Here I am again, filling in another in a long line of ‘I Quit’ forms, this time for Age of Conan. Always a difficult thing for me. I spend a lot of time in MMOs, and reaching this point of the Cycle of Interest is always uncomfortable, no matter how many I pass through. Is it me? I feel like I’m letting the game down a bit – something about my psychology can’t stay away from these games, and yet never manages to quite play them properly, to see it through, to stick with it, to complete the single very basic task an MMO sets before me; to hit monsters until the level value reaches the most it can.

In this particular case, it’s been a bit of a charged decision to make. So many people have been so vocal about how much Age of Conan has let them down, sometimes on quite a spiteful and personal level, that I’ve often felt a kind of nagging peer pressure throughout my own time there, that some how I shouldn’t be playing the thing in the first place. Whispers, rhetoric, snark, and at times I have indeed felt a bit embarrassed to be seen to be writing about the thing. Then again, I play games, and then I write about what happened. It’s all I know how to do.

I also have quite a reactionary streak, as regular readers may have noticed, in my gaming choices. For me, my own much vaunted (by me!) Three Month Rule is no real hardship at all; it makes sense to wait for all the rough patches to be smoothed out, (thanks to the tireless forumwork of the early adopters), certainly, but I’m often leery of mere popularity alone. I know at a rational level that the reason so many people say so many good things about a thing, is that it might actually be good, but still I stubbornly resist. It’s my own particular kink, I guess.

So why now? Well, partly Technical Issues, which the game still has a fair few of, most notably in my own gaming experience, the CTD Out of Memory Errors and a general annoyingly low framerate. I thought I had a decent gaming PC, but at least now I know that I actually don’t. I’ve only just upgraded the graphics card, and don’t see a need to do so again right now thankyou! Bioshock seems to run well enough though, so I do wonder.

I know there are fan-researched ‘fixes’ for the memory problems, but frankly, I’m a bit tired of Us having to find ways around Their mistakes. I gain increasing sympathy for the growing number of folks who raise a defiant fist against the typically accepted level of MMO Quality Control. Does “It’s an MMO, they’re always broken at launch” do as an excuse anymore? Should I even need a Three Month Rule in the first place?

Like everyone else who plays these, I’m a bit more pragmatic (or just too addicted to care), and am actually capable of putting up with far more than I ought to. The CTDs are a bit of a gamebreaker though, I found.

Partly, I guess, I just had the same burnout I have in most Level Games these days. Kill, kill, kill, quest, quest, quest, and then I get these moments of clarity and look around and start asking awkward philosophical questions, like ‘Why?’. 42 levels behind me, 38 to go, and a sudden bout of Career Ennui. Playing a Herald of Xotli was fun enough in itself, but the Bigger Picture seems much the same whatever I played; a somewhat abstract and unending drive for intense self-improvement, for no obviously discernable purpose at all. Something about Thoth-Amon? I lost track, frankly.

I made it to the Fields of the Dead, which seemed to be the only outdoor Adventure Region for the 40-50 range. I like travel; I’m an 80%+ Explorer Bartle type, and I have a tendency to want to adventure somewhere entirely different from session to session. Aside from the occasional trip to Tarantia Noble District, it looked like Fields of the Dead was it really, which was a shame.

I think perhaps my own tolerance for any kind of Level Game is wearing out a bit. I’m playing City of Villains at the moment, which is technically a Level Game, but it practically bends over backwards to make sure the Level doesn’t get in the way. Even so, I wonder if I’ll make it to the ‘end’ in that either. Time will tell. Try as I might, I invariably end up soloing a lot in these games, and the road to the end is always a much longer thing alone. Whatever else Age of Conan might, or might not be, it is still a Level Game of the old school. Perhaps I never belonged here at all, and increasingly I find myself attracted to Short or No Level types of game; I can’t see myself ever quitting Guild Wars, for example.

While the timing may seem suspiciously coincidental, I can confirm that I am not quitting to sign right up for Warhammer. Age of Conan has reinforced the Three Month Rule for all MMOs quite comprehensively for me. I’m also not quitting out of solidarity for the recently resigned Game Director, Gaute Godager. All a bit of a shame, that; whatever the hell went on there, I’m not quite sure it warrants a founding member of the company of sixteen years standing being hounded out of his livelihood. Quite enjoyed my time in Anarchy Online, as I recall.

So mostly, I was getting a bit tired of it all anyway, but the ongoing technical issues didn’t help. I might be back in a year or so, maybe when the 360 version turns up, to see how it has (hopefully) improved, and by then I’ll probably have a renewed interest in pushing forward on that particular levelquest. I have so many other abandoned levelquests that need work first though.

No idea what to replace it with, but given that my own current “Most Anticipated MMO”, is in fact Fallout 3, who can say?

Anyway, do tell me ‘I told you so!’, and how awesome Squig Herders are below!

Life continues in Everyone’s Favourite MMO, and that most rare of things, a Positive Pick Up Group Experience! Like many of my MMOs of late, Age of Conan seems to be turning into a once-a-week thing for me. Quite possibly this is just the result of having far too many on the go at once, but I find a comforting kind of dependability in the weekly routine I seem to have fallen into of late. Mondays is Age of Conan, Tuesdays is, well, the Tuesday Noob Club of course, Wednesdays seems to have suddenly become City of Villains Night (More on that later), Thursdays is the night where I Leave The House, a token nod to a normal life, (and even then it’s the pub for the Podcast Planning Meeting), and Fridays, I mind the shop in Second Life. The weekends invariably manage to fill themselves up with less structured gaming, dipping here and there into whichever my whims dictate, and of course, actually recording the podcasts. It’s a life, of sorts.

Mind you, it does have consolations, and over the months and years, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that perhaps MMOs are only meant to be played once a week? It’s certainly prolonged my interest in Guild Wars far beyond any expectation I’d have had all those years ago. If I’d have charged in and gone 25+ hours a week on it, I doubt I’d still be there today. AoC seems to be fitting that pattern for me as well of late.

Last week saw myself and my regular cohort in a very capricious mood while out in the Wild Lands of Zelata, and a combination of their enthusiasm, and my own fatalism saw us signing up with a six-man assault on the Sanctum of Burning Souls dungeon. It was the usual barely organised kind of trip, but conducted with a rather unusual amount of patience and tolerance, which was a surprise in itself.

Of course, first we all had to actually get there, which took a while. The Sanctum is at the far end of one of those brooding majestic Acheronian Ruins that I like so much, and included the trademark huge staircase to fight your way up. I seem to have developed quite the fetish for those, which is both bizarre and unsettling. Once at the top, there’s a shifty Stygian NPC dishing out a quest in the ruins. Fair enough, I think, as months of conditioning kick in. I’m thinking of marketing some kind of large yellow foam exclamation mark, held together by wire, which you wear as a hat. Armed with only one of these, it should be a simple matter to head to your nearest town centre and get all manner of strangers to carry out all manner of tasks for you, all with no questions asked!

I know it would work on me, anyway, and sure enough, I clicked, only to find myself curses with a cloud of flies. These flies will kill you in 15 minutes, unless you search the ruins for some Acheronian Knickknack, and bring it back to the fellow. Possibly not the kind of thing one ought to have hanging over them as you’re on your way to a dungeon crawl. My friend showed me where the knickknack was, helpfully enough, but in one of those incidents which the Age of Conan Player becomes increasingly philosophical about, it didn’t work. Ho hum.

I arrived at the entrance of the dungeon just in time for the flies to instakill me. The group leader seemed more bemused than angry though, and at any rate, we were the first two of the hired hands to arrive. I bounced up at the distant shrine, which was okay, because I got to fight up the Big Stairs again! Meanwhile, at least two others of our would be group were also struck down by flies, before I could warn them about the whole Broken Instant Death thing. I supposed as a test of groupmate patience levels, it did serve a useful purpose, and no sudden sullen groupquits so far!

Eventually, we did all get sorted out and headed in. I’m a Herald of Xotli, and my cohort is a Ranger. With us were also another Ranger, a Barbarian, a Guardian (which I gather is the Tank class), and a Priest of Mitra (the big Healer class). Looked good on paper, and after a few false starts, worked well in practice too.

The Sanctum is a large ruinous area with all manner of staircases to fight up, which was excellent, and is populated by monsters of the ‘Group’ grade. Interesting to fight actually, as they really are pretty buffed, and clearly balanced for a proper group, meaning that the fights actually last long enough to get some of the combos off, which is nice. There were a number of quests in there, apparently, along with a satisfying variety of Group Bosses, that took a significant amount of wailing on to defeat.

We did wipe a few times, largely down to a slight philosophical difference in gameplay styles, in that some of the group prefer only expending energy and resources on the big bosses and quest ticks, while others (myself included), prefer to scour the map clean, trashmobs and all. This ideological discord tended to manifest in several botched attempts to creep past whole sections of trashmobs, which works well in theory, but only if everyone knows that this indeed, The Plan. Also, with six people all moving together, the aggregate ‘footprint’ of the group as a whole, tends to be much larger than that of just one player alone, meaning that accidental aggro is much more likely, even if you are all trying to creep.

A few wipes is enough to drive home the lessons though, and things picked up significantly after we’d all been trampled a bit. The rest of the excursion went well; there were lakes of blood, enslaved undead spirit zombie things, evil Princesses, defiled altars, the ubiquitous Demon Infestation (again!), and a suitably epic final confrontation with a Warlord, no less!

We finished heroes, but I suspect that we finished at all mostly due to the surprising patience and determination of our sudden coalition of strangers; much of the antics I saw in the place (my own included) would have sent most PUGs I’ve tried in the past, in other games, yanking the network cable out in disgust. Our lot didn’t seem to mind or care, and on the whole, everyone seemed to be enjoying the ride. Perhaps, if all the stories of falling numbers, doom and gloom are based in fact, those folks remaining in the game are, by necessity, somewhat less inclined to be consciously driving other players away from the game, and in any case, by definition, are probably the sort of people who will put up with more hassle than most. Who knows?

I overanalyse a bit I think. We went, we saw, we conquered, and that’s what really matters. I got some phat loot from the night out, which was a bonus, but mostly, it was nice just to see somewhere new, and do well once there.

Mind you, the Bug-O-The-Week didn’t help matters; a newly patched in and disappointingly regular spate of CTD out-of-memory issues that make zoning a matter of taking your life in your hands. While much of the stupid stuff is bearable; missing hair after demonform, fire buff effects never going out, etc, this particular gremlin is very much of the gamebreaking grade (litterallly!), and one I’ll be keeping a very close eye on, from a continued subscription perspective. I put up with a lot more than most would in these matters, but even I have limits…

Anyway, I’m Level 40 now, which means a horse, and that I can finally start on the crafting. Too bad I sold 20 levels worth of harvesting materials to pay for a horse…

After a whirlwind world tour, and a couple of dings, it was back home to Stygia again, to find ourselves at last, ready for the big black pyramid that had been bothering me since I got out of Tortage. You can’t really miss it, giant squatting monstrosity visible from clear across the zone, and so obviously a Den O Evil that it was something of a relief to actually be eligible for all the lead-in quests involved.

There’s actually two instances in that neck of the woods, and we decided to warm up with a go at the other one first; the Treasury of the Ancients. One of the desert nomad types out front of the Pyramid turned out not to be there to mooch off the enigmatic Oracle of Derketo, but was in fact looking for some freelance antiquities retrieval specialists to wander by. Hello there!

I was actually very impressed with the Treasury actually. It’s very short, as instances go, and somewhat linear in design, but… well, I don’t want to spoil it actually, as the scripting used inside does something I never thought I’d ever see in an MMO; create suspense. Actual edge of the seat stuff, which coming from me, the kind of gamer who is generally immersed as a lily-pad these days, is saying a lot. Stuff Happens in there, and at points I was doubting my senses, and detecting actual signs of panic in myself. Remarkable, and worth a go if you’re in that neck of the woods. Very well done. Its apparently a solo instance, but we were duoing. I can only imagine what it’s like alone…

We made it out alive, and largely as sane as when we’d went in, and it was on to the main event, the Pyramid of the Ancients. This is more of the normal kind of MMO Instance kind of thing, a large rambling multi-levelled tomb full of objectives, monsters and the like. This one is very well done though, and almost DDO-like it it’s design and complexity. It has traps, environmental effects, winding passageways, invisible ninja ambush, and a number of sub-bosses which required a little more than my usual Meet-n-Greet tactics, (“Hello! Can I interest you in the Good News!”… mash Hellstep…), instead involving using previously dropped items to significantly debuff them down to manageability.

Quite a quest haul on the rampage through, and I’m sure I dinged once just inside the place, which is always nice. Things went a bit complicated when we reached the summit and the final boss. A novel and curious designed encounter. The chap starts off normal enough; a largish thug in dire need of a concerted pamphlet campaign, but soon demons up. It’s always the demons in AoC!

Once in his full glory, it all gets rather hectic, and choreographed, and reminded me somewhat of anecdotes I’d heard from the Front Lines of endgame WoW. Although not doing an awful lot of straight damage during the ensuing melee, the chap comes with four different insta-nukes he can casually toss out. They take a second or so to charge up, which you can see happening if you’ve got him targeted. Now, all through the preceding rampage, we’d been collecting four useable gems, which when used, will protect the team from the correctly colour coded blast. Had a bit of trouble with these; important thing to note here, is that they’re No Trade, so it is vitally important to have the team work out who wants to be in charge of what gem.

We didn’t, of course. I ended up with one and my compatriot had the other three. All made for quite a slapstick exercise, as we tried to coordinate gems, which seem to have linked reuse timers, and whose buffs overwrite each other, meaning that you can’t just spam all four constantly, and of course, actually kill the bugger. On the plus side, the respawn shrine thing is only next door, but on the negative side, the entire thing resets if you all die. And there’s a door that shuts behind you, preventing the old Tag-Team Attrition Strategy.

I was somewhat divided on the whole thing to be honest. Objectively, I couldn’t help be impressed by the intricacy of it all. It’s a very well designed encounter, which at an intellectual level, I approved of thoroughly. On the other hand, we did get our arses handed to use repeatedly, which has been known to make me grumpy! It was a good kind of grumpy though, and that special kind of nagging failure which makes me go away and plan and plot.

We’ll be back…

So I swallowed my Stygian pride and am now a world-wandering mercenary. I was hoping to get all the way through Khopshef Province without having to go elsewhere to level, but I’m an explorer at heart, so it was always going to be an inevitable thing I guess. Its an opportunity in disguise I think, and an opportunity to spread The Good News to ignorant foreign savages!

It’s quite interesting to learn how much the two alternative zones, The Wild Lands of Zelata and Conall’s Valley, differ from the Stygian adventure zone, and its more than just the scenery. Wild Lands seems to have quite a few more instances on offer, for example, while Conall’s seems to have more than average in the way of group-based questing. They all look good, mind you, and I’m just enjoying the scenery of it all; suitably epic landscapes in all the zones I’ve seen so far. And of course, grabbing all the yellow !’s I see, and if you do it like that, a bit of of a worldwide smorgasbord of missioning, there seems very little need to hunker down and grind on mobs, certainly at this lower end anyway.

I’m learning that it isn’t meant to be the usual kind of thing; a balanced set of alternative equivalents, so that each ‘side’ gets their own version of it all, there seem not to be any ‘sides’ in that sense, and instead, we’re all meant to go to all of the zones. Fair enough, a wanderer I shall be!

Impressive sights so far include The Maze, a brooding spider and demon infested set of canyons that we were slightly overpowered for, and anyway, you know what spiders and cobwebs are like around Fire. Good News suitably driven home, we then went off to the big ruins in the middle of the map, which had another huge staircase! I love the Heroic Rampage Up The Big Staircase, so it was great to see the theme is repeated out in the post-Tortage real world. Once up the top, its on to the ever-present Undead Hordes, and beyond that, the enigmatic, and often LFGed Sanctum of Burning Souls. We peeked inside, then ran away screaming from the first ‘trashmob’ in the place, a rather enraged huge spider monster. Probably have to hold on the missionary work in there for the time being, I think.

Quite enjoyed the Border Range side instance place, which we happened to be just about the right level for, which is always nice. Its a winding canyon pass on the border between the warring nations of Aquilonia and Nemedia, and it seems the big military push has ground to a halt somewhat. Enter two hapless mercenaries, stage left! An interesting chain of quests in there, although we did have some troubles getting the requisite ticks in the journals. The Ranger went afk briefly, and me, full of enthusiastic zeal, managed to completely depopulate the place of the Dark Beast werewolf things, before they’d managed to get back. Unfortunately, the group shared ticks require your little team to be quite close together, or all land some damage or something, which meant the Ranger didn’t get any of the ticks along the quest for my somewhat frenzied spree, so we had to both leave the place, degroup, regroup and then go back in to reset the place, to let the Ranger have a werewolf or two. Oops, my bad!

The plot thickens as we find a lost and routed Aqulionian patrol, and are sent all the way through the pass to the big Nemedian Fort at the far end and free a gaggle of prisoners. The whole ‘not being close enough’ thing reared it’s ugly head again; I got all a bit Red Mist again, and was somewhere on the other side of the enemy camp, enlightening the natives on the Word of Xotli, (I love my job), while the Ranger was actually getting on with the whole Freeing the Prisoners bit, and by the time I calmed down, they’d already scarpered. No tick for me! Still, this must have been one problem they’d anticipated, as by the time I’d finished unsuccessfully beating myself against the closed fort door (which it turns out, you’re not supposed to break down at all), the cage magically closed and filled up with prisoners again, allowing me to be a Hero too. Phew! So all in all, a bit quirky, but still a fun self-contained romp.

Later explorations have seen me poking about the Cimmerian lands too, which are all very Alpine, and a quick peek into the Fields of the Dead, which I’m not quite ready for yet, but which seems to be the only L40 Adventure zone on the map, so I expect plenty of Good News to be spread in there in the weeks ahead. Not wanting to neglect my Resource Gathering duties (Or more precisely, wanting to free up six quest slots), I then finished the tour by heading into Lacheish Plains, the Cimmerian Resource zone. I expect its quite nice too, but I ended up far beneath the world on entry, so will have to come back another time to see that properly. The Perils of Foreign Parts…you wouldn’t get that kind of thing happening in Stygia, I can tell you!

The spreading of the Good News continues, and after a bit of ‘normal’ MMO play in Age of Conan, my own personal story picks up again, at level 30, with a very sarcastic seer chap on the docks of Khemi taking it on himself to supervise my ascent to glory, fame, and hopefully no small amount of lamentation of the women!

Being left to one’s own devices for a whole ten levels is a bit of a jarring break, to be honest, after the rather personal attention of the first twenty levels in Tortage. Personally, I don’t mind that much, and am the sort of person who quite likes The Normal MMO Experience; whimsical odd-jobbing from outpost to outpost, with plenty of legwork, allowing me to take in the zones. Quite liking Khopsef Province, an excellent example of the Desert Type Zone, and have yet to find the need to head to the other two zones of my level, over in Aquillonia and Cimmeria. Probably saving those for alt purposes, I think. Strangely enough, my one trip to the other two capital cities, I found them very cold places, visually, and mildly uncomfortable to wander about in. I think I may have acclimatised to a computer game climate region, which is a bit odd.

Level 30 came without me really noticing actually, but I can see how the large gaps in Destiny might annoy or upset the player who is less accustomed to How Things Are Done in MMOs, and I’m sure a lot of AoC’s 700k are folks from Outside. Strangely enough, I found the opposite problem actually.

The day came, and I headed for the Seer. He sent me off to a cave atop a huge rock that I’d seen but wasn’t allowed into before. Climbing wall fun, and a spectacular view from the top. It’s a solo instance, which was a bit of a disappointment, as largely, I’m duoing my way through Hyboria. Once inside there is Trouble With Demons, and the ensuing Cultist Clearance turned out to be quite a tricky affair in the end, with patrols, and fiendish linked aggro with a melee chap and a couple of casters. It’s all aimed at a L30 player, but…I don’t know what went wrong really. Sloppy play from having been beating on low blues and greens for the last five levels or so, perhaps. It may be that I was actually wrong about Armour Stats Mattering (see previous AoC posting). Wrong? Me? Outrageous! Saying that, I was mostly dressed in L20 gear which perhaps might have had something to do with what followed.

I zoned in, made all sorts of brash claims to the token NPC at the entrance, then Hellstepped (Charged) directly into the first cluster of cultists, bellowing my usual battlecry (“Hello! Can I interest you in the Word of Xotli?” FWOOSH!). This usually works, and in a satisfyingly spectacular manner, but these cultists were made of sterner (and more flame-retardant) stuff. I bounced off, and then received a terrific beatdown. (“No…” WHUMP! “…you can’t…” SPLUT! “…interest us…” MASH! “…in Xotli…”)

I think they were especially annoyed that I’d caught them just as they were about to sit down to Sunday lunch, but whatever the reason, I died. Which was a bit of an anticlimax, frankly. Here I am, in my Special Story Place, being all Special and Heroic, and full of Destiny, and I’m dead. I guess not everyone gets to be the Hero and anyway, I tend to gravitate to the Vizier role where I roleplay at all.

Grumbling that my Destiny is in the hands of an inept Itemisation Designer, I got up at the shrine and got stuck in to a less than Heroic game of attrition. “All Aboard The -60%DP Express”, as we say in Guild Wars, which gets the job done, but does nothing for dignity. The rest of the instance was indeed quite well done, but by then I had a good old grump on, and wasn’t really in a position to appreciate the thing, and since there is only one way out, through, I couldn’t even go away and come back and try it in a better mood, and set of equipment. (Or indeed, come back after to try again)

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, with the final Demon boss, as being sometimes a Demon myself, I like nothing more than a bit of Hot Demon On Demon Action, and by the time I’d got that far in, I was starting to find my feet again, so the latter part of it all didn’t go so badly. On the whole though, as I played through, I was mostly thinking, “I can’t wait to get out of here and back to the game”, which was a shame.

I’m back out now and playing Normal MMO again, and while many would be annoyed to learn that nothing new happens on that front until L50, I find myself quite glad, to be honest.

Looking ahead, I’ll soon be big enough to play in Black Castle. I have no idea what that is, but LFGs for that, and oddly enough, The Chicken Handler (An epic, er, poultry husbander, whose chicken you have to steal), make up almost all the OOC chat I’ve seen, so it’s clearly a popular venue. Looking forward to seeing what it’s about, and of course, moving upward in levels to the next Adventure Zone. I like the Province, but there’s always time to see somewhere new…

Bug O the Week: I have a spell called Flame Lash. It’s quite neat, causing each following melee hit to cause a damage buff to stack up. It also sets my hands on fire. Which is neat, but they then never go out. While some people grind a ridiculous amount of Destroyer Cores in GW for this privilege, I’m not quite so impressed, and it makes visits to the bookshop terribly fraught…

It’s a good job I don’t read the Internet really; if I did, I might get quite dispirited about Age of Conan’s apparent and universal failure to make anyone happy at all! There’s probably a WordPress template some place you can download which fills in the bulk of the now commonplace ‘I am quitting AoC and Here is Why’ post, and even traditional contrarian that I am, I start to get bizarre mental images in which I’m a eager naive country rat, struggling with a suitcase and politely trying to fight my way up a cruise liner gangplank, against a tide of hysterical and panicky other rats, all fleeing to dry land. “Excuse me…excuse me…is this the way to the ship? Why is everyone in such a hurry?”

Very Wind in the Willows, but the slight background worry that I’ve Made The Incorrect Choice still nags a little. Even the mighty Yahtzee seems to have taken a moment out of beating on console titles with the bloody end of his wit, to throw an acerbic glance at my current Momorperger of the moment:

Zero Punctuation: Age of Conan

Actually, for all his bile, he makes a lot of good points, and has a surprisingly keen insight on the whole thing. In that vein, his mauling of Tabula Rasa was quite accurate too, now I think back. He Doesn’t Like Momerpergers, which is fair enough. I’d pay good money to see his reaction to Last Chaos!

One observation in particular rings a bell; and just in case the end-credits flash by too quickly, he sets a bit of a challenge, to play for a session without any clothes on. Obviously, yes; ‘huhuhuhuh… boobies!’, but beyond that is a more pointed observation, that he doesn’t believe wearing armour makes any difference at all to combat. I’m not in the habit of running around with no clothes on, virtually or otherwise, but in the interests of science, I’ll have to give this a go.

Certainly, I can believe it, and find myself routinely bewildered by AoC’s curious statistics. As an example, my current Chest Slot Armour, which is admittedly of the Cloth Armour type, has the following statistics:

Requirement: Level 20, +7 Defense Rating, +0.6 Defense Rating Proficiency, +0.7 Natural Health Regen, +0.1% Crushing Invulnerability, +37 Max Mana.

I think I understand the Mana one! This is a ‘Green’ item – the lowest grade of magical stuff, and was given out as a quest reward, so assumedly beats NPC bought and Junkloot, but I honestly have no idea if it is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Comparisons are hard work, given AoC’s apparent blasé attitude to integers. Presumably, if I can find a robe with 1000 times the Crushing Invulnerability, I will be completely immune to falling rocks, badly parked mammoths, buggering up the dismount at the top of the climbing walls, and being punched in the boobies?

I’m sure there are perfectly logical design reasons for doing it all like this, but I have no idea what Defense Rating Proficiency actually is. Is it better than Defense Rating? Possibly it was in the manual, but its all terribly confusing. I’ll learn it in time, I expect, but by simply having such small numbers, and worse still, fractions… it all makes the loot and equipment feel decidedly puny. Only 7 Armour Points at level 20? I may as well indeed not bother wearing anything at all! (Or at least dress for comfort rather than protection. Do have standards, dontcherknow!)

Oh its quite superficial, I know, and I’m not generally much of a lootwhore, but I AM keenly interested in Numbers and their application in MMOs, and this is all a bit of a headache! At the very least, it would be nice to know if Item A is better or worse than Item B, which currently, isn’t all that apparent. At least the weapons have a DPS value I can relate to.

(Mind you – both myself and Yahtzee, above, are using Mage-types, with Cloth Armour – perhaps the cloth stuff is meant to be ineffective?)

Anyway, I’m out of Tortage now and have been for a week or so. Can’t see what all the fuss was on that score to be honest – got through the place in something over a week of normal play; groupwork and solo nightime quests. Certainly wasn’t there long enough to get bored of the maps, at any rate. Underhalls was a a bit generic, but greatly enjoyed White Sands, Acheronian Ruins and the Volcano Bit.

Off in Stygia now, and Khemi, Purple Lotus Swamp and Khopsef Province, three zones of a very Egyptian look and feel, which makes a nice change from the usual pseudo-mediaeval Europeanesque fare, and a bit of variety. Khemi is a town, mostly there for goods and services, with a twistey dense feel and even has “taverns” for those of a RP bent. Courtesans ahoy!

Purple Lotus Swamp is a new thing I’d not seen before – an entire zone set aside for tradeskill gathering; nodes of the various resources scattered about the place, and no real static monster spawns there to fight. Nice to have it all in one place, and being L20 now, I can actually start harvesting. I’m not quite sure what to do with this stuff mind you, as actual crafting appears not to start until L40, for some reason. Still, I’m one of those odd folks who will spend hours harvesting, simply because its free stuff, and just lying there!

The zone also has a bunch of Guild Townbuilding stuff going on too, which I’m sure I’ll figure out in due course.

The gathering is a bit hectic at times mind you, and in a bid to combat the ever-present menace of afk-macro-farmers, they seem to have gone with a system where you just get randomly attacked by sudden and tailored spawns every now and then, reminiscent of belt-rats in EVE. These abrupt visits scale to your level appropriately, so if you’re alert and actually playing, you shouldn’t have too much trouble defending yourself, but I wish the actual models would load in a prompt manner. I sometimes find myself swinging wildly at the invisible monsters for a good thirty seconds sometimes, before they’ll actually load. “Argh! What’s hurting me!?” Annoying, but the place makes for a decent enough alternative to be getting on with for a bit of relaxed down-time as needed.

The real action is in Khopsef Province, an ‘Adventure Zone’, which has mobs, spawns, quests and all the usual stuff in it. Quite like it actually; a rocky desert region, with oases, camel trails, ruins, a lush delta in the north and a very ominous spikey black pyramid indeed. It also has its fair share of regional troubles; rebellion, banditry and the old “Trampoline Cemetery Problem”, so plenty of opportunities to set people’s heads on fire!

I find myself taking my duties as a Herald of Xotli quite seriously actually, and see it as my duty to spread The Good News wherever I can, knocking on doors, tent flaps, tree stumps and rocks all over the region, and asking the various denizens if they would like to Learn More about Xotli, or as is more often the case, Fire. One of the downsides of being a Xotli’s Witness, is that the basic nature of the hell-crazed demi-demon of the Outer Darkness makes it very difficult to work with flammable Pamphlets and Newsletters, so I’m mostly having to fall back to the Huge Sword to illuminate the would-be faithful. Often literally.

While the basic nature of gameplay isn’t so different to anything else of our genre, and bugs do indeed still jar on occassion, AoC does look good, if you have a PC with enough oomph to tick all the boxes. It also sounds good too, with a soundtrack that seems to do the world and the setting a fair degree of justice, along with a large selection of suitable concussive fire noises to got with my spells and whatnot.

Here are some holiday snaps:

(Special appearance by the award winning Conan Correspondent from Hat News Now Today! He’s the one with the hat. Its entirely possible there’s a head under there.)

Still to come are jaunts to the Aquillonian and Cimmerian lands, a number of instance dungeons out in the desert, and what ever lies beyond L38, the maximum suggested level for the Province. I’m in no real hurry though; as a kind of online virtual sightseeing tour, (which I tend to view an alarming number of these games as – I probably ought to have and RL holiday soon, before I forget how…), its certainly doing the job for me so far. I’ve no idea how long this sense of wonder will last for, but I’m just taking my time, and enjoying the moment – the sandals on the trail of yet another new world.

Not sure who or what lives in the big black pointy pyramid, but I expect they’re dying to Learn More about The Good News! I must make a point of knocking on the door, preferably when they’re in the middle of Sunday lunch. Professionalism, see?

Bug-O-The-Week: When browsing the Trader (Auction House), sorting items by level does so alphabetically, rather than numerically; i.e: 1, 10, 11, 16, 2, 23, 25, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Very irritating, and a schoolboy error in data handling!

Onward with Age of Conan then! I’m not sure what I was expecting to be honest, and find myself in a somewhat unique position, playing an MMO that I didn’t really choose myself. Oh, certainly, I picked up the box, and plonked down the credit card details, but as noted previous, I’m mostly there to keep in touch with friends.

I’m finding it gives me a strangely detached view on the game itself; neither fanboy, nor hater. My expectations can’t be crushed, or confirmed, simply because I didn’t have any in the first place; I did no research, followed no forums and the first thought I gave to race/class combos, was when presented with the actual character creation screen itself.

I went with Herald of Xotli in the end, mostly due to the sheer preposterousness of the concept; a cloth-wearing wizard type, who gets two-handed swords! Just thinking about it makes me giggle, given the relentless training I’ve had over the years about A Wizard’s Place. That place, generally, is Not On The Front Row, and is one of the reasons I generally avoid caster classes. I like to get stuck in! (Just ask any of the TNC about my propensity for Mesmer tanking, against all common sense!)

After some play, up to 21 so far, I was rather surprised to discover that actually, a hell-crazed mage type set up for close combat is not only fun, but actually works! The Herald is essentially a kind of DPS off-tank assist, in basic game function. They get an awful lot of spells dishing out fire damage, but virtually all of them have to be delivered at sword-point. Those few that don’t require a melee weapon seem to have a very short range anyway, so you can’t just stand at the back and wiggle fingers, even if you wanted to. Its all very hands on, and made even more engaging by the basic nature of AoC’s melee combat, where position and spatial awareness seem more emphasised than in the more standard fare.

They get no armour to speak of, and only a minimal amount of magical defences, so you wouldn’t get away with being main tank for anything major, but then again, this is nothing new to the more traditional Rogue DPS types anyway, and I’m more reminded of that, than any kind of Wizarding I’ve seen in the past. To further drive home this unexpected kind of gameplay, a recent ding gave me ‘Hellstep’, an ability that functions more or less like WoW’s Warrior ‘Charge’; a sudden high speed sprint at the target, taking you right into the fray, only in this case, it also sets me on fire and make me explode on contact! Neat!

I was trying to play it all cold, calculating and mystical, but frankly, the skills and abilities so far positively encourage berserking gameplay. I think I’ve found my niche!

Tortage is good. Seen a lot about how much of a prison it is, but I’m only on my first go through the place, so am not feeling that myself, yet. Only been playing a week, at a fairly usual kind of place, and am already eligible to leave the place if I want, although I have done a lot more group-based Daytime questing than is absolutely necessary. There is indeed a lot of running backward and forth involved in the early questing, which probably does annoy a lot of players, but I’ve never minded long walks in the countryside, and in all fairness, this particular countryside is very well done; detailed, brooding, full of hidden menace.

I’ve also heard a lot about how life beyond Tortage isn’t nearly as well put together or purposeful. I guess I’ll see that for myself soon enough.

Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised on the whole ‘Conan’ thing actually. Indeed, the Conan Mythos is hack’n'slash guts and glory pulp of the trashiest literary order, but I guess there’s a certain guilty pleasure to that. While not being that familiar with it all myself, I’m definitely getting the sense of a real world there, rather than a collection of random Fantasy Adventuring Necessities, plonked down in some arbitrary game-facilitating manner.

On some level, it is just the same old collection of mobile bags of improvement, monster gunk collections and fed-exes, but at another, well… suffice to say that its taking me a lot less effort than usual to sit back, and start to see through the mechanics and catch glimpses of a heroic saga of which I’m some kind of part. Jaded wanderer that I am, I’m surprised to even feel faint twitchings of my long-shrivelled and largely vestigial role-playing gland, and I wonder if perhaps this is a world I can embrace, in which I can maybe even be, rather than play.

There are certainly ‘Conan Moments’, my most memorable so far being the Acheronian Ruins; sinister epic music playing as we cleave and incinerate our way up the massive stone stairs of the cyclopean ruined temple to ancient and dark gods, on our way to combat demonic forces and steal great treasures for glory! An excellently done zone full of majesty, ruin, hectic combat and bikini and/or loin-cloth clad heroes cleaving out individual destinies. Its cheesy, certainly, but well-done cheese, and from my limited familiarly, its supposed to be cheesy. Surprisingly easy to just let go and embrace the cheese!

Mind you, I do rather wish my companions and I had stuck to my own Three Month Rule; there is indeed a fair bit of work to go on the bug front. I don’t know about the wider issues; siege warfare, PvP balance, DPS ‘Women’s Troubles’, etc, but have certainly experienced my own personal troubles in a variety of forms. Bugwatch this week includes:

An almost routine and regular corruption of my Resource database, which means I need to watch a Verification progress bar churn its way through for ten minutes before a session can even start. Apparently, this is optional, but it must be prompting for a reason, surely?

A particularly frustrating bug which causes quest dialogue text to show as black on black, making it impossible to see what you’re replying with. Possibly a memory leak of some kind. I also get grey minimap textures a lot too. The only time I’d ever seen similar symptoms before, was in Second Life, a game that streams everything to you as needed. That uses grey textures as placeholders until it finally receives the texture it needs. Surely AoC isn’t streaming this stuff? What the hell is the 24.7GB install for then, if so?

It might be streaming actually…every now and then, I take a very long time to load a new zone. Took me a while to realise that it was actually patching during zone transitions! I have no idea why they’ve done it like this, only Guild Wars does similar, and it’s sub-patches are far smaller. Why not just wait until next log-in like everyone else? Frustrating, and also seems to cause framerate hell on the other side just afterward. Easier just to log out entirely and come back if that happens.

Then there’s the ‘Lockup for several seconds just after first login’ one. Apparently, a report has been sent in the background. That’s nice. They’ve had at least ten of these from me alone by now…ought to be enough to work out what’s going on, no?

There’s lag spikes, but then few games escape that, so I’m less picky about those. On the plus side, at least they fixed my Missing Hair After Demonform problem, which is just as well. I can be very superficial sometimes, and it was stopping me using what is an otherwise useful skill in company!

Some work to go yet, I think, but it is playable, and when the ‘Conan Moments’ come together, it can be quite easy to forget how bumpy the thing still is. Not sure if I’d recommend it to anyone now, but ought to be a fine game indeed, in a month or two. Since I’m there now anyway, I think I’ll keep at it myself…

Demonstrating my typical innate ability to identify popular trends, and then jump completely the wrong way, (and months late at that!) just when what seems to be most of the MMO-o-Sphere is busy unsubscribing from Age of Conan in disgust, and then writing lengthy posts on how bad it is to warn others, I’ve signed up!

It’s a long story, some of which is to do with a coincidental burn-out and unsubscription of my own, with Tabula Rasa, noted previously. Some of it is to do with my own ongoing psychosis. I think I’m close to inviting a new one of those, by the way; a compulsive necessity to play every MMO and see every made up MMO world. (Yet to come up with a snappy name for it, but do chip in below; [Something]omania.)

Some of it is pure curiosity; its not that I don’t believe all these other blogfolk, you understand, but many of the observations are couched in such witty ways (Inadvertently, or on purpose), that I start to feel I’m missing out on the joke somewhat, without the underlying common frame of reference.

Some of it is just that I now only have two MMOs on the go, and need something to fill my time. I mean I’ve always got that Cure for Cancer on the back-burner, of course, but…meh…

Mostly though, its to do with a very fundamental reason, which I’ll come to in a moment.

First, some first impressions, as I only get to do these once! Here’s a peek inside the nebulous ramshackle greyness that makes up my subconscious, raw and unedited:

• Why can’t I pick DirectX10? I bought this graphics card and a Vista PC specifically for that!
• Patchey patchey patchey patchey…I hear they’re down to one a week now! Practically polished!
• Why do I have to press escape six times to reach the login screen?
• The choice of skin tone is hard to see in the shifting moody lighting of this slave galley.
• Its a cloth caster class, that gets massive two-handed swords! That can’t possibly work. That’s the one for me!
• This business with the shields and arrows is neat, but god knows how I’m going to micromanage my own shields. Best just set them to One Each and hope for the best!
• Spectacular Jungle.
• Demons? I’m only level four!
• Awesome! I’m sometimes a Demon too! Hot Demon on Demon Action!
• Nobody look at me when Demon form ends! Not until I’ve swapped a hat on and off anyway… my hair is gone!
• Woah…hello lag, my old friend…
• Friendslist sorted – I know I can’t beat them to the city; they’ve played before. But I can win the Pict Nosebone Challenge!
• Just how abusive can I be in these quest chats without actually failing them?
• Civilisation at last!
• Level 6 – still no two handed edged weapon drop. Fear The Oar of DOOM!
• Pict Nosebone Challenge was a draw. I’ll get you next time!
• This is ridiculous. I’m a messenger of demonic outer darkness, or something, and now wielding a Pickaxe of DOOM!
• Whaaaaaat!? You can’t call it that, even if it is a whorehouse!
• Must look into timeshare villa opportunities in White Sands. Magnificent design.
• Different world, same quotas of monster gunk required.
• Outstanding! Dance Combos!
• Crazy. There’s more bags of unlooted treasure here than there are monsters! And just where do I buy more bags?
• Just seen a practical demonstration of why one should be very careful at the top of a climbing wall. Nice splat!
• Groupwork a bit confusing. Am I a tank or a nuker?
• Dead again. I’m glad they’re so patient with noobs.
• Getting the hang of groups now. Herald of Xanadu seems to be best as ‘off-tank’ of sorts, up close, but not aggro.
• Argh! Why….won’t…the…snakes….stop…spawning! Tied of these mother*%*&£ing snakes in this mother*^%&ing garden!
• Wish the textures would make their resolution mind up.
• At last! A two handed scimitar, that’s bigger than I am!
• Hmm. Another two handed scimitar. I have no idea what any of these stats mean.
• Ewww! Bloodspaltter on the screen! Neat! Fear the Huge Scimitar of DOOM!
• Interesting. I’ve had this party-wide buff for the last half hour without noticing it. How to tell the rest of the group?
• Ah, I recognise this vast array of unknown skills I have to allocate hundreds of points into, permanently, without the faintest clue what I’m doing. This’ll be a Funcom game then, yes?
• Hey! It’s the WoW Talent Trees! Click randomly until the points have all gone away ftw!
• I hope there are respecs.
• My character seems to get an inappropriate amount of sexual pleasure from Picking Up Objects. Need to keep an eye on that. Could be trouble later on.
• I see that none of us rolled a Healer, AGAIN…
• Apparently, the work-around for the ‘Falling through bridges and stairs’ bug, is to relog. Not impressed.
• Terribly impressed! Logged out, forced to patch, gone for several minutes, and I’m still in the group when I get back. Gold star! Wish Tabula Rasa did that. AoC also has Mentoring, another other reason I dumped TR.
• The others have gone to bed. Lightweights. Time to try this nighttime solo stuff…

All in all, a rather hectic and confusing few hours, but I must admit, I’ve come to miss that; the utter bewilderment of one’s first steps in a new MMO. Its mitigated a bit in my case; I’ve played so many, and many of the basics are quite similar in all MMOs.

Overall, it didn’t send me away screaming, so I’ll give it a go, and see again at the end of the freebie month. Quite liking it so far though, although I’m cynical enough to recognise a Honeymoon Period when I experience one. Mind you, its nice to have one to experience at all, whatever horrors may lie ahead in the coming weeks and months.

Regular readers may know that I have occasionally dabbled in the “MMORPG” once or twice in the past, so I am quite aware of many of the things that seem to be provoking so much interweb outrage over the title at present, and perhaps in other circumstances, I might have just walked on by, grabbed LOTRO or Vanguard instead perhaps, but this time its different. The principle of the earlier reasons for me flaunting the advice of the internet, and perhaps even my own better judgement, is that within minutes of even starting into the jungle after the shipwreck, I was sharing my experiences with existing friends. We’re playing it together. The good, the bad and the ugly; I’ve got friends to celebrate and/or grumble about it with, and that makes up for a great many cold and mechanical game design and implementation sins. We may indeed, all decide that its rubbish at some point and leave for pastures new, or all settle in for the long haul.

It’s such an obvious realisation, I suppose, but for me, a great deal of my MMO life has been conducted alone and in solitude. With the ongoing Tuesday N00b Club in Guild Wars, I’m starting to painfully unlearn those harsh lessons I was taught on Rallos Zek, all those years ago, which were then reinforced by my own continual and repeated severing of all ties within a game I’ve gotten bored of.

So when one of that aforementioned N00b Club, the same duoing companion who’d stuck by me and humoured me so long in Tabula Rasa, recommended AoC, I felt it was only fair to return the favour. Another of that illustrious company then made the sacrifice of starting a newbie alt on our server so they could come along on the journey too.

That is the real reason I’m playing AoC now – because my friend asked me to; nothing more high-brow, academic or calculating than that. If the game itself turns out to be fun and enjoyable in its own right, that’ll be a bonus too! And if its not, well, it’s all material for the blog…