
twice weekly downtimes (every week) means i was getting home, grabbing a beer, sitting down to play, and realizing i had 15 minutes left to play that night, being in japan.
OK, I want to say first that I have not played AoC yet, and it sounds based on the review that it is indeed an unfinished game. I do want to add one thought, though.
I remember playing Shadowbane, and although the game had a lot of problems, it did have one standout feature that I have not really seen in any other game. That said feature was that what you did had an effect on the world. People built cities which you could see on the world map, and guilds would fight and the map of the world would change from time to time.
Is AoC supposed to be like that?
Sort of, but every zone has multiple instances of that same zone. My guild's city is in Instance 9 or something like that...kind of rediculous.
Yes, I wish it was more like Horizons.
My prefect MMO?
Take one part,
- Crafting from Horizons
- World/House building from Horizons
- Diplomacy system from Vanguard
- Graphics engine and performance from Lord of the Rings Online/DDO
- Weather effects from Lord of the Rings Online
- Character custimisaion from Age of Conan
- Chat system from City of Heroes
- A little dash of World of Warcraft, mostly with blood and night elves ( what can I say, I have a soft spot for the pointed eared ones )
- Dump that into a Sci-Fi setting like Warhammer 40K or Fallout.
... and there you have it. Or you can all go off and play Fallen Earth.
The most perfectly designed MMO Ive ever played was an EQ-EMU mod called Guild Wars. Only had about 300 people playing while I played but the concept was as near to flawless as I've ever seen.
Basically it forced you to do small 10 man raids, back when raiding party numbers were HUGE in EQ this was a welcome change. By raiding you'd not only get gear but it was the only way to earn a fair amount of plat. Then you used the plat to pay your hired guards to protect your cities. The more cities you hold the more points your guild earned, they distribute the points to your guildmates and they could purchase really powerful gear with these points.
The Devs were super active and would hold special events almost every weekend. From spawning some huge super dragon (the sleeper etc) to kill with one time only drops, to forcing the guard's union to go on strike (which was lol), to having races around Oasis.
There was no fast travel which meant you had to march long distances to get cities like Halaa and leave your own cities open to attack. So if you spied well enough you could take advantage of this. I remember nearly never logging off of vent for 3 months just in case someone came on to alarm of us some incoming army. It was super involved, and the rivalry's between guilds were really heated. By far the most fun I've ever had in a MMO.
Warhammer online looks awesome as hell... There you have a video of the first dungeon shown in beta, 'Mount Gunbad' :P
http://www.dailymotion.com/error1987/video/x5ugyl_mountgunbad_auto
The player there is running alone, so it's only showing scenery but whatever :D
Just to make it clear, that above video is _not_ mine, I stole it... And, that is a solo run, so no big battles :D
Weird, I can't get logged in atm. ANYWHO...
"I didn’t see my first “dungeon” in AoC until level 34."
At which point you have... what... roughly... 7 dungeons you can hit over the next 5-6 levels?
I have a lvl 60 assassin and a lvl 70 guardian, and I'm still enjoying the game plenty. It will easily hold me through the summer, and after that, we'll see what the level 80 content is like... if something shows up, or if there continues to be nothing.
Is it a perfect game? No. Is it the BEST game on the market? If you haven't played any of the other ones yet... eh... maybe not. Is it better to play this game for the next 6 months, rather than play WoW, which you've already played for 3+ years for the next 6 months... In my opinion, yes it is. I like this game VASTLY more than WoW... especially as a melee character. The combo system is rough in PvP, but once you get the hang of it, you can land combos in PvP in most circumstances. There are a lot of other mechanics which are rough on melee, like the sprinting stam drain mechanic, and the shitty stam regen vs mana regen rates... But all in all, it's very playable, and imo, the PvE melee system is FAR, FAR, FAR more fun than any combat I've ever done in 3+ years of playing WoW with 4 different classes at max level.
And I'm sorry, but if you're building the perfect MMO, it needs the crafting from SWG, mostly the market from SWG, with a dash of EVE, and the hardcore PvP matters, politics are the focus, player driven content of EVE+L2+early UO.
And I actually really like the way most of the gear looks on my characters in AoC. A lot of people bitch that it's bland or whatever... but hey... that's what most armor actually looks like in a medieval setting. I prefer it immensely to the anime-esque sword is bigger than the person carrying it (or worse, often two of them) shit they pull in WoW.
"Killing people at these spawn points is a bannable offense "
No it's not. Some of the GMs were poorly trained, or being vigilantes early on, which created that weird situation, but the official response we got from the AoC Community Manager (after posting threads with the screenshot of a GM telling us not to raid as a guild but to only have groups of 3-5 cause we were making too many people cry and other GMs might "not be so friendly" to us) was that on FFA-PvP servers, you can camp anyone, anywhere, for as long as you damn well please.
And after reading more comments... 3rd post in a row... then I'm gone for the weekend:
I've only had my AoC client crash ONCE since launch on the 20th, outside of the FotD load issues, which could be solved by just switching off sound before you loaded into the zone, then turning it back on after you loaded... and they fixed those in about a week. That's with one character at 60 and another played to 70. Totally stable for me. No memory leaks. No out of mem errors, no random blue screens, no falling through the world, no getting stuck anywhere... No problems at all really.
Jmo, unless you got the latest PC which is tweaked to max, there is no way you could run AoC with its graphics if zones were all non instanced and connected as in WoW. Your PC would just melt. So its rly aint much to bring up.
I just want to say that the critics of instances are simply not forward-looking enough. Mostly, people criticize instancing because it takes away from reality. My answer is that our world will one day be instanced as well to solve overpopulation and other problems around the globe. Like if you want to go to an amusement park, and the lines are too long, you just pick a different instance of it. Or if your girlfriend is just bitching about something nonstop and you have had it, you pick a different instance of her that is more calm at the moment. Or, for example, if the freeway to town is congested due to an accident. . . well, you get the idea.
Please stop smoking crack. The real world will be instanced ? Yeah and we will all be driving flying cars and living on the moon by 1999.
Instancing zones sucked in EQ2 and it sucks in AOC.
Guess what smart ass. If it wasnt for instanced world, your PC would never manage to run AoC. Get a clue.
Yeah and we will all be driving flying cars and living on the moon by 1999.
lol
;)
Instancing is terrible. Using the fact that AoC is poorly coded and would run like ass if it wasn't instanced is pretty lame excuse. I don't care about reality I just think it makes for a shittier game. I prefer shared content which allows for direct competition and IMO is flat out the only way to have "meaningful" pvp.
Anyway the WoW comparissons are silly. I don't know what cracked out version of WoW you were playing at release but from months before release to release WoW was by far the most detailed and "complete" feeling game I had played since EQ. It ran well, it looked good, the vast majority of the content worked, etc etc. The only real annoyance I seem to recall from playing WoW at release was the fact that queuing was out of control. I will forgive Blizzard this one though. I just don't think they realized just how crazy popular it would be. *shrug*
WoW wasn't perfect at release by any means. I have never played an MMO that was. It was however a superior game at release than AoC. AoC feels like a game that had a million good ideas going into it that instead of trying to pick out a few and flesh them out they instead left them all in implemented as some half assed shadow of what they should have been. Examples:
Combo System - I am thinking "street fighter MMO!!". Which is instead normal MMO where you hit stupid hotkey to perform an action with the nifty addition of having to hit a few more keys afterwards to complete the action. Totally revolutionary. The least they could have done was added in combos that you could memorize and just do without having to hit some stupid hotkey first. *shrug*
Spell Weaving - I am thinking "caster version of street fighter MMO!!". Instead it's a neat button I can click on that slowly kills me but randomly pops up buffs here and there to make me do neat shit while I am rooted in place and giant statues are popping out of the ground around me... Yay.
Siege - I am thinking "Yes shadowbane minus the sux!!". Apparently funcom was thinking "let's take the worst parts of DAoC, WoW, and Shadowbane PvP/Siege and put them all together to make something ubercraptastic!!". So now we have the lovely PvP scheduling of shadowbane, the oh so exciting PvP in its own special zone and nifty structures that you don't really "own" of DAoC, and the taking meaningless bg/minigame pvp and forcing it on people who would rather have world PvP of WoW. But there are catapaults and meeeeean olephants that will smash walls!!
Crafting - I am thinking "OMG with the crazy crafting systems of SWG, EQ2, and Vanguard to model yourself after a 'revolutionary' game like AoC is bound to have something amazing crafting wise!!". Apparently the consensus at Funcom was "I bet if we try hard enough we can make our crafting even more dumbed down than WoW's!! Also lets make it so you have to have a city to advance crafting cuz cities are cool!!"
Player Cities - I am thinking "Yes! SWG and SB cities! With the uber crafting and such in place there will finally be a new game with an awesome player economy!!". The big thinkers over at Funcom got together and somehow decided upon "I bet players would really love it if we laid out their cities for them in advance and put them in their own happy little instance with the only people able to visit their cities being the other two guilds stuck in the same instance! What fun!".
I could seriously go on for quite a while but I think that covers some of the bigger ones. I am honestly more disappointed in this game than I was in Shadowbane. So sad.
When I pointed out AoC's total sum of broken designs on another forum, in the most logical fashion possible, I was met with violent resistance and character attacks, the thread was locked and I was threatened by a moderator. This was a few weeks ago. That's when I stopped posting there, hopefully for good.
Since then more and more people on that forum started admitting to noticing pretty much every single thing that I initially mentioned, and dropping out of their AoC subscriptions.
Honeymoon syndrome is as good of a term as any.
The game is a disaster of design and programming. It can never be PATCHED to what people, with frightening religious fervor and zealousy, wanted it to be. It is a result of five years of work by a highly incompetent, deluded team who is responsible for ALL the dysfunctional decisions that went into it.
They learned nothing from City of Heroes, WoW, or even the interface mistakes and "nots" of LOTRO.
The pointless dialogue choices, broken stealth, uninspired spells, the single-player instances (City of Heroes had multiplayer instances in 2004 !), the confused abortion of the UI, the broken area/instance/collision designs, the broken renderer (or is it merely amateur level design bringing down the FPS ?), and the most enlightened decision of all - making it into a GUILD WARS - like instance system, and allowing GUILD WARS, a free-to-play game, compete with AGE OF CONAN.
The only people holding AoC afloat are the newcomers to the MMO genre at this point. Like people born to a third-world country such as Bulgaria or Moldova, they simply don't know any different.
Idunno, I've been playing AoC and I'm just about to hit 40 as a Guardian. It's been pretty fun so far.
I could give a crap about quest dialogue really, would be nice to have them all speak instead of just read text, but I understand the constraint of that.
The instancing....I just read that, and it dawned on me why there aren't more people in towns. (dur) Although some of the noob dungeons are packed to the point where there aren't any mobs, which is the opposite of instancing sucking.
Haven't tried out the siege pvp or crafting yet, so can't comment on it.
Maybe it's just me coming from EQ1, but the graphics are jaw-droppingly amazing on a 9800 gtx and a 47" hdtv with surround sound. Then again, I really also hate the cartoony feel of WoW, even with good raid content & quests I can't get past how it looks.
And yes, the UI and chat functions blow, but once again, don't care too much, that's what Ventrilo is for.
I think the game really rocks as far as Immersion, but that's just what I've seen so far. In fact, I'm thinking of super-geeking it out and hacking a Wiimote, and macroing different combos to swing moves in the game.
It's funny though, reading Iso's review, when I bought the game I did a lot of the same things just to see what he meant.
dude, if you hack the wiimote thing, lemme know via PM on our forums. i'd love to see a video or something of it in action. ;)
http://www.wiiprojects.org/bluetooth.html
Is my first step, but I'm waiting on getting my IR bar delivered so I can have full functionality. I'll keep you updated with the Wiimote thing though (I also bought a DDR pad for movement, but I think I may have gone too far with that one lol...
Funcom deletes your character if inactive for over 3months.
My friend was banned for pvping on a pvp server instantly with no warning or chance to discuss. We both have canceled. Nothing other than disappointment.
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