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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures: AoC Re-Review
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com's Joe Iuliani writes this look at Funcom's Age of Conan. After a year of the game's existence, he looks at what works and what doesn't in the rated "M" MMO.
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Well, it's just been just over a year since the launch of Age of Conan. A launch that was just perhaps a bit premature. And yes we've heard the line, "it's never happened to me," but in this case it happened to us all. There was way too much hype with not nearly enough payoff. The communication in game was horrific. It's tough for that whole "Multi" part of MMO to exist without the ability to effectively communicate within the game. Many gamers abandoned AoC quicker than [insert your own humorous anecdote here].
In a clever bid to lure players back to AoC, for a limited time, the folks over at Funcom are offering two free weeks of game play for Age of Conan. This offer to revisit the game on Funcom's dime was the perfect opportunity to hop back into Hyboria and see how the game holds up at present. AoC has undergone a series of massive changes in the year since its launch. Full notes on all of these updates can be found here. In addition to the basic information found at the main AoC website, there is a great Q&A session with Funcom brought to you by MMORPG's own Jon Wood here. Well without further ado, on to the review.
Read the Age of Conan Re-Review
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Some of the passages on the loading screens are misquotes (or shown with the incorrect author being given credit).
I agree that the idea was great, but if they wanted to honor the memory of REH and his legacy they could have at least hired a competent proof reader...
Good read though, thanks alot for posting it. Always appreciated
Fairly decent review. 2 points. First, you are DEAD SPOT ON with your review of the music. The soundtrack for this game is incredible. This is what mmorpg's should be looking to for inspiration when making video game music(I'm looking at you Warhammer Developers!).
Second, you mentioned community very quickly. I have to point out, that for me, how the community is in AoC is currently the major flaw in the game. I have not seen a worse community in all my mmorpg travels yet. Not sure how a developer fixes that, but well, there it is.
Hopefully the expansion pack will make some new starting areas, I like your idea that each race have a starting area, to help spread out and give variety to the starting levels.
About switching characters, when you select Exit Game from the menu, just let the timer run out. It will bring you back to the login screen and you're just a password away from the character selection. It's not to the character select screen, but pretty close. Some other games use this method (City of Heroes comes to mind), it sure would help if the UI tells you where you end up depending on the option you choose.
It would be fun to have many startup area, but in a sense when you're done with Tortage, you end up in your race main city which in a way is about the same thing. It's just the way the game is designed I guess. What I would like is more option at higher level on where you go questing, the selection is limited and you still end up following the same questing path with every characters. Better that last year, but still very limited.
I like the fact that you can directly travel to the questing zone (if you're the appropriate level), it's much easier and you don't spend 30-45 minutes just to complete a quest in Eiglophan Mountains.
Good re-review of the game though.
The soundtrack cd made CE worth it! (yeah yeah cudda pirated it blahdy blah) still have it in my player quite often. Maybe it missed it in the review but was was the original score?
Playing polished, lag free, feature complete games is carebear. Whining about a game you hate but still play is hardcore man!
Good review. Just one mistake: There is a way to change your characters with out complete log out the game. Just click in the log out bottom and wait till the time finishe with out click the "log out ". These will make you go back to the select characters screen very fast, and you will not need to re-enter in the game as you said in the review.
You can also just type /camp
Heat, pressure and time. The three things that make a diamond, also make a waffle.
Also known as Ardanwen.
I feel I need to point out this seems relevant to servers. Your milage may vary, but I have characters on 3 servers, Wiccana, Tyranny, and Cimmeria. Of those 3, Tyranny is the worst. People given the option to "pvp freely" , I think clearly means you suffer the wrath of every idiot who fails @ day to day life and needs a little pick-me-up by murdering pixels. Don't confuse this statement with the "ZOMG QQ YOU CAREBEAR, YOU'RE ON A PVP SERVER" mentality, this is entirely different. I like PvP, I don't care if I'm ganked, all part of it, but I swear, people on this server (Tyranny) pretend they have something to prove by being just rude, not just in PvP, but in general interaction. Gratz, you're cool, or perhaps you're just roleplaying... as a douchebag.
I've had very little issue with the community on Wiccana the PvE server, most people have been helpful, talkative, and overall friendly. (Global Chat excluded as you'll always get some idiot spamming some nonsense there, regardless of server)
But people is what makes or breaks these games, the 'MO' part of the MMORPG. I'm fortunate to have a few friends playing now so dealing with the populous has become less of a requirement, but I can agree to some extent, that the community of this game can be a major turn off for a lot of people.
But what the "hard core" AoC players don't realize, much like the Call of Duty players on Xbox Live who use the awesome rapid fire controllers... Piss off enough players with your antics, and pretty soon, you're playing alone.....
Hey TSW Players http://www.unfair.co/ for Mission guides, Lore Locations and stuff....
Elocke,
A lot of this has to do with the difference of player-types between PvP and PvE communities. I agree with your statement regarding PvP server(s). The wife and I came back to reevaluate AoC, but decided to go a different route and try playing on a PvP/RP server (keyword being RP, as in my experience it seems that there is a larger number of more-mature players on RP-ing servers, whether they RP or not). Big mistake! The community was nothing short of horrible. I mean, some of the worst Global Chat that I have ever seen, coupled with the fact that no one wanted to help one another. On the contrary, it was just a *noob-slaughter-fest* from level 10 on. I finally got my assassin to 16 and hit Tortage Underhalls (after being absolutely man-handled on White Sands by bored 12-year-old level 20+ Rangers that had nothing better to do than pick-on...scratch that, *pick-on* is not a good enough description...pierced to death, chopped to pieces, etc... my character as I attempted to quest). While attempting to quest there, I discovered no less than 5 higher levels (lvl 20+ casters) that weren't interested in questing, but only in preventing questing of any type. So, instead of being able to quest and gain levels, I was forced to join forces with 3 others (lvl 14 and below) that were being smacked, slapped, and spanked like red-headed step-children and continuously camp the rez spot and attempt to turn the tables. I grew very bored with this very quickly, as this measure did nothing to help my charcter other than a number increase of PvP kills. I believe that having PvP in Tortage of any type should be a huge no-no on the devs list. I think that Tortage (including Acheronian Ruins, Tortage Underhalls, and White Sands Isle) should be PvP *safe-zones, as we're all escaped slaves attempting to escape a blockade. I think PvP should start *after* you leave Tortage. Bleh, I'm getting off-topic. What I'm attempting to say is this: PvP = Bad Community (until you find a good guild).
After deciding that PvP wasn't for me (as the RP wasn't evident early in the game), the wife and I moved to Wiccana Server. Now, unknown to us at the time was that Wiccana (Normal) Server is considered as the *unofficial* RP server (as it was, at one time, an official RP server). The community was/is terrific. Of course you have the immaturity in Global Chat at times. What game doesn't? However, we found the community to be great. So great, in fact, that we moved our lvl 68 and lvl 70 from Set to Wiccana (using Free Character Move, which took only 30 mins, btw...one of the fastest I've ever seen in a MMO).
So, try your hand at a Normal server, preferably Wiccana. Remember, every server has PvP. The Border Kingdoms are free-for-all PvP, so if that's your bag you'll get your *fix* even on a normal server.
If you like PvP such as I mentioned in the first paragraph, then I'm afraid you will have to suffer the immaturity, as PvP servers draw the most-immature crowds. That's true in just about any MMO (with few exceptions).
Good luck, and I hope you find a good community soon!
"I am handicapped...I'm psychotic."
Developers need to learn a commonality that exists with all MMOs. If you do not hook your audience when you first launch, you simply don't get a second chance at the revenue stream that would of been available had you done it right the first time. Now AoC has to beg for subscribers. Look at WAR, that game is dying as we speak and I expect EA to pull the plug once titles like Aion and Star Wars: The Old Republic are done with it. It is worthwhile to delay and fix what is broken. The long term rewards outweigh the capital investment putting an extra year into development would take.
3rd review for AoC on this site, 2nd re-review. Kinda silly if you ask me, how many chances should a game get?
Also, this review is fairly basic, it's more of a preview than anything. Combat is great but very imbalanced between casters and melee, fantastic engine if you have a computer that can handle it and great music BUT there are still very heavy flaws in the game and the first and most obivous one is purpose.
The only thing you can do is grind PvP points til you hit PvP level 5 or raid the broken and unfinished raids and that's it. There are no natural meeting places (rush around to buy stuff, move on), no events (Paradigm owns the license and won't let anyone make any changes to it, which GM/dev events are considered), it's HEAVILY instanced with a disjointed world.
Now don't get me wrong, the fast paced combat (although slower after last patch) and not having to target is pure bliss. I prefer playing it just for that over any other mmo.
Tbh, Funcom should sell the game and engine to a company who knows what they're doing, it's a great engine. To bad about the execution.
www.excisiongaming.com
Casual PvP & gaming fun for mature gamers
It might have to do with FC's Third Grand Marketing Offensive!
... I'd rather see them plough a dragliner through their world to increase the zone sizes, physically connect them with eachother and get rid of the channeling system than spend their money on marketing. But nevermind me
My brand new bloggity blog.
It might have to do with FC's Third Grand Marketing Offensive!
... I'd rather see them plough a dragliner through their world to increase the zone sizes, physically connect them with eachother and get rid of the channeling system than spend their money on marketing. But nevermind me
Yeap i feel the same way you do. One of the reasons i left the game. Good to see you re-re-review the game but i feel alot of ppl are going back for the free trail just to fill the space til other MMO's come out. 2009-2010 are going to be great years for new MMO's. All we can hope is that Failcom will read between the lines and get a clue.
Played Aoc/DDO/FFXI/WAR / LoTRo / CO / Aion
Playing Rift
Waiting for FFXIV to be the game it should. so sad =(
No sense of exploration in this world, you are channeled everywhere which is a horrible design decision in my book. No patches are going to correct this. Real shame too as I grew up reading Conan books. There really is no end game either.
Will admit the graphics and music are really well done and I do like the combat, they are just not enough to keep me playing.
Interesting re-review, but some of the early flaws were completely overlooked whereas the current status of such should have been mentioned in more then one occasion.
Item Stats - they were mostly fictitious at launch. It was quite common to have items many level lower then a Blue item and preform better. Some items with what appeared to be lesser stats often outperformed ones which were BLUE and displayed modifiers which were superior.
How has this changed!?!
Character Classes were Broken - The Champion, for example, was a completely useless class on many levels. In concept it's good, but in delivery it did not function. To make matters worse, creating a Female Champion allowed a player to have the least effective character possible. Thier party buffs did not proc if other Champions were in a group and if the party was configured for a Raid the class was even less effective as the buffs did not apply to the entire party. These were MASSIVE design flaws.
how has this been fixed!?!
Crafting was broken - When I say broken, I mean that if you attempted to craft an object there was a good chance you were among one of many players who were completely unable to load their characters. On top of that, crafting wasn't even complete and MANY compnets weren't in-game.
How has this improved!?!?
Player Cities - Awesome concept, but suffered flaws. One of the funny things about City Walls is they did no keep out anyone as you could simply go around them. Firing an Arrow from ramparts did not allow for elevation and for some reason I recall that an archer's range was actually reduced. The different structures were supposed to provide global buffs to the Guild although they didn't.
How have these been improved!?!?
All I get from the re-review is the graphics and audio are still topnotch. No where does it touch on the MAIN issues other then a brief mentioning of the sporadic client performance issues. All in all, it sounds like the game is still broken and not worth bothering with.
Is that true!?!?
MMO's of all types deserve MANY re-reviews. The reason is it goes both ways - where you might experiance a game that should have undergone more attention during the development cycle and release in an otherwise unfinished state (AoC) there are also situations where a good game at launch plays very poorly several years later(ie, SOE products). All MMO's not only deserve follow-up reports on the State of The Game but require them as patches, updates and expansions can vastly alter the game experiance.
Played Aoc/DDO/FFXI/WAR / LoTRo / CO / Aion
Playing Rift
Waiting for FFXIV to be the game it should. so sad =(
I played the game during beta and launch. The launch was horrible and everyone has heard all about that so I will say no more. I purchased 10 copies for my guild members and now we can officially burn them. The game is more stable but it is just not fun. The biggest issue may be me. See, I am a Robert E. Howard collector and fan. I have not only the Conan writings but his short stories and his Krull and El Borack writings as well. Focusing on Conan is good but leaving out nearly half the content is stupid. The land of Kush is not mentioned and neither are the characters from Kush. Those who just watch the movies do not know so I do not included them. To say you are making a game for Conan and leave out Kush is inexcusable. To make it worse all dark skinned players in the game are evil and cannot be warriors??? The logic behind that is nothing short of racist. I am not into racism but many of Conan’s best friends and worst enemies were dark skinned warriors from Kush and many of his women. They included Stygians and yes Stygia is an evil place but even they had warriors but that does not explain the omission of Kush or does it? Maybe that is why it was omitted. I like creating all races of character but I never play evil character. Who knows and now who cares. I will never give them another dime and anyone who I can convince not to play this game I will and in my position and have the privilege to connect and convince many. I hope another company picks up this ideal after this game has died and gone. Maybe the next company will at least hire someone who has read a few of the books. For anyone who is interested. One of Conan’s greatest battles was against a giant of a man in Kush. They grabbed each other by the neck and tried to break each other’s neck. For 3 days this contest went on until something happened to one of the contestants. I would tell the rest of it but it is more fun to read about it. It cannot be added to AoC because in AoC Kush does not exist.
not a bad review but a little stuck on issues regarding multiple characters. i never had any of those problems when I played.
If i recall correctly, there is a different questing experience for each archtype in Tortuga to a certain extent.
I should mention i also played at launch and now hate Funcom with a passion. Bunch'o'lyin scammers. it IS good to here they have brought things around somewhat though.
Wow, 3 reviews in 14 months huh? Must be those FC advertising dollars hard at work.
While the review was well written, it glossed over many of the fatal flaws of AoC. While graphics and music are fairly important to a game, this review spent way too much time talking about them. I saw no mention of the zone-heavy design, broken sieges or any of the flaws people contantly bitch about.
Instead of 2 weeks for free! ($ 7.50)
Give 11 months for free and see if that works! ($ 164.89)
..its a guideline, not a rule, as players we must remember: Its a Game.
Failcom is already considering micro transactions as a future possibility.
[(T+G=W)=Gr*Nf]-S=FoF
T=Time G=Gear W=Win Gr=Grind Nf=NoFun S=Skill FoF=FullofFail
"Hey, I'll tell you what. You can get a good look at a butcher's azz by sticking your head up there. But, wouldn't you rather to take his word for it?" - Tommy Boy
If you re-review a game a year after release shouldn't you have to mention the quality and quantity of the end-game content and also the class balance since we are talking about a game with strong pvp focus?
It's ok if you don't talk about of these things in your first review for the obvious reasons but if you don't bother making an 80 level character and spend time pvping you shouldn't be posting a review imo.
Here is my experience of AoC from the re-evaluation period I was given:
Class balance is as bad as ever. Worse than any subscription based MMO I have played. Things have changed, so while it used to be the ToS that were unkillable, now its the necromancers. I was in a duel spot for a few hours and no class can ever take a necro down for anything. Blah blah the game is balanced around groups etc etc so it's ok for one class to kill 10 people at once in group play while no other class can take him down on his own. Yea because necros pay more money for their subscription than other classes so they should be able to do that....
If you think I am just bashing here or trolling, just do your re-evaluation, go to a pvp server, and ask in global how are the necro and demo doing in pvp.
And add to this mess that the patch had been on testlive for months and months and still came out with such broken balance.
New content after 6 months is a new zone that you can finish in a couple of days.
Though I didn't get to go to a siege in the 2-3 days that I bothered logging in, the lag in regular open world pvp was not at all imrpoved so there is nothing to suggest that sieges won't still be unplayable due to lag. Especially for the melee classes with the 'innovative' combat system that is the major pro for this game when it completelly cripples the melees against 1-button wonder casters.
All in all more of the same that AoC has been since launch. And I am only writing this post cause it bothers me to see that company throwing advertising money to get a few thousand people back to level a toon again, and pay for 1-2 months keeping the company afloat, before realising that this is all they are going to get out of this and it was time waisted.
I have just started playing aoc. I had avoided it for awhile to let the bugs and such get ironed out that I had heard it had, I am surprisingly enjoying it more than I thought I was going to.
My good rig is down at the moment, waiting on a new hard drive, so I am playing on my older rig, and surprisingly the game is running very well, admittedly I do get lagged a bit but it goes away quickly as I sync up, but that is to be expected on a 5 year old comp running a radeon 9800 pro vid card LOL,
As far as content is concerned I have always been on a quest, or task or whatever the kids are calling it these days, I am so far a lvl 33 conq.,and I barely notice any type of complaint I would call a boring grind, as I am always traversing somewhere to do something, be it to kill something, run something somewhere, harvest resources, run an instance, while following whatever story arch I am in within that particular moment (to my understanding this type of content was not implemented as much at launch as it is currently, which was the reason for my initial hesitation upon getting the game, or any game at launch for that matter, I usually enter a game a year or so after it opens to curtail things as bugs and rocky releases)
All in all I am very pleased with AoC as it stands currently, and I am hoping for it to have a good future with more great content to be added and a continuing story, lands, raids, dungeons, quests and tasks. Well thats my opinion on AoC, oh yeah one last thing, I almost immediatly joined a guild and this enabled me to turn off the general chat LOL, as with most mmo's being in a guild can be helpful and fun, as well as get away from certain people whom may spew crap from there mouths in general. If any of you are interested in a growing guild we are called 'the band of the red hand', on the set server I do think.
playing eq2 and two worlds
I really have to ask MMORPG.com where they get their writers. I mean, do you just pick anyone off the street that sends in an email and claims they can write a review?
There are so many grammatical and stylistic errors in this piece its hard to know where to begin with the criticism. And that's saying nothing of the content itself (a re-review that doesn't mention anything about endgame? really?)
Honestly, the only current staffers who should be writing articles for this site are Sanya, Jess Lebow, and even though I frequently disagree with his opinions, Dana Massey.
Everyone else's writing skills make my junior high newspaper look like the Wall Street Journal. Please do some house cleaning and hire real writers. This amateur hour / open mic stuff is really not the way to boost your reputation.
I have to agree with those saying that this looks suspiciously more like a PR fluff piece than a serious review.
Obviously I disagree with both the tone and the rating, since I found the free trial unplayably bad and the game just terrible. On a 1-10 scale, I'd be inclined to give it a 4-5 in overall historical terms...the only possible way it ranks a 7 is in comparison to the relatively poor selection of MMOs out there currently in the mainstream.
It remains the only free trial I have ever stopped playing and uninstalled before the time limit was up.