Aug 22 2008
Age of Conan is a hot mess - my review.
As I noted in one of the comments, I have also taken a few writing jobs elsewhere. Occasionally I will link to the articles here and then open things up for discussion. I recently had a 4 part review of Age of Conan published , and I am not spoiling much to tell you the review is far from positive. In fact, I’d say my review is downright savage, but that’s hardly my fault. Age of Conan is a disaster of almost epic proportions. Bloated, inefficient code (32 gig install, and it runs poorly even at recommended specs), terrible design choices (the much hyped combo system is a wreck), bugs, and missing features are just a few of the problems. In my review, I did not even have time to address the weak PvP or the rampant sexism.
A few choice selections to pique your interest. On the system performance :
I tested this game on three different machines: one far above recommended specs, one right at recommended, and one somewhere between minimum and recommended. The top machine ran the game passably, but still had long load times and frequent framerate drops. But on all the other machines performance was atrocious. In major cities the FPS monitor literally dropped to SPF (Seconds Per Frame). That is not hyperbole - that is fact. Before Age of Conan, the only place I had heard of SPF was on sunscreen.
A snippet about combat - specifically the utter failure that is the AoC combo system :
4) If you are moving at any time during the completion of the combo, the combo fails. Yes, that is right. This is a melee combo system that forces you to stand still. It is like having a long, interactive casting time that has to be maintained with additional keypresses. It also makes kiting a melee player extremely easy for ranged attackers.
A bit about healing and support:
For some reason, the Age of Conan developers seem to think nobody wants to actually play a healing or support character. They seem to think everyone wants to deal damage and kill things. The complete and utter failure to acknowledge two major types of gameplay is absolutely mind boggling. If you like healing or support, you really should avoid this game completely.
Then I move on to a variety of other general areas of gameplay , like questing, guilds, role playing (lol), and loot:
If you like your questing to involve absolutely zero thought or effort, then you will love this system. If you fondly remember a day when quests in games required the firing of at least two synapses, you will find this system an abomination.
ROLE PLAYING
None. Next!
Finally, I summarize things , try to point out a few positives (the hardest part of writing the review) and give a score.
Age of Conan is not the worst MMORPG I have ever played, it is just a very bad one. I would expect a lot more from a modern MMORPG developed by a company that actually has MMORPG experience.
Please click on the links and read the whole review. Then feel free to share your own opinions of Age of Conan here, or tell me where I went wrong (or right).
Ouch. I just read some pretty brutal news about Age of Conan:
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http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19867
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They tried to put a positive spin on the news:
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Um… you lost 385,000 customers, or half your customer base, in the first 2 months.
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Stockholders are apparently not fooled by the marketing speak and can see the writing on the wall. Funcom’s stock price was $54 in May (before AoC’s release), and has fallen all the way to $14.70.
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Apparently Funcom has since stated it will no longer release subscription numbers “for marketing reasons.” LOL
I will say this first of all: I have not played AoC. I do not have enough computer to do so, but from what I have heard, even that seems not to be enough to enjoy it.
However, I figured as much from AoC. While ambitious, Funcom did not sit and work on developing a game that could contend with the current champ, WoW, much less excel in any of its hyped features. My prediction will be that WAR will suffer from the same (the news of cutting 4 major cities worth of content and several classes bolsters this). In all honesty, unless a company is willing to invest the time, money and risk in creating a successful product, they should not really waste their time in competing with WoW (last I read, an estimate was somewhere of several hundred million dollars to make an mmo on par with WoW. Wish I had the article =< ).
In my opinion, up and coming mmo’s should work towards the same relative success that Eve Online has. Sure, space sim combat is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the game is almost purely PVP, has a well done economy and is small enough so that the company can actually take a larger role in driving the story along with game events. Eve was not looking to beat WoW, just do well in their niche and from my experience in the game, I feel they have.
P.S. I am not sure what you mean by sexism, but I understand that original Conan was set in a savage world where sexism reigned. Were you referring to some aspect of the game in particular?
I don’t understand why people even try to out-WoW WoW. Just let WoW burn itself out, and then those 10 million subscribers will scatter to the games out there.
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Anyone else making a game in the MMO industry should be looking to make something new and different. There are millions of people out there willing to try something different from WoW. A little variety would be a very nice thing.
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Regarding the Sexism: I’ll give a few examples.
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1) In the very first newbie quest you rescue a scantily clad chick that is tied up. While saving her, she makes frequent promises to pleasure you afterward in thanks for your heroic deeds. This is an instanced, solo quest.
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After I did it, I walked over to my wife’s PC to watch her to it and see how good of a job they did creating a studly beefcake guy for her to rescue. Nope. She got the same chick. And the chick makes the same sexual innuendos and promises.
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2) Throughout the game, any female quest NPC that makes sexual promises or hints does the same thing to female characters as well. Basically, if your character is female, you are assumed to be a lesbian. Oh wait, male NPCs will make flirty comments to you that they don’t make to female ones, so I guess you’re assumed to be bi - and hypersexed.
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3) The female characters can take off all their clothes and walk around with their tits flopping in the breeze. Male characters can’t drop their pants and dangle their franks and beans.
I’ve been totally unimpressed by AoC. The technical specs are requirements alone just make it unplayable. I was sent a buddy key and I thought I’d try it out. However, when it came time to download the client for the buddy key trial — Funcom wanted to charge me for the download. I’m not kidding.
I stopped right there. I didn’t even redeem the buddy key.
I’m not surprised more than half their subs quit in the first month. I imagine if they could datamine they would find out that is the approximate number of people who found the game unplayable. I’m enormously disappointed in Funcom and I will be extremely leery of any future offerings from that company.
Sentinel
http://www.forgottenlegion.net
I was asked somewhere to explain what I mean by things looking brown and dull. This was my brief explanation:
And yeah Sentinel, I’ve read funny things about the trial on the net. Stuff like: “Free Trial - Just $2.99!“
I’m going to dispute a bit of what you said, though I agree with some of the rest of your conclusions.
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When you state that crafted gear is garbage in comparison to the other gear in the game, you are WAY off. Crafted gear is blatantly better than every other piece of gear in the game. Every serious pvper uses a full crafted set. Alot of raiders use it as well. Crafted gear is, in fact, so ridiculously overpowered that they are nerfing it’s stats by 95% in the next patch(I’ll get back to this later in my post).
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As far as performance goes, I do surprisingly well on my laptop. I suspect that the key is I’m running Vista 64 with 4 gig of ram. The game has only ever crashed on me once, and the performance has been pretty reasonable in most situations. Spell effects can be problematic, especially in large group fights(ie 40 players or more). I agree that having spell effects tied in with other graphical effects on the same setting is a terrible idea.
As far as sexism goes, a certain amount of it was to be expected, given the source material. The female character experience is pretty horrid overall though. You’re assumed to be a lesbian basically, as you mentioned. Also, at launch and for about 2 months after, female characters attacked more slowly than male ones. Quite frankly, I wonder if anybody at Funcom ever played a female character at all. I can only imagine what female players think of playing this game. Whenever the female attack speed issue came up on the forums, there was a horde of people claiming it was justified because females are weaker in real life. This went basically unmoderated.
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Overall, I think Funcom is pretty incompetent. I think the good parts of the game were basically luck. Every change they make to the game is drastically overdone. For example, the female attack speed issue mentioned above. Their fix came in two stages. First they slowed both male and female characters drastically(original dagger speed was 1.2 male, 1.4 female, they nerfed both to 2.0 which was slower than 2 handed speed!). This only heightened the sexist bitching on the forums(which still went unmoderated). Then, weeks later, they put both back to male speed(1.2). Now they are nerfing crafted items by 95%, intending to buff them back up to a more appropriate level later on.
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I think the main thing keeping me there at this point is the free for all pvp. It really seems to be hard to find that in a modern mmo of decent quality. All of the other ones I’ve played in recent years have had “sides”, which I consider to be a drawback. I do get a kick out of the fatalities, and there is a decent amount of depth to the combat, compared to other mmos. Another thing I liked about it is that crafted gear is the best gear in the game. All you need to get crafted gear is money, and I’m good at making money. I had myself fully equipped in crafted gear by level 75, so I wasn’t stuck on the item grind treadmill.
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While I’m feeling a bit negative on the game right at this second, I’ve had fun with it over the last couple months, and would definitely rate it higher than you did.
I agree with everyone about games trying to compete with WoW. It almost turns my stomach when I see “OMG THE WOW KILLER!!” Ugh.
Don’t get me wrong, competition is great, ultimately it only delivers stronger products to the consumer, but emulation is a wretched blemish on the gaming front, and too often it leads to features that feel ‘tacked on.’
Age of Conan sucks. I did pay for the buddy key (huge Howard fan), and I was extremely disappointed. I have a pretty high-end machine (which I use primarily for text based MUDs), and I had more than a few issues with that game. I called AlienWare support, to see if they had any setup tips, and those guys were having framerate issues as well. That’s when I gave up, and put AoC down as a failure.
I’m probably a bit unique in that AoC is the -only- graphical MMO I’ve played. I grew up on MUDs and still love them, but the graphical ones always seemed sort of lame by comparison. I’d watch friends play, but never felt the pull to try one. Conan seemed different, and I figured it was about time I gave one of those newfangled moving picture games a shot.
At first I was really impressed; I thought most of the Tortage experience was well done. It seemed like the game had a decent storyline, and was definitely doable solo. I don’t usually play games for too long at a clip, so group expeditions are rare for me. Once I got out of Tortage and into the ‘real game’ though, I started to sour on it. Quests seemed to have less of a point, and not much more character than plowing through monsters. When a game stops being fun and starts feeling like work, I generally set it aside. What’s worse, the ‘goal’ of the work didn’t seem appealing to me at all. Siege PvP and raiding? Ick.
I may try another graphical MMO eventually, but AoC reinforced my preconception that I should stick with text or single-player games. Boo.
As mentioned in another comment somewhere I am one of those who bought AoC.
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The Good
To be honest I actually liked the Tortage experience as well. For people who haven’t played Torgage is a newbie area level 1-20 that is meant for solo.
I also liked the huge amount of NPC’s who actually speak instead of just having a text to read. This was cut drastically down after Tortage and even though they wrote at a time that they would add more in patches it is still lacking now.
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The Bad
My computer is right on spec and most people would state it as unplayable. The framerate and the load experience is horrible. I could wait more than a minute for a quest NPC to load so I could talk with him.
What killed the game for me is the experience that the game is hardly out of Alpha stage. They make drastic changes back and forth and huge areas are missing or done very poorly.
I don’t know if the game would have caught me if they had another year to get their act together but the Alpha feel is so heavy on the game that it is hard to get a real impression of anything.
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FunCom
I played the Anarchy Online beta which was the last MMO from FunCom. I didn’t buy the game though because at release time the game was so insanely bugged. If I recall correctly Anarchy Online had started our as a 2D game and at some point they started over as a 3D game. I got into beta rather late but was active in their community and the amount of changes they made during the beta was mind boggling.
I didn’t read anything about AoC beforehand, but when several of my friends bought it I bought it as well. What a waste of money.
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Making an other WoW
WoW did not invent much new. They took things from the other games that seemed to work and made a success on this. Surely it will take something amazing to take those people away from WoW, but in a few years I am sure there will come a new MMO that work somewhat like WoW but with some small twist that make people switch.
First I’d like to thank you for an honest and thorough review. I’ve not played AoC, but I have followed the development from afar for a while now. As soon as people started hyping it as blood, boobs, and super-high graphics I could feel the oncoming failure and letdown. To be honest I feel sorry for many people I’ve talked to leading up to AoC’s release who quit the game they’d been enjoying for months or years and then dropped a few thousand on a new system for this game.
Outsider: Up to level 50, crafted gear was all crap. If it is better at the high end, that’s nice but unfortunately I never got to see that.
Funcom: Looks like universal agreement on the suckitude of Failcom. Someone actually registered that domain name and pointed it to funcom. That’s hilarious.
The more I look, the more it seems that AoC, WAR and other emulators are feature and gimmick driven games that hope to capitalize on WoW’s weaker points. All this does is overhype the game as a whole, setting up the game for intense backlash when it does not deliver wildly on the features and gimmicks. In the end, they under-deliver on these features and without their strength, the rest of the game appears weak and impotent, causing an exodus. This happened in other games such as Star Wars Galaxies and now, AoC.
I think what we are going to see is several games looking to emulate the success of WoW without actually doing what Blizzard did to attain this success. Blizzard is a strong company with a history of well made games, albeit long in releasing said games. I think what they did was create an okay game which was hugely accessible. Once they got on their feet they looked at making the game more refined. This is apparent from pre-BC to BC and is even more so in Wrath. For this reason, I think WoW is here to stay for quite a while longer. I can only imagine the leaps they will make on their unnamed next-gen MMO project.
Amunekaten: I think you are on to something. I think it is very likely that what we will have to see is 4 or 5 grisly failures from would-be WoW Killers before people realize it is time to break the mold.
After that, the industry will get very interesting as people make smaller, more unique games that will cater to 10,000 to 100,000 people (more Eve Online style). People love Eve. It isn’t my thing, but the 30,000 or so who play it feel it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Oh, more on Age of Conan. Things are looking VERY grim. The CEO of Funcom just dumped a ton of stock and their stock price is plumetting. I wrote an article about it here that you all might find interesting:
Bad News for Age of Conan Fans: CEO dumps Funcom Stock
Although I really had no intention of purchasing this before, now I definitely don’t. I’m not sure at what point down the line that games became so graphics intensive that people need the most flipped-out systems to even be able to play them, but that was the time that I stopped buying very many games. Is this really what so many people want? I’d much rather the graphics be limited and gamespeed be greatly enhanced, but maybe I’m just a leftover from another generation.
Yeah, I’ve been saying for a while that the better approach is just to make “niche” games rather than trying to compete with WoW. Nobody is likely to be able to do it within the near future. Unless SOE suddenly becomes competent, there’s nobody with the development experience and budget neccessary to compete with WoW.
kalilea: I agree. I do enjoy nice graphics on a graphical game, but I don’t understand why someone would slit their own throat and massively limit their customer base with denial of entry level minimum specs. This is one of the many reasons console games are eating PC gaming’s lunch.
Outsider: Yup. I hope the industry will see the light on that. if it does, we could get a lot of fun, unique games in the future. Like Primordiax!
What killed it for me was the instancing and loading screens. It was just so annoying.
I didn’t play AoC; I was waiting for the buzz. When it was released, I was hard pressed to find a positive comment. So I was saved from having to play and quit (or pay and quit).
@Amunekaten: I agree with you on everything. Blizzard “seems” to have a conscience. Thus far they haven’t released a game that felt rushed or crappy. Even if you didn’t like it you would have to admit it’s polished and playtested. When I was in the WoW beta, I was really impressed with how complete the game was, much more so than any other game that I’ve played at release, even to this day. An MMO was brand new to Blizzard and they basically took EQ and tried to refine it, imo. But they didn’t rush it out the door either, it was in development for years and came out pretty great, needing some major patches, but still working for all classes and all features. I think they hired some EQ people at the time to help them out and ended up with 40 man raiding, and lots of it (Blech!). Then with BC they had already realized that hardly anoyne can do the 40 man stuff, it’s near impossible to get 40 people together that don’t hate each other
So hopefully WoW 2.0 as people call it, will be nothing like WoW. It might be, but after the years of experience in development and player feedback I hope it’s something unique since they can afford it to be. That and they still have WoW.
I played the WAR preview weekend and I think Amunekaten touched on something here. It is about something WoW doesn’t do well which is meaningful PvP. But I would at least give Mythic some credit since DAoC came out before WoW and still had that PvP element. It’s not going to appeal to most WoW players because I don’t think it’s nearly as accessible and it isn’t about the same gear grind (raiding). I love the RvR though, and I’ve pre-ordered and will probably put some time in before Wrath drops. The game is lacking a lot of polish, but I play WoW and they’ve had 4 years of polish time. The combat is what throws most people since the Global Cooldown is slower. But getting used to it wasn’t all that difficult.
Blizzard is indeed an amazing gaming company. My only gripe with them as a company is the fact that they are barely investing any of their WoW income back into the game. They pump out a new raid dungeon every few months, a trickle of non-raid content, and that is it. I have said it many times, but the lack of player housing, mini games, and other features that were standard in older MMORPGs really annoys me. It just makes me feel like they don’t care enough to reinvest in their own game.
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But back to AoC, they tried to kill WoW but did everything worse than WoW. I don’t know how they figured they could put a long term dent in WoW when AoC has no USP (Unique Selling Point) at all.
Isn’t it the first high profile MMO to try to bank on boobs, blood and an otherwise puerile “mature” bit of content? *resists urge to rant on ESRB misnomers* Perhaps they thought that such tripe was enough of a hook for GTA to do well, so why not make it even bigger and better with an IP oversaturated with the stuff and the addictive nature of a grindy MMO? Throw in some bleeding edge hardware requirements, and hey, you’re poised to take the lead for the next MMO generation! (Too much marketspeak?)
…yeah, I consigned the game to my “utter trash” list, without even trying to play it. I’m grumpy that way. I’m allergic to marketspeak and dumb ideas.
I actually wish there were more Mature games. My company makes MMORPGs for the 18+ crowd, and I find it to be a very fulfilling marketplace.
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The problems with AoC had little to do with the boobs and the blood. The fatalities and the few sexy parts were actually some of the rare highlights.
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They just ruined it with about 5000 other problems.
The closest thing they had to a unique selling point was free for all hardcore pvp. Unfortunately for them, the “hardcore” pvp crowd is notorious for never being satisfied and jumping into every new pvp game that comes up, only to start bitching about it a few weeks later and quit for the next one.
Cam,
I’m really no fan of 18+ content, but I’ll concede that there’s a market for it. Thing is, that market isn’t the mainstream MMO market. Even the GTA market doesn’t work as an indicator for how an MMO might work; GTA is all about freedom and screwing around in the world, but that doesn’t translate to the bounded experience of an MMO.
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Perhaps an MMO will bank on freedom someday, but as you note, a buggy mess that AoC turned out to be isn’t going to make inroads in that direction.
Tesh, I did a poor job of explaining. While my company’s games are 18+, they are not adult content. I’ll use our game Threshold as an example. It is a text mud that is role play required. The reason it is 18+ is so people know (to some degree) that they are role playing with other adults. They also don’t have to worry about occasional use of profanity, sexual innuendos that occur naturally in conversation, etc. While it is true that some folks engage in racy behavior, that is not the design of the game by any means.
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The 18+ thing is mainly there so adult gamers can game with other adults. The game itself is a high fantasy, medieval role playing game where the focus is on religion, politics, etc. It is not “adult content” by any means.
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AoC, however, seemed to use its mature label as a way to be sophomoric and immature. I am fine with boobies, but the fact that male characters couldn’t be naked kinda annoyed me. It made the nudity factor seem a little more porn-like and a lot less “freedom” oriented. The fact that so many female NPCs were sexually foward no matter what your gender just added to this.
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Outsider: I think you are right about the hardcore PvP crowd. That is not a good crowd to court, as they are extremely critical, quixotic, and will rapidly turn into trolls and flamers. Also, far too many of them mostly get their kicks from ganking. So when the playing field becomes more level, they get upset.
Cam,
I think it’s a fundamental linguistic problem. I’ll probably write about it at length on my blog someday, but the gist of the trouble I see is that the ESRB isn’t using the word “mature” correctly. The things that “earn” an M rating are typically immature, puerile, gutter muck.
I long for truly “mature” game content. Y’know, stuff that makes you think, or that shows real consequences for actions. Game communities that as a whole, mute the inevitable nits that come in with leetspeak, profanity or lewdness. Maturity is getting past all that stupid teenager crap.
…so yeah, I’m all for truly mature gaming. What the industry laughingly calls “mature” or “adult” is just so much trash. So yeah, I guess I agree with you more than I thought. Good to know!
Exactly. For us, the 18+ rule is not a license to have tawdry harlots offering sex on every street corner. It means we don’t have to worry about kids being traumatized by whatever situation might arise.
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One of the major quests in Threshold involves some pretty depressing betrayals amongst family members. I like to think it is somewhat Shakespearean in its tragic nature. It might be somewhat of a shock to a kid who happened upon the quest.
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I should mention that when I refer to a quest in Threshold, I mean something that might take you weeks or months to solve… or even years. Our quests have no monetary, gear, or exp rewards. You work on them for the pure joy of solving them and unraveling the story. I know that sounds crazy in this day and age.
I agree with the notion that AoC is a very bad game, but I would like to point out (if it hasn’t been done yet) that it is and never was true that you cannot move while doing combos.
You cannot move during the COMPLETION of the combo (the final move). I am relatively certain that is what I wrote in the review. There is really no excuse for a melee combo system that requires standing still at any point in the combo. This is especially true once you factor in PvP, but it means it is far too easy to get out of melee range when someone is in the last step of the combo.
I’ fairly new to MMO’s, only picking up a buddy key to WoW in early 07, but I think I’ve got quite a good picture of why they are and aren’t successful.
In really simple terms, WoW is just a good game. Reasonably intuitive, pleasing graphics although not hi-tech, fun classes and character development and…fun. Not without flaws, but to sustain such a client base over the period of time that they have done really is an impressive feat.
I picked up AoC about a week after UK release and as others have said, reasonably enjoyed the tortage experience. However, my one and only character is still level 20 two months later, out of tortage it just wasn’t fun, never mind finished. So in total I played for 4 days and haven’t logged in since, and a brief scan of the forums makes this decision seem wise indeed. £30 wasted or 60 days salvaged?
I have already pre-ordered WAR. I am concerned it too will not be finished upon release, such is the financial pressure to start returning the development costs, pressure which blizzard didn’t really have at the time of developing WoW. But I will give it a fair shot and I really hope it will hold its own.
Surely WoW will die at some point, all games do, right? But at the moment can anyone really see a 9million or so strong playerbase abandoning it? I think They just reinforce their position with time, more players, more time invested not wanting to be wasted - a lot of people view their WoW characters as assets.