Age of Conan Closed Beta Impressions– Part I

Been fairly busy of late, so the blog suffers. I was involved over the past few months in the Age of Conan technical beta stress tests though not part of the regular closed beta until very recently. There’s a fair amount to cover, so I’ll break this into a few posts to make it digestible.

As I’ve mentioned before, AoC hasn’t been particularly high on my list. The early marketing spin of mature=boobs+blood and FPS-like combat coupled with the PvP focus suggested that AoC was not likely a must-play game for me. Nor was Robert E. Howard a particular favorite author of mine. Nonetheless, many reported aspects of the game had me curious enough to want to see what it was all about despite the two+ strikes going in.

Performance and Hardware

For those who may not be aware, AoC has had two betas running– the Fileplanet Open Beta which you had to pay for, and the closed or General Beta. Shortly after the last round of stress tests, Funcom saw fit to invite all the stress testers to the general beta, hence my access.

Confusingly, general (closed) beta participants are still under the NDA except with respect to their level 1-13 experiences, so anything I relate here pertains only to levels 1-13 (mostly solo play). I mention this because of the controversy over the version of the game client used for the open beta. Bildo and Keen and others have adequately covered that ground, so I wont rehash.

Since I didn’t sign up for the Fileplanet beta, I can’t comment on how significant the performance issues may have been. I can say that the closed beta client was pretty decent with few of the reported issues with the open beta client occurring for me. I have had lockups and few CTDs, but nothing close to the scale others have reported about both the open and close beta clients.

Despite the apparent total marketing meltdown fuckup with the open beta, Funcom pushed patches out before this last weekend on both Open and closed beta I believe. Many folks are calling this the “Miracle” patch and I must say that many of the significant loading time and other annoyances seem to be receding into the background at an acceptable level.

Also for reference, my current system stats are as follows:

Intel Core Duo E8400 3.0 GHz
4GB Ram
nVidia 8800GT 512MB
WinXP

Not the top of the heap by a long shot, but decently above “recommended” specs for AoC of a Core Duo 2.4GHZ, 7900 GTX card and 2MB of RAM. I’ve been running on high settings without any significant problems. There have been some annoying lag spikes, but that isn’t a client-side hardware problem. Haven’t been checking framerates because quite frankly, its been consistently smooth for the most part, so I assume its been north of 25-30FPS or I would have started to get that flipbook animation/slide show feeling.

Graphics

The look is pseudo-realism, so think EQ2, LotRO, Vanguard. The (starting) world is lush with almost too much detail. Personal preference, but I think LotRO has done a better job of tying all the graphical elements together in the environment. For me there are a few too many sharp edges and hard lines between textures which don’t blend. This pertains mostly to vegetation rather than buildings and such which seem more smoothly integrated into the environment. Water is probably the best I’ve seen in an MMO. Surface ripples and vees out behind your character as they move through the water. Waves lap at the shore. Nice.

There are a reasonable but not excessive range of avatar customization features. You can dive into advanced options and tweak just about any feature with sliders and pick lists, or you can random and minorly tweak your overall appearance. Overall, I think the models are very well done with a few caveats based on style preferences rather than oddness. Animations are generally very well done and quite smooth.

Men are big and strong and women are buxom, full stop. The wimpiest male version I could come up with would still probably come up to me, crack walnuts with their biceps and then sweep the floor with my weaksauce gamer ass. Not a fault unique to Conan, but I’m still waiting for a wider range of body types, ages, fitness, etc. rather than permutations of the epic hero, but that’s me. No shrivelled aged scholarly mystical caster types here nor gangly broken tooth meth heads either.

/rant on

Women in Conan are quite simply objectified and typify the misogynist tendencies in most fantasy writing (and present in Robert E. Howard, his writing and most societies in the 1930’s when he was writing). I see manifested throughout the game an environment sadly faithful to Howard’s writing and his particularly strange (Oedipal?) and adolescent male view toward women. Yes, there are “positive” depictions of women in AoC (e.g., Valeria somewhat of an exception) though the contrary seems to prevail far too often.

I’d love to play a game where tough smart women characters of varied body types (i.e. something other than Barbie doll-esque proportions) were available so that women might actually be attracted to playing the game. Amazon to princess, nymph to crone, is that so hard? Apparently it is because developers don’t yet realize that women are mammals, not mammaries.

Simple question, answer silently to yourselves, would you play this game with your wife? you mother? your daughter? Would it bug you if they did without you? If not why not? Discuss (amongst yourselves). Park your rants elsewhere, this is not the typical hypocritical American violence>sex perspective. Try (hard) to think why this is so.  Suffice it to say that typical media and entertainment industry depictions of women aren’t going to be changed by AoC.

/rant off

Races and classes

Aquilonian, Cimmerian and Stygian. Research project: research and discuss Robert E. Howard’s views on race and the rise of fascism in the 1930’s. Relate to the foregoing. Discuss. Yes, you could do the same with Lovecraft, Tolkien, Lewis as well. Maybe you should.

Three soldier archetypes– Guardian, Conquerer and Dark Templar
Three mage archetypes– Herald of Xotli, Necromancer and Demonologist
Three priest archetypes– Tempest of Set, Priest of Mitra and Bear Shaman
Three scout archetypes– Assassin, Barbarian and Ranger

So far, I’ve played a Conquerer, Demonologist, Priest of Mitra and Bear Shaman, all up to around Level 10. My general impression is that the classes are still in need of some serious balancing at this point. Some encounters seem near impossible with some classes that are trivial for others of the same level. Keep in mind that this is all during the Noob portion of the game, not at endgame where no one would expect a caster to have the survivability of a tank, nor the tank not have the dps of a caster, etc.

Among the major divisions (caster/non-caster), combat has a very samey quality. All the head smashing types don’t seem particularly differentiated early on. Similar with casters excepting Bear Shaman. The BS plays much more like a melee class in all respects.

The healing classes to me seem the most disappointment at the low levels. They just don’t seem to have any significant healing abilities. At low levels, most have wimpy HoTs though they are considerably tougher than the usual squishy. I’m told “healers don’t really come into their own until about level 20 or so”… which is a bit of a warning sign for me. In no encounter was healing even remotely capable of significantly forestalling the inevitable.

Combat

What AoC seems to be really good at is allowing you to take big heavy and/or sharp things and bash people to bits with them. And that is fairly fun. I’ve actually had the most fun with my conqueror (high dps warrior type). Note the similar Barbarian is actually a scout class and while higher dps is also more vulnerable.

The vaunted combat system is a welcome departure from typical Diku MUD autoattack combat but not without its limitations. Attacks are left, middle, right (1,2,3 keys). You don’t swing, you don’t attack. As you progress, characters learn combos that are special attacks you can initiate in combat like most MMO spells and abilities.

Like Tobold, I’m thinking either the twitch kiddies or the G15 crowd will have greater efficiency in getting them off when you want them and you will want them. Executing combos requires initiating the combo then, when its icon appears on screen, you have a window of time to hit the requisite attack key to execute the combo. Timing in the mechanics is a little sloppy at times, or maybe its lag in combat that causes problems in getting them off sometimes. Key presses seem more reliable than mouse clicking but your mileage may vary.

Certainly, combat is hands on. That is good. Its also a bit of button mashing which can sometimes take your attention off the otherwise quite nicely done combat animations. I think spell caster effects leave something to be desired still– they feel a bit more like a low grade particle overlay– but the melee combat feels pretty visceral. I think the blood spatter on the “camera” effect for fatalities is just too cheesy.

Character balance being off right now, its hard to judge the effectiveness of characters in combat. Some encounters are trivial while similar encounters of mobs at the same level are near quick and certain death making succeeding in some encounters simply zerging one mob down, dieing, running back and taking down the next. Repeat.

As this is getting a bit long, I’ll save the Noob experience and more thoughts for Part II.

Fixing WoW’s Progression Problem

Tobold’s post and comments on the idea of creating disincentives to guildhopping got me thinking. People are fundamentally self-interested asshats (this I already knew). There’s just not going to be a lot you can do about that problem. Good or bad design can mitigate or exacerbate the tendency though. The more I look at it though, its really a problem with WoW’s current PvE reward/progression model.

WoW’s progression and reward model greatly exacerbates the tendency toward asshattery (greedy, selfish, anti-social and uncivil behavior) by requiring collective action for personal (and uncertain) rewards (primarily in the form of improved gear). Twenty five or ten or five people devote a significant amount of time to collectively work on an objective without any guarantee that they will be rewarded for their efforts at all (no useful drop), and if rewarded that they will be able to share in that reward (useful drop, lose the roll or drop is useful only for other class).

Under the current paradigm, we are required to run and re-run content to get another pull on the slot machine. No matter how many times you run an encounter/instance/raid the fundamental law of statistics applies– each run results in the same percentage to get a desire drop. Everytime you toss a coin, the probability of heads coming up is 50%. Its called the Gambler’s Fallacy for a reason.

As our tank Earlthecat knows after 60+ Baron runs (back in the day…) without receiving his class pants, that can be brutal and fundamentally smacks of unfairness. Your item has to drop AND you have to win the roll unless you have collective assent to redistribute the limited loot. Of course, that’s where that asshattery problem kicks in again…

The opportunity for asshattery exists as a result of the limited number and random nature of the drops. Five/10/25/40 toons enter, perhaps no one leaves with a goddamned thing. Tigole must surely be sitting somewhere with Rob Pardo laughing their collective asses off. And they should. Like Skinner in the lab late one Friday night with a bottle of Wild Turkey watching the mice. What a bunch of chumps.

As Tobold and the commenters pointed out, the guild (or raid group or just plain friend group) doesn’t progress evenly. So long as one player “needs” a certain piece of kit to progress, they are bound to collective action. Once rewarded, ggktxbye, sayonara suckers. I’m off to find the next group of chumps and my next piece of better gear.

So how to mitigate rather than exacerbate the baser aspects of our greed-addled nature? Seems pretty basic, but the problem comes down to one of two basic approaches– either collectivize the ownership of the rewards (discussed, bad, problematic) or simply equitably distribute rewards among the group (impossible to do with random, limited drops).

Simple concept and already in the game and yes, maybe a little boring– earn marks, badges, rep, BoP currency, whatever you want to call it, and distribute it equally to all members of the group. Acquire X tokens, spend them at the token merchant for the reward of your choosing. If it takes 5 runs to collect enough tokens to get the uber shield of ultimate defense or cap of bottomless mana, so be it. Take the same damned boss mob loot table for a dungeon and make that a vendor’s offerings.

Everyone progresses equally. Everyone’s contribution to that session is rewarded. No one gets screwed or ninja’d. No one cares if you guild hop, so hopefully you have incentive to stay to play with mates. At least you have less incentive to bail early. People with different play budgets will always progress at different rates, but at least if out-of-work-basement-guy does 40 runs of instance X, each of the other members of those groups were each equally rewarded toward each of those runs. If those are the same 5/10/25 people for each of the runs: Hurray! If not: no one is QQing because tankboy (who completed 40 of those runs) cashed in and got his just rewards.

Assuming some of the geniuses that created the already tired grindy-assed mechanics could come up with some shred of a shitty story to keep us mildly entertained while we’re doing it, so much the better. Basic quest to point us at an instance with some reward for clearing it, then some crappy subplot that ties into the main story arc to thinly justify that by grinding instances we are participating in the epic grand story.

If you really wanted to be generous and encourage helping others out (at no personal opportunity cost) you could make the tokens either homogenous but drop with greater frequency in higher level content or make them exchangeable so rewards in one instance could be used for rewards from another. All micro/tokens are BoP.

Imagine this: You show up in Honor Hold and receive the basic “Go Kick Ramparts Ass” quest (Blah blah blah, epic battle, enemy of the alliance, contributions to the war effort would be rewarded, etc. etc.). You get your group, run the dungeon. As you clear mobs, instance specific microtokens drop at reasonable rate from the trash distributed via the basic loot rules. You progress and kill 2 out of the 4 bosses receiving 1 token for each group member for each boss downed before you wipe or get tired or someone needs to change a diaper. Run over. Each group member would have received 1/5 of the microtokens that dropped (click on 10 to turn it into a full token just like motes) and 2 tokens.  Think two bits and pieces of eight, you get the idea.

Go back to Honor Hold, talk to the quartermaster and exchange your tokens for the gear items you want that are available from that instance. Don’t like the rewards available for Ramparts tokens? Convert them into Underbog tokens (at some less than 1-for-1 exchange rate so the progression model doesn’t get gamed too badly).

Starting to all seem a bit familiar? It should. It looks a lot like the PvP reward system except its not screwed up with a marks + honor system. As the guild/group raid begins to acquire the upgraded gear, the runs get better. By the time everyone has acquired a total of X tokens (enough that they could be exchanged for all the usable items from that instance) the guild could move on and no one should be left behind assuming they’ve contributed equally.

So what do you end up with?

• The progression path is group agnostic, but still collective action dependent.
• Down-playing (i.e., helping your lowbies in a below level instance) isn’t penalized– its rewarded equally in upconvertible tokens.
• Ninjas cease to exist for progression gear.
• Because rewards are certain, the risk of grouping is reduced encouraging collective play.
• Unlike the battlegrounds, there is no timer, so progression requires play, not just afk honor farming or AV zerg rush min/max strats.

While we’re fixing WoW’s PvE progression, level restrict the instances and add mentoring so higher levels are downscaled to a lower level instance so the tokens aren’t devalued. Sorry twinkers.

Now that WoW’s fixed, I think I’ll go have lunch.

Separated At Birth, Chapter Five: LotRO

Yet another installment of the MMO version of Spy Magazine’s favorite game. I give you Harvi the Mapmaker from the Prancing Pony in Bree and CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

One Dollar, One Vote

We’re a bunch of pathetic whiners with no backbone. Keen’s got a post up about the latest details of Age of Conan’s end-game raiding grind which he takes issue with. I whole-heartedly agree that that kind of tired resource sucking design element is a big turn off. I wasn’t that interested in AoC even after participtating in the stress tests, etc. From what little I’ve seen, Keen’s PvP weekend impressions were spot on, but I digress.

The issue at hand is that here is a game that purports to have structure that Keen and I’m sure many others will find objectionable, annoying or at least off-putting. Maybe it matters little to some, maybe it matters a lot to more. At the end of the day, Keen seems resigned to vigorously object to the approach the devs have taken but will still gladly give them $50 for the box and probably some subscription revenue (not to mention whatever they get for the so-called Fileplanet “Open” beta). I’m sure many of us will find ourselves in a similar conundrum.

I did the same thing with PotBS. I was very luke warm about the game from closed and open beta but decided I’d give FLS the benefit of the doubt since I didn’t have time to personally experience all of the aspects of gameplay during beta. In retrospect, I wish I didn’t. I did know about most of them (not the buggy ridiculously broken ones, but the major design features) and even though I was somewhat iffy on whether that would be the game for me, I handed them $50 only to cancel before the initial 30 days ran out.

LotRO wooed me and I gladly gave them my $50 and subbed. I loved the early part of LotRO, but the middle bits started being unfun. I parked my accounts but kept them live and the dollars flowing to Turbine which has regularly and continually improved the game, added content and garnered my attention again. I had seen the high quality that Turbine had put into the game and was hopeful that it would evolve in the right direction (for me at least) and consciously wanted them to succeed in doing so. So I’ve paid and continue to play.

I continue to go back and forth with Eve. Its not 100% my game, but I do like what they’re doing and want to support it. But I can’t always justify keeping the subs live when I’m just not playing and not sure that I’ll come back to stay next time. Or the time after that.

WoW I’ve continued to play and bought TBC without hesitation even though I wouldn’t bring my new mains to Outland for a year after the expansion. Quite frankly, if I knew then what I know now about TBC (at release at least), I probably wouldn’t have thrown down for it on release. I’ll certainly be more careful about WotLK because I think WoW has lost its way though I’m still enjoying our group adventures.

We have two true feedback mechanisms that work with game developers– our dollars and our feet, and our feet only matter if they’ve already gotten our dollars and by then, its probably too late for us at least. The number of games that have successfully “come back” after losing someone is probably small (EQ2). The number of successful games that have grown and grown into a player base is similarly small (Eve), but have slowly grown because of their design decisions not despite them.

In the democratic capitalism of game development, one dollar (or euro or yen, or won or …) equals one vote. If we really want to see projects succeed, we have to put our money where our mouth is and buy and subscribe. We are patrons of the game arts. If, however, we object to design decisions made, then the last thing we should do is support them with our hard earned cash.

Once they’ve got it, don’t expect an audience with the game gods or even assume that you have a voice that matters. If you’re playing, you’re paying and if you’re paying, they’re doing something right (in their minds). If AoC sells 250k boxes ($12.5 million), they’ve probably gone a good way toward recouping their development cost. Tack on three more months of subs (beyond the initial 30 days) and you’ve got another $11+ million. $24 million in revenue in the first four months. Not a hit, not a giant win by any means, but enough revenue to take the pressure off the devs so they don’t have to answer the question “Why aren’t more people playing? Why aren’t more people staying?”. If we don’t pay, they have to ask those questions and hopefully win our business. If not, and they are still successful, then its just not our game.

The dirty little secret is that unless it sucks SO bad that we can’t stand it, subscriber’s remorse sets in and most of us want to see some kind of ROI on our time or dollar investment in a game. We are enamoured by the new and the promise of the better. We like the shiny, even if its dingy and often refuse to see the Man behind the curtain which is the same Man behind all the curtains of all the unsatisfying games we bought and continue to pay for.

Truth is we get the games we pay for, so we must be very careful of what we pay for.

LotRO Book 13 Official Release Notes Available

Official release notes for LotRO’s free content update Book 13: Doom of the Last-king were revealed today. Find them here.

The login page had the message that scheduled LotRO server downtime would run from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) Thursday, April 24, so it looks like Book 13 will be live tomorrow.

In addition to all the good stuff going on in the quest log/grouping UI, here are some other interesting items from the notes (in no particular order):

• More active gameplay feeling in combat [Anything to reduce the Sedan de Ville slugginshness is good in my book]
• Smoothed and fix some existing animations [Less Al Gore woodeness FTW!]
• Genericized monster trophies (aka rare crafting drops used for mastery versions of recipes) now drop across several species and stack in your bags [Yay!]
• All classes with an Area Effect Heal will now heal Escorts [Yay!]
• When housing upkeep is overdue, instead of foreclosing on your personal or kinship house, we “lock” the house [LotRO aids the subprime mortgage crisis. Yay!]
• When you receive an invitation to join a fellowship you will now see the members of that fellowship before you join. [All Dwarves! No thank you!]
• A class column has been added to the kinship panel. You can now sort kinship members by class (low-class, high-class.. oh wait, not that kind of class!).
• More emotes now have sound [Something about a /cheer without audio just isn't the same...]
• The Bree-land Outfitter now sells something that might be of interest to all of the fishing enthusiasts out there…
• Mounts: Avatars will now whistle to summon their mounts. [Not being "magical" mounts the whole summoning from the heavens thing was a bit odd]
• World Eaters can no longer be summoned after the final Rift boss has been defeated.

And many many more including lots of little polishy bits. Enjoy.