Its 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!