I keep hearing in the trial chat that people say the game is a lot different after Tortage. In what way is it different? Is it worse? I'm really enjoying the Tortage experience but I'd like to know what's going to change after Tortage to decide if I want to get this game or not.

After Tortage you don't have quite as strong a story and not everything revolves around the story. It's a lot more like the newer MMO type quests. There are definitely some very well done quests, but not all of them are going to be Tortage quality.

It's a different experience. Also, the voice overs are only for the most important quests in the zone, so not every tom harry and dick is going to be telling you all about the lions that ate his girlfriend.

However, there is a lot less instancing in the rest of the world. There's still some, but the zones are a lot bigger and more open.

It's a different experience, not necessarily bad, but different.

My advice is to find a zone that clicks with you. There are 3 once you leave Tortage. Khopshef Province, The Wild Lands of Zelata, and Conall's Valley. They all have their own flavor, so find one that fits you. If you begin to get burnt out on one zone, check out another.

I hope that helps

The trail does not end with Tortage.  You can download the entire game, and keep playing with-in your 7 or 14 days.

In my opinion I found the game to improve ouside Tortage, more freedom and being able to explore the world a bit more. There is less voiceovers for quests, but also the absolutley best quests in the game is to be found outside tortage. :)

Originally posted by Capn23

After Tortage you don't have quite as strong a story and not everything revolves around the story. It's a lot more like the newer MMO type quests. There are definitely some very well done quests, but not all of them are going to be Tortage quality.

 

It's a different experience. Also, the voice overs are only for the most important quests in the zone, so not every tom harry and dick is going to be telling you all about the lions that ate his girlfriend.

 

However, there is a lot less instancing in the rest of the world. There's still some, but the zones are a lot bigger and more open.

 

It's a different experience, not necessarily bad, but different.

 

My advice is to find a zone that clicks with you. There are 3 once you leave Tortage. Khopshef Province, The Wild Lands of Zelata, and Conall's Valley. They all have their own flavor, so find one that fits you. If you begin to get burnt out on one zone, check out another.

 

I hope that helps

I think you're incorrect here, you have 3 lands Cimmeria, Aquilania and Stygia. Each land has a minnimum of 10 zones with each zone containing a plethora of instances or sub-zones.

After you leave Tortage instancing only becomes more prevelant, it is an integral part of AoC that allows for such high end graphics. Player cities are instanced and sieges are instanced with a player cap, AoC ended up feeling more like a low population GW server to me.

Tortage is an excellent single player experience, but as an MMORPG AoC just fails to deliver on a Titanic scale. After you reach max level it's mind numbingly boring, all the PvPers got bored of the fighting the same people in the same place for no risk or reward. By level 80 the game is just a steaming pile of over instanced utter, utter, utter wank in my opinion.

Amazing Avery I beg you to bail on this unpolished turd and come be our correspondent for Earthrise, the AoC playerbase is lucky to have you and Funcom should be paying you twice as much as any of their shitty DEVs!

After Tortage the game plays more or less like other MMOs, you have cities and quests hubs. Get a quest go out and do it and return for reward and xp. Lots of players like Tortage, whereas some don't and like the traditional play areas.

Regarding the instancing:-

When navigating through Tortage, you go in to the Inn and get a loading screen, you go to White Sands you get a loading screen. This is reduced in the main areas of the game, as the areas are soo much bigger.

However this is not what is referred to as "Instancing".  This is lack of a contiguous world and results in the use of Zones.  Where as a game like WoW is contiguous as you pass from one zone to another without having to "zone".

Instancing is the existanceof multiple zones of the same area. So when you move from Zone A to Zone B, you are filtered into a particular instance of the Zone B, depending on whether the previous instance is full or not.

EQ2 uses this system as well, and as far as playing the game is concerned it has no effect at all. Until it comes to grouping.

If you join a group and you are not in the same Zone as your group, when you Zone in to the map where they are you will always go to the same instance as they are in, whether it is full or not. So unnoticable really.

If however you are on the same map as the newly joined group then you may or may not be in the same Instance. If you are then fine otherwise you will need to go to a res point and re-zone to the correct instance.

Instancing is a technology limitation, why some games can do away with it and others can't, I don't know.

However if there were no instancing in AoC then they would have to make Tortage a hell of a lot bigger to accomodate all the players as with collision dectation, players would not be able to move, hence the reason why Orgrimmar in WoW is so spacious(even without collision dectection).

 Regarding voice overs: the game currently has a 25gig footprint, imagine how big that would be if there were voice for all quests in the game?

The game is very different once you leave tortage.   You are not guided nearly as much and the polish level of the game drops off.   Quests become much more generic and blah.    The load screens are much less frequent outside of tortage, but the world feels less complete also..... ie.. the unreachable mountains.

With the trial, you should easily be able to spend a few days outside of tortage.

Tortage is a fully fleshed out standalone RPG that happens to have other people playing in it with you. Fun and polished, but not what you really want in an MMO.  Still its just a mandatory 20 level tutorial that you MUST repeat for every character you make. You may opt out at lvl 15, but not advisable as there will be no content for you in the rest of the game til you grind up closer to 20.

Post Tortage is a shallow MMO. Much more open than Tortage but much more lacking in content and polish.

If you like Tortage and want the rest of the game to be like Tortage you will be disappointed. You may like the rest of the game (though the vast majority have not) but you won't like it for the same reasons you liked Tortage.

If you hate Tortage, you won't hate the rest of the game for the same reasons. You'll hate it for many other reasons.

Originally posted by dhayes68

If you hate Tortage, you won't hate the rest of the game for the same reasons. You'll hate it for many other reasons.

Either way your going to hate it right? LOL

I'm sure the chap can find out for himself.

Two things in difference from Tortage to the rest of the game.

* Lvl 20 + is in open larger several kilometer X several kilometer zones.

* Voice acting is not as frequent post 20.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

Originally posted by dhayes68

If you hate Tortage, you won't hate the rest of the game for the same reasons. You'll hate it for many other reasons.

 

Either way your going to hate it right? LOL

I'm sure the chap can find out for himself.

Two things in difference from Tortage to the rest of the game.

* Lvl 20 + is in open larger several kilometer X several kilometer zones.

* Voice acting is not as frequent post 20.

I posted hypotheticals for a player if liked or if hated. l2r.

AoC is a far cry from state of the art. Really the only thing going for it is it has nice looking graphics. The bugs, the lack of content, PvP problems, itemization problems etc. can possibly be fixed. These things are to be expected in a new game. However the fact remains the game was designed with an old zoned and highly instanced architecture. By contrast WoW, which is now an old game, has a beautify designed seamless and open world. While it's true the raw polygon density is less than in AoC, overall Blizzards approach is far more advanced.

On top of that Funcom routinely lies to its customers. I played AoC for a few days until I figured out they are basically a rip-off company. They distributed preorders cards with the expressly written promise that this would grant you early access to the game. Unfortunately the oversold these cards and thousands of people were left out in the cold. Then instead of admitting their mistake and trying to make some sort of amends they tried to claim that early access to the game was first come fist serve basis even though this was stated nowhere on the preorder cards.

In my view it seems they want to sell as many boxes as possible before players figure out the sorry state of the game and quit. Why else are they spending time and money at X-fire comp when they should be fixing their game? As is stands their stock has fallen though the floor.
 

Goodness, they got me excited when I heard they finally had te trial available...  I played beta, early release, and a few of the first months.  I thought I was going to test the parts of the game they had screwed up before, but in actuality, this is just another chance to play through Tortage.

Tortage was a ton of fun.  I had more fun going to zones there to pvp a bit because it was a concentrated group of people my level.  After Tortage, the game loses its luster.  Pvp is either greatly unfair or there's no one nearby.  The rest of the game is the buggy part, and the enjoyable voiceover quests are few and far between.  I would not recommend paying 50 for the game or resubbing after this trial..

Originally posted by VultureSkull

Instancing is a technology limitation, why some games can do away with it and others can't, I don't know.

Errm you DO realize that you are perfectly right? And that is exactly why this is not a technological limitation but simply a limitation caused by the implementation that Funcom chose?

There can be any number of perfectly valid priorities involved in choosing the implementation that FC did but that is besides my point ;)