It’s been a little while since I wrote about AoC and what’s going on there. A lot has changed as I see it so let’s get started;
First of all, I understand that the game isn’t for everyone. I don’t understand the hate that is going around about the game though. There are some definite annoyances in the game. It still crashes and hitches too much. Not nearly as much as in the open beta but enough to make your blood boil at times. There are harvesting bugs, quest bugs (some of them just plain don’t work) and other kinds of bugs all over the game. That being said, it’s still very playable and Funcom is patching twice a week trying to get on top of it. As long as there is progress then I think it’s worth playing, more so than anything else I can think of right now.
On the positive side, at level 42 now and still have a full quest log. I’ve been exploring the other parts of the game as well. Genda, my main character, is an Architect and Weaponsmith. The early weapons you can make are useful and on par with drops of similar levels. Architecture allows you to make plans for the buildings in your guild city. For our little guild this is Job One. We raised our first guild structure the other day, our keep. There are some tangible benefits to having a guild city even though the stat bonuses don’t work yet (you are supposed to get class stat bonuses for each building related to that class.) The biggest things that make a guild city desirable are the ability to transport there from any city guide instantly, and since zones with cities are instanced you often get an entire gathering zone basically to yourselves. Our guild (Cross Plains Drifters on the Set server) has definitely made hay there. If you are wondering where we got the name, look up Robert E Howard in Wikipedia and see where his museum is. Next up is our Trade Post, where we can bank, mail, and trade on the player market.
The big obstacle to progression of the guild city is cash. It takes 2 gold (not an insignificant amount at this stage of the game) for the mats to make the plans. You also need a ton of mats. We have enough mats in the guild to make 4 or 5 more buildings, but we’re short on cash for the next one. The total amount of gold to complete a player city and be capable of doing upgrades to a Tier 2 city is about 180 Gold (162 gold for the structures and 18 gold to train up the Architect for their Tier 2 recipes.) For us at this time that is a staggering amount of gold. We’ll get there but we definitely won’t be first.
As far as fun goes, we’re having a blast still. It seems the community is settling in, although there are still your usual assortment of asshats playing “look at me!” in the public channels. That’s easy to fix; right click on their name in chat, choose “ignore” and peace is restored.
On a personal note, Tarkheena and I are enjoying the game and the other folks in the guild seem to as well. I can see us playing this game for a while. I’ve even started bringing up an alt Guardian (you can never go wrong having a meat shield) and planning on trying another of the classes that I haven’t run yet. It looks like our friend Bildo is enjoying his time in teh game as well. He’s got a running commentary about his game experiences over at The Ramblings of a Bildo. Even the Big Guys over at 38 Studios seem to be into it.
I’ve hesitated to write too much about AoC because I don’t want this to just be an AoC blog, but that is what I’m playing so it’s obviously front-of-mind. I’ll get some more diverse content up here soon I promise. Until then, see you in Hyboria.
Nothing at all wrong with writing about your experiences… this is your blog! I’d love to hear about you and Tarkheena’s adventures, along with those of your guild.
I’m never sure how long my stay in any MMOG will be, but what I do know is that I’m really enjoying Conan so far and hope it lasts for a good while.
I would be immensely happy if I never experience the leveling wall at 50+ that people talk about, but even if I do… I’m patient enough to wait for the content that’s incoming.
Hyborian Adventures indeed.
…. resisting ….
But what Bildo said – do write more. I’m especially interested to see what happens as you level up — if it’s going to be an endless round of raiding and stuff like in WoW, it won’t be my cup of tea for very long anyway.
Interestingly, Slashdot is publicizing a bug that penalizes accounts in game, if the first character created for that account is female. The original article that started the speculation is at Massively. (Sorry for not providing links, I didn’t know if these blog comments would accept them.)
I don’t mean to nitpick and criticize the game per se but the various problems they’re having do give us a peek at their game design process and development priorities. I admit for the record that I play WoW right now (and have never denied that), and one of the top-ten feature requests there is player constructed housing and guild halls. If AoC is struggling with guild cities and spends all of their time squashing exploits, then WoW can justifiably point to fundamental problems underlying the game design as reasons not to have housing. On the other hand, if AoC manages to pull it off, then WoW doesn’t really have any excuses. It’s largely for that reason that I enjoy reading Genda’s perspectives, criticisms and compliments about other games even if I don’t intend to play them myself.
It really turned out better than expeced, although I sometimes wonder how some bugs could ever (EVER) pass through beta and QA. It’s right out bizarre. That said, I also encounter relatively few problems on my own (besides the mentioned ones which are kinda “common knowledge”). I do crash on zoning sometimes, but I know it in advance once the minimap turns gray. There’s obviously still a big memory leak there. Maybe the hires textures, I don’t know (I have basically everything pumped up to max).
I still have to find the “quest hole levels” that are admitted by Funcom – my main is also level 42 now, and I never had the feeling I’m running out of quests (on the contrary, even the AoC quest log is too small sometimes
Harvesting is basically o bitter chore to me, though. Enormous playfields with very few resource nodes that are harvested to death by players. Additionally, no rough leather ever seems to drop for me from any mob. It’s said to work, but for me it simply doesn’t. Anyway, the process is beyond annoying for me.
Still, it’s got something, and I’m not really sure what it is. There’s the occasional “Ahh, look at the scenery!” Kodak moment there. There’s also some good sense of accomplishment based on the fact that mobs aren’t very strong, really. I know by now I can always take down mobs four or five levels above me and still handle occasional adds when I’m careful. Some may say that’s overpowered, but I think it’s a good balance to make you feel strong, but not godlike. Which is definitely a selling point, to me at least. (In the end it does not matter what level the mob is, it’s just psychological. Smaller number beats bigger number = ownage
Cleverly done, I think.
On the crafting side I really hope it works out. I’ll go and try now. As long as it gives me a _good_ reason to go on harvest-grinding, it’s okay. Still wonder how to remotely get close to earning enosugh money for a horse, though.
Age of Conan deffinitely is still in a mode where they are squashing a lot of bugs but I’m still enjoying it.
The instances are a little confusing with the Sanctum of the Burning Souls being the first “real” dungeon. The next dungeons you can do are the three instances in the gathering zones which apparently scale to the level of the first person who enters it. We tried doing one at level 41 and everything was fine until we got to the spiders who were hitting like a truck even though they were supposedly “41″.
Anyways, there are problems but nothing that has made me want to quit the game. I usually know by the mid level range if a MMO is for me or not.