First Age of Conan Expansion On the Way 47
Funcom announced today that they are working on the first expansion to Age of Conan, titled Rise of the Godslayer. In addition to high-level content, it contains new objectives for lower levels as well, in an effort to fill out the leveling process. It also introduces new factions that are at war with each other: "Faction gameplay plays a large role in Rise of the Godslayer, presenting the player with choices that earn them both allies and enemies in Khitai. Through questing and adventure players can advance through faction ranks, rewarding them with treasures such as epic new armor and weapons. Players can choose to continue their adventures with existing characters, acquiring new combat abilities and spells through a robust alternate advancement system, or start over again as a Khitan — an all-new culture." A brief trailer has been posted, and Eurogamer has a more detailed preview of the new content.
aw man, still? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been looking forward to an expansion for a while. AoC is a great game that has completely shed the shackles of its lousy launch, but could certainly benefit from an injection of new content. However, I was very disappointed to read this in the press release:
Aw man.. we still have to endure 8 hours of Tortage every time we create a new character? It's a beautiful area with great quests, but every AoC player has played through that entire area about 12 times. It's time to introduce a new starting area. I don't care how they rationalize it in the story but it must be done.
Why, exactly...? (Score:1, Insightful)
Funcom shouldn't be announcing an expansion: they should be announcing that they're shutting down the game. Who on earth would buy this? If I was a Funcom shareholder, I'd be talking to my lawyer right now.
Why buy a new Conan expansion when WoW has:
1) Better quests
2) Better and more classes
3) More races
4) Better graphics
5) Better music
6) Better zones
7) Better dungeons
8) Better PvP
9) About 1000x the population
10) Developers who can continuously fund the game and improve it. 11.5 million players at $15/mo gives a lot of bank.
What game will you find the top raiding guilds in any MMO? WoW. The top PvP players, and the most competitive PvP community? WoW again. No one's going to get sucked into Funcom's latest MMO abortion, sorry.
A basic review to warn you (Score:4, Insightful)
Age of Conan is a comedy of errors. There are so many mistakes made that you have to wonder just what the hell they were thinking.
Lets start with the start. There are four main classes, the heavy fighter, the damage dealing mages, the health restorers and the light fighters. You may notice that I do NOT mention the usual tank, healer, dps. That is because these roles really just don't exist in the game, but more on that later.
You choose your race and that determines the classes you can choose. You then crash on an island, every race does it, every class does it. EXACTLY the same island.
For the next 20 levels you will do the EXACT same quest except for some minor variations in the main story line quest that are different for every main class.
Does this sound odd? That's right, almost all western MMO's give you different starting points, so that if you create an alt, you spend at least the first few hours in a new area with new quests. Not AoC. As nice as Tortage seems the first time, many a player has commented just how much they hated doing it again and again. In fact, if you want to start in the new area that comes with expansion, you have to go through Tortage ALL OVER AGAIN!
Another huge mistake is the new combat system. In most MMO's you have a thing called auto-attack. This is evil. Nobody actually uses auto-attack (you attack an enemy and you keep hitting with a basic attack until you or the enemy are death, almost certainly you) outside korean MMO's because you get a rich set of special skills that you use to make the fight go in your favor. What these skills are depend highly on your class and a skilled player will learn what skills to use when for maximum effect.
But it can be said that pressing the buttons for these attacks can be become rather routine.
So AoC in a brilliant move did NOT make enemies more intelligent or force more tactical/strategic thinking on how to survive. Rather they introduced a system where you press a button for a skill, then have to press 1-4 more arrow buttons (ALWAYS THE SAME ONE FOR EACH MOVE), for the move to fire. The "trick" is that enemies can have their defences up randomly in each direction and you get best result of your attack has the direction where the enemy is defending least.
It sounds intresting, on paper. But since defence is random it is mostly based on luck and the skills themselves are all pretty much the same "do some damage". There is precious little beyond the direction to choose between the moves.
The effect is that in PvE you could just was well macro the "combo's" and be done with it, you are then left with the simplest of korean MMO's. Those games attract HUGE audiences and are a valid genre in their own right, but AoC made the mistake of marketing itself to a WESTERN audience, the kind of people who cut their teeth on EQ, WOW and LOTRO. They expect roles, tactics even a bit of strategy. Not, go into a dungeon, find enemies randomly standining around in a very wide series of hallways, each of which requires no more then to attack them for a minute or so in an endless slapdown. There really is nothing to it. No thinking, just endlessly pushing the same buttons over and over again. I played it one time with a looping macro and did perfectly. There is not even the satisfaction of finding a masterly put together macro. Just take three skills that hit different directions and you got it.
People put up with SWG and remember it fondly because beyond the bugs was a marvelous deep game. Age of Conan is bugs on top of an extremely shallow hack&slash.
If you are tired of WoW or EQ, then this is not the game for you. If you loved Lineage, then you might like this.
AoC is the example of the game that tried to be different for the sake of being different. They seemed to have thought, "maybe there is reason everyone else do it that way".
The MMO market certainly can do with some new ideas, but square wheels on a car would be new.
It will be intresting to see what The