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Age of Conan Expansion Coming In 2009
At the recent Leipzig Games Conference, Funcom developers announced that the first expansion to Age of Conan is planned for a 2009 release. Details about the expansion are sparse, but a significant amount of new areas appear to be in development for that and a free upcoming content patch. Massively points out a video which showcases some of the new content. 1Up has a piece of concept art for the expansion.
Currently LOTRO appears to be the best fantasy themed MMO out there if you're looking for content. They went live in 2007 and had _7_ major content dumps called 'books' while a major expansion is launching this fall. I'd say that sets the industry standard.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
Most people who I know play it are not satisfied with the content, so instead of announcing an expansion they should focus on finishing what is already out. With this announcement, I bet a lot of people are going to decide not to resubscribe and just wait for the expansion.
As if WoW was any better when it launched.
Not really, but then most people remember everything in rosecolored hindsight. AoC is a mediocre MMO, but then all MMOs have been mediocre, at best, when they launched. The main problem with this one being how much further it takes WoW's annoying obsession with being Singleplayer Online. Stability is fine, performance is fine, some crap bugs with the more advanced stuff but they're mostly fixed as far as patch notes go. But it's still just an Online Singleplayer, and I quit before I even made it to lvl 80. Maybe the next game will have reasons to play with a team of players instead of running around alone. With WoW's success in this area though, I don't hold much hope. *goes back to Anarchy Online*
I'm pretty sure WoW had both functional base stats and an entertaining leveling experience past 20.
Some people may disagree that leveling is entertaining, but even given that, it had a functional and complete experience.
From the Alliance side you had foreshadowing of what would amount to be the uncovering of Onyxia, a rather large dragon, who had ensnared the minds of the leaders of the human capital city of Stormwind. Over a rather... "long" quest chain covering quite a bit of the in-game world, the player was then able to become attuned with the area surrounding Onyxia's Lair, and eventually defeat her in combat.
AoC had (has?) neither functional base stats nor any really functional/remotely entertaining leveling experience past... 20.
Soooo..... you were saying?
Having seen 1st hand the release of every major MMORPG since EQ1 I have no qualms in saying it was much better at release. There's no rosey colored hindsight required for AoC.
Functioning stats, didn't really matter too much. Stamina and Mana were affected fine. It was str/agi whatever that was fubared. As a lvl 70 or so soldier it buffed my damage by about 2 dps (from 98 to 100), so not really something that was making or breaking anything. An enjoyable level experience? I would say that that is highly subjective, but if a highly enjoyable leveling experience is what WoW had at launch, then AoC does trump it heavily. There were loads of quests for each of the 3 races, and grinding wasn't required at all till around lvl 60 if you just ran around and did quests and killing mobs that got in your way doing that. Indeed, AoC also has a whole "singleplayer" questline that follows you from lvl 1 to lvl 80 in your quest to defeat Toth Amon, setting the stage for the final raidboss in the game. I can't really see much of a difference here, other than AoC's character-centric quest line being better done. So, take off the rose colored glasses. WoW wasn't better when it launched.
It was later. At launch, everything was fine. The problem was scaling, and you can't entirely blame them. See Blizzard looked at EQ's peak numbers and figured "well we can't do any better than that." Made sense. EQ was the first real big MMO, and there was now competition. None of the other MMOs before WoW had beaten EQs peak. So Blizzard figured they'd do no better. Well, they were wrong. Suddenly people bought up every available copy and they had more and more players coming in. THAT was when the problems started. Their hardware simply couldn't handle the load. Once they got that straightened out, it has gone pretty well since.
While their beginning was not without problems, it was a lot smoother than AoC. Goes double since what WoW had mostly was technical problems. The game itself was sound. Good design, lots of stuff to do, etc. That's one of the reasons why they started having the problem of too many people playing. Their game was done so well that people started rushing to it. They not only got lots of players from other MMOs, they got people who didn't do MMOs before.
WoW had hour long server queues, several days worth of server downtime, lag, instability, exploits left and right. I have seen just as many MMO launches and AoC is in the upper part when it comes to the stability part. There have been no server queues, there have been no extreme server downtimes outside what was scheduled for patching and the client doesn't crash every 5 minutes. What is wrong with AoC is mainly that it's a singleplayer game set online and that it's target audience is the casual player. It's been live now for almost 3 months and the majority of the problems are apparently fixed. What remains is the redesign of teamcontent. Extremely disappointing from my point of view that the team experience is what was left out of the game, but then, the casual player has no time for team-work.
I am both a former WoW and AOC player. I got to level 71 in AOC before I finally called it quits; most of my friends quit a week or two before I did.
The game had a lot of potential, and the hype led me to buy it before I had read the reviews. But the potential to be good is not the same as *actually* being good.
AOC was riddled with bugs and was largely incomplete. Almost every aspect of the game had something wrong with it -- there were zones that were entirely broken (e.g., the Pyramid), character talents that didn't work, and hardware compatibility issues. The crafting, gathering, and siege systems were also largely non-functional, and I'm not sure if gear stats actually did anything.
There were other, more fundamental problems with the game, for me. For example, the zoning system (and load screens) really detracted from the "grandiose" feel. The look of the earlier levels felt fresh & innovative, but the end game was dreary and ill-conceived -- just about every zone from the Field of the Dead onward involved snowy, ice-covered mountains populated by angry humans, serpents, cavemen, and bears.
AOC lacked a certain "magical" feel that WoW had engendered in me. Leveling in WoW was about starting in a tiny corner of a huge world, and over time, coming to realize just how enormous the game world was -- how many different types of landscapes, enemies, and hidden "gems" there were. AOC, on the other hand, felt small -- by level 50, I had visited every outdoor zone, and apart from the aforementioned creature types, there just wasn't that much variety. Sure, it may be true to Howard's lore, but it felt boring nonetheless.
The zones and character design did little to encourage any "emotion" while playing -- while WoW's Duskwood felt "creepy" and Ashenvale felt "alive", AOC simply just ... was. Play-wise, I was never concerned about being ganked by a human player or accidentally running into a mob that was too potent (for my level-appropriate zone) because I was almost always able to run away, even when attacked by characters 10 levels higher. Against same-level mobs, I almost never ran out of mana, and found myself grinding enemies in groups of 6 at a time. The most amusement that I had stemmed from figuring out how many critters I could pull at once without dying.
While it may have been a "smooth" launch for an MMO, it availed itself to be an unpolished, largely unfinished game. I don't like the idea of paying to beta-test other people's software, and found the game to be fairly disappointing.
I won't be partaking in AOC's "ongoing beta", and I doubt that their expansion will be any better. But I may consider WoW's next expansion -- if anything, my experience with AOC has taught me just how well Blizzard play-tests its games.
Read and understand. It helps. I was talking about Age of Conan. Teaming being annoying? Yes, the current itteration of quests in online games is stupid. It's just a singleplayer game inside the online game, making the idea of teaming up intrusive, interrupting your own lvling, making everything less effective. Think about something other than WoW and it's retarded online singleplayer game, maybe try playing one of the few remaining games where teaming is not worse than being solo and you might change your mood. The reason that you play an MMO is to play with other people in some way or other. Making the game's design inhibit this is just puzzling.
Your three bitches about the WoW launch are :
- servers were down regularly (Too true, they weren't prepared for the playerbase they created. MUDs, EQ, UO, and Meridian69 never had anything close to the rush that WoW experienced.)
- queues (Same as above. But the flaw in your argument is that AoC had queues as well. I was on a mid/high pop server and the first two weeks saw me hitting a queue most evenings.)
- the capability for solo play (I solo'd my fixer in AO. I've soloed in WoW. But until BC, the only reliable and consistent way to get good equipment was go do group instances or be in a decent raid guild.)
Basically every post you have put up boils down to one thing.... You detest solo play. Since a couple of games out there (EQ, AO, EVE come to mind) cater specifically to team gameplay, they are the only decent MMO games on the market. Since Funcom created AO, AoC should be defended.
You constantly accuse others of donning rose colored glasses...how about you drop the myopic view and accept that your personal tastes for team-only play is in the minority for gamers. Judging by subscription numbers and purchases, gamers as a whole like the ability to choose both solo and teamplay within the same game.
Holy smokes! You have GOT to be kidding me.
I was in the closed beta of WoW, and I was in the closed beta for AoC. There was a HUGE difference in the feelings both communities had.
In WoW, everyone was stoked about the upcomming release. There were very few bugs, and the only major outstanding issue was that Paladins didn't get a fix to their ability tree until 2 weeks before launch, so it wasn't tested properly. They really needed help at launch. Otherwise, everyone in the CB was glowing with enthusiasm.
In AoC, the fanbois were excited for launch, but everyone else that was able to take a hard look at the game saw that it was deeply flawed. No tradeskilling until level 40? Too much travel with few speedy travel options? Monotonous encouters? Yep, got them covered.
AoC wasn't ready to be launched, as just about every MMO since WoW has come out has suffered through. The big-wigs upstairs know that players will pay for the continuing development of games, so why not get revenue to offset the fixing of bugs and design flaws? So, the rush a game to retail, knowing that a large group of lemmings will pay the initial cost plus a fee to play a beta product.
It's become the norm, not the exception.
As someone else pointed out, most of WoW's flaws were hardware and network infrastructure, not the actual game itself. The game was pretty, functioned on a low level system, and was damn fun to play.
AoC was never that fun to play, bugged out the ass, and required a more powerful system to run, without ever getting DX10 supported. (Even though the box touts it.)
I would call you quite wrong here. First, Anarchy Online, this game has a more extensive fast travel system than any other game I've ever played. You can travel to almost any anchorpoint anywhere in the game world in less than a minute. But the game isn't about running around alone, it's about teamwork, so the community people created grew strong.
What ruined a lot of AO was the inclusion of community controlled raidgroups, that took everyone from everywhere and raided everything. As there is no limit on how many you can bring in a zone in AO. This caused guilds to become useless, as previously you would need your contacts in order and your guild to be strong in order for you to prosper in the world. With the major basis point for guilds disappearing due to public wellfare, everyone turned into lazy solo-focused idiots rather than focusing on community, despite being fed by the community.
Guilds swapping game is understandable. You want to play with your friends from the guild, but hey, if you don't think you want to go where they go then why go? You should have no problem finding new friends in the MMO world you're in if you're not a complete ass.
WoW's gameplay style, the solo-questing, is what's breaking MMOs apart and reducing the community to elite groups that start out complete and only let others in. It's not because of fast travel or guilds.
That's one of the things i like about EVE online, people are almost driven together. Especially when traveling/living in dangerous areas.
Very often the populations of a few systems will band together to fight off raiders or to track down and kill a pirate. This sort of event usually spawns a new alliance and friends. Of course a new big alliance will attract a bigger enemy and then things get epic.
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But I have to ask you... why do you need to be on every side of the world in a matter of minutes? What game mechanic deems this a worthwhile endeavor? If you can't complete a mission line in one area, what's to stop you from taking the "easy mode" way out and jumping to another area to complete their quest line instead? Where's the pride in character development from "suffering" through something difficult and having bragging rights? ("Oh wow, you completed ___ dungeon!? How did you get past ___?")
What do the MMO designers have to do now to determine what skills to give to the enemies and loot drops should be in certain areas if people can pack up and travel at a whim to find fire resist gear in Magma Valley and jump on a flying ostrich and get their frost resist gear from Penguinville. Fast travel is also why people complain about diversity in characters. If every tank has access to the same gear in relative ease, all tanks will look alike, play alike and smell alike. If you have to travel for hours to get somewhere just to get a few points in resistance, you're going to deal with what you have, you'll find tactics to use and you'll look more unique when you meet someone from another region...
With guilds and such, you remove the difficulty and challenge in a game and it becomes a social wank-fest to see who can be the most popular tank in the guild so they can be first invited to ___ raid on the other side of the world for the Sword of Goblin Slaying (because it looks cool, not because you actually fight any goblins...)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.