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Age of Conan gets first expansion
Posts
Reading Kull made the world of Hyborea expand outwards into infinity in my imagination. It's just a big shame that so much potential has been utterly and truly wasted.
The game is fun though. It's just not what I want in an MMO and definitely not what I want out of a Conan MMO. After growing up reading Conan novels and comics, my expectations were far greater than what we got.
Phrased another way, how the fuck can Robert E Howard predict plate tectonics that weren't even widely considered until after he died from being too crazy?
I actually know the answer to this, but it's uncanny.
PM if you add me!
the date is set up day/month/year instead of your crazy American month/day/year and for some strange reason it blocks you if you enter a month over 12. Just in case you did that
I want to know more PA people on Twitter.
Then I don't think you should look at the pictures! Try clicking the UK flag and it will let you through instead.
I want to know more PA people on Twitter.
This. It led to one of the most enjoyable moments I ever had playing an MMO which I captured with a screenshot to boot. Plus it's always fun to hang out with the PA crowd.
Melted his goddamn face right off.
My buddy dragged me back to AoC after the overhaul and we found the game to be a blast. Combat was easily the funnest I've played in an MMO, though we were meleers and I don't think casters were that much fun personally. The instances were all pretty awesome. Even the lvl 25 instances contained really cool things, like a giant Indiana Jones boulder that rolls toward your party and will kill you outright.
Though I do still have my complaints. For starters, armor. Until about lvl 50ish you are going to be wearing armor that looks exactly the same as the crap you were probably wearing in freaking Tortage. Once you get in the 50s then you will start getting unique/cool/homoerotic looking armor. Cimmeria is pretty much the only nation that has enough zones to lvl you pretty close to the lvl cap. For Aquillonia and Stygia you'll have to bounce around from nation to nation. Also, while I did find the game fun, once you get to the lvl cap and have done all the dungeons there really is no reason to keep playing.
Oh, PvP! This game was supposed to be all about PvP. It was like the main selling point. However, I found PvP to be incredibly annoying. Repeated ganking, spawn camping, and all around douchebagery abound. At least in my experience. Best piece of advice I can give to anyone who wishes to try AoC out is to roll on a PvE server. It will save you SO much grief. Besides there are still PvP "frontier" zones ala DAoC, complete with forts and sieges on PvE servers too. Along with WoW styled "battlegrounds" you can join anytime, from any location.
Tortage itself can be fairly annoying too. You have to go through it every time you make a new character. While the quests differ a bit depending on your base class, for the most part you will be doing all the same stuff over and over. However, I do believe they added a way to skip Tortage if you already have completed it once before. Though, if memory serves, it ain't exactly convenient to find.
The game will never be great, but a lot of fun can be had in it.
Yep. I really loved the open PVP world, but ARRRGGHHH. I couldn't get my Bear Shaman mauling on while I was DDR dancing. They also at one point made it so you had to be in range and hit every time in the combo for full damage. That was a great idea.
I actually enjoyed the game and Tortage is probably the best MMO tutorial I've ever played, but Funcom's betrayal of its customers at launch is irreparable
(Retired) Rift Characters (Faeblight): Tag, Fabulous, Rawr, Clericalerror, Salestag
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
Fatalities were awesome though so it had that.
[tiny]Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.[/tiny]
Originally I wasn't going to. I was going to stick with DDO until something better came along, while playing some CO on the side, but then I say the Letter from the GD on the 30th, and I had to buy it.
Spoilered for Length
For this letter though I wanted to give a slightly more personal insight into one of the smaller, but I think more interesting parts of the expansion we haven’t talked about yet. It’s also a good example of when it is good that the Game Director isn’t right! So what exactly do I mean by that? Let me explain…
One element of overseeing a project like this as Game Director is that you have to say ‘no’ a lot, an awful lot in fact. The developers, just like you folks playing the game, are full of interesting and creative ideas; they always want to improve the game. That leads to a lot of ideas being pitched about and considered, far more than we could actually complete. The key part of my role is essentially helping the team decide which of these ideas best suit our intended goals and targets for the project and which can be achieved within budget. So more often than not the answer is ‘no’ and far more ideas are rejected than are accepted. It is probably the hardest part of this job. Feeling like the big bad troll that spoils all the fun comes with the territory.
However that said, another very important part of running a team like this is also being able to trust that on occasion your designers can prove you wrong. That sometimes you have to view a feature as a player would, and not just distill it down to time and resource.
In Rise of the Godslayer there is one fun feature in particular that wouldn’t have made it into the game if I had stuck by my own original assessment, and I’m glad that the designers were able to convince me!
Random Encounters on the Road to Khitai
The idea was a simple one - add a number of encounters that could happen randomly while the players were traveling to Khitai from Khemi. The designers wanted to highlight that it was a dangerous and lengthy journey. They wanted to add an optional route for players. In effect the player offers their services as a caravan guard to pay their own way to Khitai instead of handing over coin. Then along the way they would be pressed into service when the caravan encountered a problem.
When we looked at initially it was one of those things that I was skeptical to as maybe the resources could be spent elsewhere in Khitai itself to make more instanced encounters. The feature hovered very close to the ‘cut’ line for a long time during development. The lead designer though fought for its inclusion and worked with several members of the team to make it happen.
I still worried that they would only serve as an annoying distraction to players. The feature got even closer to that perilous ‘cut’ line. It wasn’t until I saw it finally working in the game and played through the encounters, that I saw that the vision the designers had for the feature was indeed a good one.
So how does it work?
As I mentioned above the player can offer their services as a caravan guard to pay their own way to Khitai instead of handing over coin. (You can of course just pay the caravan master his fare and travel straight to Khitai without worrying about working your way, so this feature is completely optional). What then happens is that you will be presented with one of nine scenarios that might occur along the way. The voyage to Khitai takes you past some dangerous areas, some of which Conan fans will recognize from the original stories, like the Vilayet Sea. These encounters take place as solo instances where the player has to complete a specific task to allow the caravan (or boat) to continue on its voyage.
These encounters range from protecting your boat from a Kraken, acquiring supplies from a Pirate Cove, defending the caravan from raiders or investigating a strange oasis plagued by the undead. There is an interestingly diverse set of objectives for these encounters, and you never know which one you are going to be presented with.
Effectively it adds some really nice texture to the journey to Khitai. I am always very keen to insist the team have a clear goal when implementing a feature, and in this instance they saw it and they implemented it well, even when they had to convince a skeptical Game Director.
As soon as I played them in context I knew they were right. I could see, as a player, this feature belonged alongside everything else in the expansion. It might not have sounded like the most compelling feature to the Producer in me when first weighed up against other resources, but, as a player…as a player it just works.
Sure, it could have been that these encounters became nine disparate solo instances or quests scattered throughout the expansion. Then it most likely would have ensured people only did them once (maybe only revisiting them when playing an alt), whereas now they provide a neat little repeatable solo adventure with variety and some fun gameplay. This was the right place for these encounters.
It isn’t a huge part of the expansion by any stretch. It is a relatively small addition that players might only do infrequently, but it does belong as part of the journey that the expansion contains. It will form part of your own journeys to Khitai that was well worth weaving into the experience…
…and is a good example of the fact that sometimes, as a lead for any kind of a project, the right decision is to trust in your people. The right decision is to look at things as a player and not just a Producer. This might not be the most influential or substantial addition to the expansion, but it’s a great example. It is often these small, ‘flavor’, type of additions that enhance the experience as well. It is very easy get wrapped up in the larger, more important features, so you can all be glad that the designers also want to set the right tone and create a complete experience.
…the closing stages
We are busy at work here with the final stages of delivery for the expansion…and we are very much looking forward to everyone getting to explore the lands of Khitai with us. A lot of inspiration, hard work and effort has been sunk into bringing these lands to life for all of you to explore.
We’ll see you in Khitai!
TL-DR: Random encounters while traveling from Stygia to Khitai instead of just load screen to load screen.
EDIT: That and new fatalities!!!!
[tiny]Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.[/tiny]
Besides, you get to kill a Kraken. I gotta experience that8-). Also the PVP might be fun for a while
Sigh.
The game seems a lot more polished and there is quite a bit more content. I've been playing a Conqueror and the changes to the class are really well done. If the game had been more like this at launch, I think a lot more people would have kept playing. They really did release this game at least 6 months too soon.
With the server merges, the world seems a lot more populated. I was on at various times over the weekend and there were people everywhere. I had no problems finding groups for various instances and dififcult quests.
It's probably worth re-subbing, if for no other reason than to experience the expansion. It's a shame that the game wasn't more like this at launch.
Rigorous Scholarship
I think catering to the end-game junkies has had a negative effect on the MMO world. You're never going to make the people who power-level through the content in 3 days happy, because their expectations and demands are completely unrealistic. Game developers would be better off ignoring those people and focusing on the much larger pool of more casual players who don't treat the game like a 2nd job.
Maybe I feel this way because my first MMO was City of Heroes, which is a game where the journey is more fun than the destination and where the typical player could have a dozen or more alts at a time.
Rigorous Scholarship
We had a few fun pvp skirmishes, the first siege (so horribly broken and untested), and it was worth a couple weeks playing time.
The biggest issues were (and sounds like still are) lack of endgame content and the melee system. I don't know if this is the case anymore, but when the beta ended/game was released, if you interrupted a melee in any of the ridiculously long combo animations, the damage would be refunded to the other player. So say even if you were landing some amazing 13 hit combo, a PoM could stun or trip you and all the damage you did at the beginning of the combo would disappear. The only time it wouldn't is it the resulting action was a fatality as that animation can't be interrupted. Once fought a guy for 15 minutes, finally ended in a one-shot head explosion with all the Bear damage stacks up. While that may sound awesome, it was fifteen minutes of getting tripped in stupidly long animations and nothing else.
If they fixed all of that and added something to do besides mine upkeep for fortresses, it might be fun.
As for your other points, that's an interesting stance to take. Unlike you, I think the endgame is the most important aspect of MMO's. The whole advantage to an MMO over other games is supposed to be that they exist not locked into a single narrative, but rather an entire world of narratives. A world which can change and improve and evolve in any given direction. A wide spectrum of ongoing choices and adventures to be had with other players, so to speak.
If the journey is essentially over when you reach level cap, like you suggest is a good thing, then the MMO has failed to create a world worth staying in and will lose customers very rapidly. Many people do not want to level alts several times through content that they have already experienced once or twice, especially in an MMO where the RPG and gameplay elements are "bad" at best, due to how MMO's lag behind the rest of the gaming world. For these people the MMO would only offer them a finite experience, which is not enough when a monthly fee is involved.
That is why I could not stay in CoH, because everyone told me that once I reached level cap the game was essentially "done". What's the point to an MMO if you can actually get "done"?
An MMO is supposed to be persistent, in my opinion, and with that definition comes an expectation of continuation, which is why I don't think "level cap" should be the end of the journey for a character. In AoC, it essentially is, (or was, I haven't played it in a while) which killed it for me.
Whether it is Social, PvP or PvE , there should always be some entertaining things to do after you hit the level cap. AoC failed in this regard pretty miserably when it came out.
One I remember is being up in this snowy mountain area in Cimmeria (lvl 40ish zone maybe). My buddy and I were just running along to our next quest stop when we see this (literally) half-naked blue chick. Being dumb guys we were like, "Hey lets check that out! Hur Hur!". We get up close to her and she begins to laugh and disappears. Two frost giants burst out from the ground and attack us.
Later on we found the blue chick again and she had a quest or two for us. When we finished she offered us a choice of rewards, sex or a magic necklace. I took the necklace. She implied I was gay.
That's an encounter taken from "The Frost-Giant's Daughter". Neat.
good times, good times.
Signed: HeraldOfLoL
I was just about to say how much I loved that story and be all "hey" but here you went and did it.
I liked AoC at launch because I've read everything Robert E. Howard wrote with the character, enough to tolerate getting to like level 30. I have a new computer now, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ran better now.
You'd be standing there and then you would get decapitated.
Stupidest shit ever. However I will give it the Herald was the best class ever.
To bad I didn't roll one at the beginning.
I'm on Euro servers, so if anyone is up for rolling through the new content together, send me a PM
Herald of Xolti is indeed the best class ever made anywhere. Shame it is chained to this particular game ;P
(Retired) Rift Characters (Faeblight): Tag, Fabulous, Rawr, Clericalerror, Salestag
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
Anyway, I'll be gone on business for the next the rest of May. I may pick this up when I get back since I have nothing else going on. Plus my dude should be a high enough lvl to take part in the Godslayer stuff.
Not sure I will actually take the wolf or tiger as a mount though. I seem to be one of very few people on my server with a Rhino mount and I do like to stand out.
As for the Wolf/Tiger, I think it could be worth it. They have described it as a very long questchain where you get the wolf/tiger as a cub, and will have to train it and quest with it and fight with it until it is ready to be your pet or mount. It sounds neat.
But then again, Funcom has a way to paint things as "neat" when in reality it's usually just "dreary" :lol:
We'll see.
edit- Ah yes, that is exactly what you said. Reading Comprehension is my friend.
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-launch-aoc-rise-of/65184