General Discussion

Last week, Managing Editor Jon Wood traveled to Norway to visit the studios of Funcom's Age of Conan. Today, he presents part three of his report, looking at raiding, city building and sieging.

Over the last few days, we’ve spent time talking about a lot of different aspects of Age of Conan, but in the end, it’s the high-level stuff that makes or breaks an MMORPG for many players, especially the hardcore folks, that makes all of the difference.

Traditionally, PvP and raids have dominated the endgame of most MMORPGs, and while Age of Conan follows that trend, they have found a new approach that will not only call upon players to fight against each other, but to plan and organize fights over property that actually means something.

Read it all here.

some good information there, thanks!

24 man raids.  That sounds kinda lame.  I was hoping they would come up with something better than that.  My experience with raids is they are very boring, and unless you run them regularly with your guild you don't get much out of it.  But with a 24 main raid, you will have to either be in a big guild or allied with another guild.   So that will mean large chunks of time, running the same dungeons over and over and over.  And if the game is a system hog, then it will be a lagfest too.  Yay for fun. 

Limiting cities I understand.  But if your guild doesn't get a city that would kinda suck.  So can you live in a guild owned city if you are not in that guild?  Once again it forces you to be in a big guild it seems.  If your not in a big guild are you homeless then?

And having to prearrange attacking a city doesn't sound right.  What about the element of surprise?!  You should be able to attack a city whenever you want. I guess I will have to schedule my life around the game unless I want my city and everything we've worked for to go poof. 

I think I am having my first doubts about this game.   It sounds like its trying to be a hardcore game, but the market is leaning heavily toward casual.  Now if you couple hardcore with poor performance, the game's success will be disappointing.

Alot of it sounds really cool, and while not a raiding fan, i can avoid raid instances, no biggie. But i agree with the above poster, this seems to scream "get in an uber guild or get out".

I actually like the this system.  Something that sounds very similiar was used in shadowbane for player cities.  This actually does the exact opposite of what you are saying, it allows you to schedule your gaming around your life, rather than your life around the game.  People know ahead of time that it is coming, the whole suprise attack concept means I have to be on alot more to protect the city and having to push other things in life to the background on a regular basis.

Shadowbane originally had the 'suprise attack' concept where people could attack city structures (but not the tree of life) at any time, but it was heavily abused to the point where they moved to the only during the bane concept.

On paper, it is probably one of the only ways to make something like this work, in practice we'll just have to wait to see how it works out.

As for the raid thing, just get together with alliances if you don't want to do the big guild thing.  I was part of a successful raiding alliance in EQ2 before I moved onto a casual raid guild from a small family guild.  And trust me, 24 people isn't all that much really, I run 24 person raids in EQ2 and there are times I wish I could take 30 :)  The key to raiding (like other aspects of the game) is to not let it stress you out and just have fun with the people.  Plus, I have a feeling that raiding in AoC is going to be a good bit different that other games.  Nothing concrete, just a feeling.  You only have 10 classes and 24 slots, that means it should be easier to find roles for anyone in a raid, regardless of the class.

I havent heard the information on the raid dungeon tier system before but there doesn't seem to be anything in the pvp siege information that hasn't been released previously.

Did you get the opportunity to witness and siege combat while you were there?

Also would be nice to get some more information on the computer built cities that are built next to guild pve villages. It's a really nice idea that you can defend your guild city from besieging npcs or you can go wage war on their village if you want.

Oi, raid encounters suck. Ya know in EQ 1 running up to some plane with 100 other people was kind of interesting. Then it's progressed to pure crap since then. You chip away at some mob's crazy amount of hp for 3 hours dealing with elements that don't make you think, but test your patience. There's no puzzle, just if you go over here you aggro 37 baby dragons and wipe the whole team. Ohh you noob..
Yeah, I'm hoping they don't just keep their top equipment at the bottom of these been there done that raid encounters. I'm not gearing like that ever again in a MMO.

News about raid encounters makes me sad. I'm hoping I can avoid them w/o feeling like a second class citizen.  I did enough raiding in WOW, I'm never going back to that again.

Yet another game falls to the elitist raiders, the niche of the niche while making all the other play styles feel like second class citizens.  I suppose this outdated thinking won't go away till they fire all of the hardcore nerds that are currently developing this crap.

Originally posted by Vrazule<