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//\\//\\oo
 Apprentice Member
Joined: 4/17/04
"The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity." -The Lord of Darkness from Legend |
If I tell you that Age of Conan is no longer on my computer, then it should come as no surprise that this review isn't exactly positive. Actually a crash caused by Age of Conan had corrupted quite a few system files, so I just formatted the whole thing while I was at it and reinstalled. Everything runs a lot better now, since my HD had really needed it, so something good did come out of the trial! Where to begin with the actual review.. Ah, yes, I have a level 80 Herald of Xotli on Cimmeria called Tetamach (an rp-pvp server) replete with 3.3k Killing blows and 1.5k Deaths, which was quite a bit of PvP back in the days of release; I had played AoC for three months from release until I ran out of content and was only left with the pitiful excuse of an end-game. The thing that had kept me playing was the visceral combat: PvP was fast and furious with the victor emerging victorious in a matter of seconds and the conquered having his head bashed in ( or worse ) and the combo system was fun. Well, some things have sure changed: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First Now ALL moves of your combo (including the opener) must connect to receive full damage; for every hit of your combo that does not make contact with your opponent, you lose a significant % of your final damage. As you can imagine in PvP, this makes playing a melee class one hell of a pain in the ass... especially since there aren't many snares and HoX only get a root and a stun. At least they add color codes to each move in the sequence in the combo to indicate which ones you've fucked up; it kind of threw me off the first time, but eventually I got used to it. If you thought competent necros were hard to kill before.. oh joy... Second Some might view this as a boon, I view it as a pox. HP has been significantly increased and melee damage has been significantly decreased: Spellcasters are now the supreme DPS/PvP spike damage and PvP has turned into rate differences instead of differences in reaction time. Combat has never felt slower, partially due to the aforementioned change. Third Performance increase? Not for me, but my rig is really the ABSOLUTE minimum, so I shouldn't complain. However, I did notice an increase in the quality in graphics and they added a default Raid/PvP setting that sets everything to EQ quality so it can perform in raids. Fourth Content? Actually there is some new content: The common district, which really won't do anything for people who are already 80, but will help that 76-78 avoid having to grind villas due to a shortage of quests ( which there were ). There is also a new raid or two, but since I really can't stand raids, I hadn't ( and obviously won't in the future ) attempted them. Fifth On yet another positive note: Talents seem to be working now! My HoX kicked some ass with his 2 minute cooldown spell tongue of xotli, which no longer deals pathetic damage, but the most possible damage given that melee has been nerfed to the ground. Sixth A pvp grind! Joy! You get to experience all of the thrills of BG-grinding that you did in WoW! Unfortunately, that really is the extent of it, since you're awarded the % of the person's life who died that you contributed to and you'll need 7000's worth at level 0 (so 70 people you would have to kill yourself) and a whopping 58k to reach level 5 (information supplied courtesy of an old PvP mate who stuck around). Mob groups are common, so as with Darkfall and other games it's a zergfest in the world; however there are battlegrounds to alleviate the search for kills that reward bonus pvp points based on scores. Seventh There would be more, but I had crashed and formatted etc.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed. |
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Amen. What a disappointment. |
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I guess it is just not your cup of tea, personally I feel it has improved enough to sub at lvl 40. Who knows maybe at lvl 80 I will feel the same as you. My personal opinion so far is that questing is great, pvp not bad so far yet not stellar. Itemization changes in regard to stats have improved character building IMO. While also being much easier to understand now. I like the idea of criminal status and would applaud more work in this area in the near future. Fundamentally the design is still basically the same, it just makes a lot more sense it seems now . Maybe that is because the game actually feels a bit more complete now. Aside from the imbalance between melee and casting of course. However I can not say I have played a game that did balance just right in any form. That is to be expected I guess, especially when one class has easy mode and another has to aim for themselves. I feel this will always be an issue in this game. It seems in a group dynamic this system works, however 1 v 1 is a different story.
If there is anything I can say it is that in Craigs hands the game is better off. As with any beast of this nature, there is still work to be done and improvements to be made. As I see it, they are doing just that though. Is it the best game ever? No, I would not say that. Is it one of the better MMO games on the market right now? Yes in my humble opinion it is. Compared to WAR, LOTRO, WOW, VG:soh and eq2 I would chose AOC at this point.That is all up to the eyes of the beholder in the end of course.
Nicely written review BTW even though we disagree, I respect what you had to say. For every minute You are angry , You lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson |
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Yes, the latest big patch introduced a lot of positives, but class balance got messed up. PvP mini-games are suffering as a consequence of this, with few melees joining up. Fortunately a fix is incoming; Patch Notes |
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Totally in agreement with you Moo. I had my fair share of problems too, for example when I changed the video settings in game it made it so that all the players were invisible. Yeah, that was real awesome walking out only to get killed by some ranger I couldn't see.
The PvP/Raid setting did manage to put my FPS at 40, which was decent, but I couldn't help but think that I was effectively running the game at low settings. It's sad because I get higher FPS in Crysis on high details than I did Age of Conan on semi-high details -- the game is still a mess in that department. Balance seemed just as fucked up as ever, I agree with you there too. I loved getting 3 shot by necros who would just stun me, nuke, nuke, nuke and dead. Combat just feels terrible now, I was wondering how they could possibly make that worse than release -- but they managed to find a way!
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Originally posted by //\\//\\oo just out of curiosity are you running Win 7 64 bit with a Nvidia 200 series card? Only reason I ask is I have had the game lock up my box to the point where I had to power off twice now in about 2 hours of game play.
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and it's because of stuff like this, that when I got my e-mail I just LAUGHED until I could barely breathe. There's NO WAY I would go back to AoC now.
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//\\//\\oo
Apprentice Member
Joined: 4/17/04
"The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity." -The Lord of Darkness from Legend |
Originally posted by Jackdog
Win XP 32 bit and no to the card. It was partially my fault; I had gotten impatient when it locked up and I frantically tried key commands. The dreaded grey map bug (symptom of memory leak) is still there in all of it's glory, which I had kept crashing after every few capture the skull games. I admit that my video card is also archaic, so I can't hold Funcom ENTIRELY responsible... Boy I did lose quite a few files though; it's a good thing I write down a lot of my stuff.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed. |
Originally posted by Wharg0ul
So because of this post on mmorpg.com you decided not to go back to AoC?
I guess the last laugh belongs to someone else |
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Originally posted by Barteaux
So because of this post on mmorpg.com you decided not to go back to AoC?
I guess the last laugh belongs to someone else
Who, exactly? Loss of customers is loss of customers, regardless. If you like AoC, you want people playing it...more subs equal more money, equals more content, updates and improvements. Unless, of course, you want the game to fail faster than it is currently. |
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Originally posted by Eben
Who, exactly? Loss of customers is loss of customers, regardless. If you like AoC, you want people playing it...more subs equal more money, equals more content, updates and improvements. Unless, of course, you want the game to fail faster than it is currently.
If someone threatens not to come back to the game, that should tell you they are not currently a customer, hence no loss. I wish for you and all other bashers to find something that you enjoy, cos to keep bashing a game a year after it deserved bashing is just plain ol' sad. We (all mmo players) should keep voting with our wallets. Right now, most peeps are voting for WoW, so WoW is what you'll get. If you want great graphics and inovative PvP. Vote Age of Conan! |
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Great graphics and Inovative PvP. Haha. Wait, you're serious?
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Agricola1
 Elite Member
Joined: 1/30/06
"The one you call messiah is a lie"--- Gary Numan |
I think AoC is at the same stage as many failing MMORPGs at the moment, where they institute many cosmetic changes but fail to address the burning issues. New content and character balance aren't going to bring in more players, never has nor will in my opinion. What needs to be addressed is flawed mechanics and game design. This means getting rid of all those exploits and the memory leak that is still in existance, doing something about the tedious PvP system and doing something major concerning instancing. Only after addressing these issues will players return, AoC already has plenty of content and balancing classes can wait. Funcom need to change end game drastically and I don't mean by adding more instanced battlekeeps, they need to remove instancing with battlekeeps and remove the exploits that have been there since launch. Allow lowbies to get involved with the combat alongside lvl 80s, allow anyone that turns up to view the combat and/or get involved. Instancing sux, fact! Remove it and people will play. PvP mechanics are bad, a novelty at first but soon become tedius to the majority, replace them with a less button mashing intensive system. The PvP system sux, fact, overhall it and introduce what was suggested at launch not a watered down mamby pamby system that doesn't matter anyway and is just a grind. I accept that most of this isn't going to happen as it's too much work to change the core system now that they're working on a different MMORPG. So let's hope they learn from their second disaster and make Secret World a decent MMORPG and bid farewell to what AoC could have been. |
Agreed fully with you. To me it doesn't really matter how much they polish the game because the core is still rotten. In a way it's the same thing WAR is going through I think (although to be fair I think WAR has a better shot in the long run than AoC does, especially because I think WAR's real big problems can be fixed. I.E get rid of scenarios [or downplay them] and change/get rid of fortress battles).
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Originally posted by Barteaux
So because of this post on mmorpg.com you decided not to go back to AoC?
I guess the last laugh belongs to someone else
pfft. hardly. it's because of Funcom's FAILURES involving AoC. NOTHING works right in the game, and hasn't since closed beta. Fuck even if I WANTED to give the trial a go, I couldn't...the fucking updater can't even patch without generating an error report and crashing. It's so funny...they spent almost a year "fixing" the game, and then fuck it all up with this "NGE" patch.
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//\\//\\oo
Apprentice Member
Joined: 4/17/04
"The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity." -The Lord of Darkness from Legend |
Originally posted by Wharg0ul
There literally is no better adjective. Most of the community hates the changes to combat and Funcom was even told so on their test servers, yet.. here we are .. or rather they, since I sure as hell will not install it ever again.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed. |
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...That's not a strong system. |
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Hmm i must be one of those rare lucky people who seems to not have major issues with this game or any game really for that matter. Ive never found game stability to be a factor in liking a game mainly because when games do crash, its not really that big of a deal...just doent happen that often. The last time i had a crash was when i was running both aoc and aion....aion crashed (its in beta so didnt bother me) graphics preform pretty well for me, even if the fps drops below 30 it still runs smoothly, might be my card i have to thank for that, not sure really. its funny when a bunch of people jump in with the "see nothing works in the game because the op had issues...it did this at launch ect" mabey im just blessed by the pc stability gods? i run a 2.3ghz intel quad, gtx 260, 8mb ddr2, vista 64.
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Originally posted by Nadril
Yes |
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I have a medium system ( 260 GTX, dual core, Win 7, 6 gig memory) and the game runs pretty decent considering. In DX 9 high quality I get 50/ 80 FPS city/jungle. DX10 without volumetric I get mid 40's jungle and 30's in city. If I enable volumetric lighting in DX10 it drops to low to mid 20's. As far as bugs in 16 lvls of play I had my HoX get stuck in "man on fire" mode once when I used hell breath. Zoning returned him to normal. Game has froze up 3 times requiring reboot. One looted belt was bugged so that if I hovered over it, it showed as a cap in the equip/inventory comparison. The game would not launch at all most of yesterday, 2 or three reverify/repair and repatches did not help. I ended up doing a uninstall and complete re install and the game runs fine this morning. Still no reply email from FC on my ticket which is really bad. Guess they still have not learned the importance of prompt CS. The graphic glitch and the inventory bug are minor annoyances, the lockups and failure to launch I would consider to be major however. For someone just coming into the game on a trial that would make for a really bad first impression. The failure of their CS to reply so far has been the most annoying part. Seems as if on the whole FC concentrates more on getting customers than they do keeping them. I know if I were running a service based business and a customer emailed me that he could not get my service to work I would be on it as fast as possible.
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Originally posted by Barteaux
So because of this post on mmorpg.com you decided not to go back to AoC?
I guess the last laugh belongs to someone else
Sounds like it belongs to him, he doesn't spend any time on a game he was disappointed with, that is disappointing people that went back to it.
There's nothing that makes me want to use the trial to go back. My guardian got nerfraped enough when I played, nothing I've seen or heard makes the game appealing, and the 'start a new character at level 50' thing is just screaming fail. Why stop at 50? Just give them a level 80 and be done with it. |
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Interesting that the people who have been bashing the game for a while are also the same ones with "stability" problems. Ya. Right.
It takes all kinds I guess. |
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Originally posted by Malkosha
I don't get this, there is a lot of 'if you don't love the game now, youre a hater' mentality here, on the official forums and especially in the game. You admitted the game isn't perfect, there a people with systems WAY better than yours that still have issues running the game. There are people with newer ATI cards who just recently started having problems running the game. I never had any problems even at launch, but friends with the exact same rig specs pulled their hair out for weeks trying to make it work before quitting in disgust. I certainly never told em "I don't have that problem, youre just hating!, GTFO go back to WoW!" If the fans are going to spit on and every returning players who doesn't scream 'bestest game evar!" than many will be chased away and Fun Com will have wasted a buncha money on the re-eval promo. Weird to see so many supposed fans keep trolling so their game gets flamed more. Talk about stupid. A country raised New Zealand girl can kill, bleed, gut, skin and butcher a sheep in about 40 minutes, the sheep are bigger than a large person ... so be careful about pissing off a NZ country girl. |
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Originally posted by Agricola1
Exactly.
My biggest gripe with the core mechanics is that the combat system does not lend itself well to interesting and/or challenging end game raids. Everyman and his dog just runs in and bashes away, even the healers!. With shitty CC and not much in the way of direct healing, everything just comes across as a big mess. |
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Do these crashes come lateer in the game or something? Just asking because I am playing on a 5 year old dell with a radeon 9800 pro video card and havent had a hitch yet, and I am enjoying the game so far. playing eq2 and two worlds |
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