General Discussion

MMORPG.com Age of Conan Correspondent Jean-Francois Doyon writes this article giving his own opinion of the customiztion in Funcom's flagship title.

Back in the days of glory of single-player games, your introduction to a new game would usually be the tutorial, or the first mission in the game's campaign. In the world of MMORPGs, your introduction to the game usually has one more step before you can jump into the action (not counting installation issues, server crashes and unbelievably long patching times, which are in the best of cases an annoyance, and in the worst of cases an introduction of the game to the trash bin): the character generation system. This system fulfills a need that most players will have; the need to give their avatar in the world a look they like and to differentiate themselves from other players, much like the need to wear a dress or a suit that isn't worn by everyone else in a reception. As the technology available to game makers becomes more powerful, players are also asking for more freedom to make their characters look the way they like.

Read the whole article here.

Lots of cool PvP gear available now with the PvP upgrade patch that came out before this week.

I think for a modern next gen MMORPG Conan fails horribly in the customisation department.

I find I no longer want MMORPGs that force looks and styles on me because I must have a particular style of armor because of its statistics and ability bonuses.

I hate the fact that all the characters look alike at various levels of the game. Sure their faces may be different (may be), but this is irrelevant when the rest of them looks identical.

Take a game like City of Heroes/City of Villians or Spellborn. You are able to fully customise your character's look, beyond adjusting physical sliders which means nothing if you are forced to wear particular clothes and armor.The difference is amazing, and your immersion in the game world increases tremendously. You actually care about your character, and pay attention to this virtual representation a lot more than with a game focused on items for abilities and stats. Lord of the Rings has a good workaround as well, allowing you to wear items for Stats/abilities...but have a seperate set of items for Look. So you can define a look for your character, and keep on gathering armors bracers, boots etc. etc. but these don't affect or change that look.

I was hoping that AoC would allow better customisation.As it stands, the customisation options for practical purposes are just marginally better than World of Warcraft which was announced 7 years ago.

The Console MMORPGs that are planned for release next year all allow near infinite full character customisation as well. This will start to show up games like AOC and others which don't offer this to players.

Isn't Age of Conan still in Closed Beta?

A very bad game wrapped in pretty graphics.  It's like waking up for Christmas and unwrapping that really shiny gift only to find a rock.

Like others, I find it hard to say anything positive about AoC.

During early beta there was a lot more character customization you could do, but it caused a lot of clipping issues. Even though it was something the players wanted, it never played out when the game made it to "retail beta". You would think a game with graphics this stunning needs better customization, especially considering how piss-poor almost everything else about the game is.

OK, now for something positive about AoC:

The retail box does not contain the small pox virus.

Originally posted by Gel214th

I hate the fact that all the characters look alike at various levels of the game. Sure their faces may be different (may be), but this is irrelevant when the rest of them looks identical.

I often wonder what the roman legion or any of today's army, navy, air-force and marines would be like if they got to choose what they the wore on the battlefield. Of course this is just a game, and everyone wants to look good, but It's not about the way you look or dress in the game. It's whats inside that set us apart from one another. So we look alike. big deal... 

"Rock Hard, Metal Heavy and Bang till ya can't stand it." j.L.

Why are they still patching this horrible game.  They need to look at the real numbers of active subscriptions and decide whether to pull the plug on it.. Sounds to me like they need to resign the whole game.

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Originally posted by Gel214th
I think for a modern next gen MMORPG Conan fails horribly in the customisation department.
I find I no longer want MMORPGs that force looks and styles on me because I must have a particular style of armor because of its statistics and ability bonuses.

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QFT

Originally posted by Soupgoblin

Like others, I find it hard to say anything positive about AoC.

During early beta there was a lot more character customization you could do, but it caused a lot of clipping issues. Even though it was something the players wanted, it never played out when the game made it to "retail beta". You would think a game with graphics this stunning needs better customization, especially considering how piss-poor almost everything else about the game is.

OK, now for something positive about AoC:

The retail box does not contain the small pox virus.

Yes, while the character creation options are really still pretty good (