Age of Conan Closed Beta Impressions– Part III

This is the third of a series of my impressions of the Age of Conan Closed Beta.  For part one, go here, for part two go here.

Recap

A quick recap of my experiences for context.  As a stress tester, I only got into the closed beta about the time the Fileplanet Open Beta started.  All in all, I played four different characters each to about level ten.  Total time played was probably about 20 hours with slightly more than 5 hours on my highest level character.  According to the recent reports, Conan has more than 250 hours of content to reach level 80.

What I Did and Didn’t Do

I did diligently work through the starting area with a variety of classes.
I didn’t actually get far enough to get OUT of the starting area of Tortage.

I did both single player instance (Tortage night) and multiplayer instance (Tortage day) quests.
I didn’t do any PvP minigames having tried them in the stress tests which was enough for me.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

I like the general feeling of the world, its mood, environment and overall the level of detail.  In the few places I could, I felt like I could find my own path whereever my legs could take me rather than just follow the road or run into invisible walls.

What I didn’t like was the hardware burden all that detail puts on the game and impairs performance.  Nor did I like that the price of all that graphical detail was to put the world into tiny instanced boxes separated by loading screens anytime you went into a building or crossed a zone boundary.  For me, its barely acceptable in LotRO because when I’m in the wide world, its seemless and yes, I can entertain myself just finding out whats over that hill.

I get a distintcly more PotBS type feeling about this or maybe Guildwars type of zoning/instancing.

I liked the more visceral feel AoC’s melee combat has.  Despite the apparent twitchyness, I think it will be well received by those that like a little “feel of the road” versus the “mail it in” skill queuing of some autoattack MMO combat.

I didn’t like the feel of its caster combat at all.  I didn’t feel mystical and powerful, or that my offensive spells were kicking someone’s ass.  The closest I got to that was with my demonologist which felt like it had promise down the road.  The spell animations seemed like they were just an overlay to otherwise nicely done animations.

I liked the idea of the destiny quest and ultimately how well it was executed in single player RPG fashion.

I hated that the multiplayer world quests were fairly uninspired by comparison and that apparently they are inferior in granting experience in effect forcing you to play to 20 as a single player.

Finally, a dislike without a like.  I did not like having all noobs grind through the Tortage starter area to get into the wider world.  The experience is simply too long for an MMO.  If an MMO can’t give me the “must play” feeling after an hour or two, I’m probably not going to stick it out.

Final Thoughts

While I’m not a big fan of PvP or Conan lore in general, I am pretty impressed with what Funcom has pulled together (as far as I’ve been able to experience).  What breaks my heart is that you can almost see the great game that it could have been with a little more time, polish, balance, tuning and perhaps a bit more clarity of what they really wanted the game to be.

Schizophrenic decisions about a single player start early on or the “choose your class at 20″ approach seem to have defocused some of the development efforts and unfortunately ate time and no doubt precious funds out of its development.  Unfortunately, this is the game they made and this is when they want to release it, damn the torpedoes.  I sincerely hope there is more behind the scenes that Funcom hasn’t revealed or I wasn’t able to experience in my brief foray.

Putting my money where my mouth is, I’m sitting this one out.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be wrong and will gladly pay and subscribe if AoC really turns out to be the game everyone has been waiting for.  I’m just not seeing it, at least for me.  Since I seem fortunate enough not to have experienced many of the performance issues others have noted, I can’t say the game is Vanguard-broken at least on my system.  I can say that while its had its moments, it just didn’t grab me in those first few critical hours.

The final nail in the coffin for me is the evident bumbling and fumbling for the controls of late as Funcom has shot itself in the foot time and time again both with the open beta client fiascos but also its incessant and wildly inaccurate hype.  Its just hard to believe anythign they say.  Roll file footage of their in-your-face fall release date of “10/30/07″ which fell almost as soon at it was put up.

I wish them the best of luck with a good launch, but I’ll be watching this one from the sidelines.

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.

Over the Top and Into a New World

Finally managed to get my hunter alt over the hump and ding level 58 this weekend. Here’s the magic moment in Ironforge turning in Arcane Runes to Tymor. My goal has been to get Nodens into Outlands to hook up with some friends’ alts. With nothing on the gaming radar now but the WoW instance group, an alt to explore Outlands is my new project.

The final run to 58 was a bit of a schizophrenic affair. I was being a bit of a min/maxer (in my own casual, carebear, keep me entertained sort of way) and having done the run toward 60 with a few other characters, I was consciously trying to avoid quests that required a lot of ping pong transcontinental travel or chasing the dreaded low drop rate needed quest item. I succeeded only marginally.

I spent a fair amount of time in EPL and WPL as well as Winterspring. Interestingly, managed to completely avoid Blasted Lands (other than some of the earlier Sharpbeak related quests). I did pick up the Arcane Runes quest at some point which was green to me at L57. Being only about 5 chiclets short of dinging 58, I thought I’d go ahead and clean up the old quest log by clearing some of these easy quests.

I remembered Arcane Runes from another alt, though I don’t recall doing it more than once even though I’ve had about a 1/2 dozen characters on various servers that could have picked it up. Basically, it involves traveling to the Ruins of Eldarath in Azshara and taking rubbings of some magical pillars found around the temple of Zin-Malor. Given the level of mobs in the area, this is completely trivial at level 57.

The quest text tells you to collect the rubbings and then head to an island off the southern tip of Azshara and signal to Xiggs Fuselighter to airlift them out. Its a bit of a trip to get down the coast to the wee island as you can see.

Despite the travel, I thought, what the heck, I’ll travel all the way to Azshara, do this easy quest and one or two other lowbie quests I still had in the area. Easy XP. Once the travel was done, risk free XP. I had it in my mind that once I got to the island I would get evac’ed to IF along with the quest items. As it would turn out, I was misremembering.

As I said before, I didn’t recall when I picked up the quest, but it had been in my log a while. So, I traveled to Azshara, got the rubbings, picked up a book in the temple for another quest which was a turn in out in the plaguelands somewhere and headed for the island.

Landing lights on, check. Landing platform, check. Yup, this is the place. Now, just to signal Xiggs, turn in a quest or two and voila, off to Outlands.

I got to the island and no Xiggs. Ok, i need to signal him. Ok, I have nothing with which to signal him. Uh oh. A quick search of teh intrawebs and it was revealed that after Tymor gives you the quest in IF, he gives a separate quest to go talk to Xiggs over in the Military District. Did I mention that it was quite a while that I had this in my log? There he gives you a flare gun to signal him. Bag check. No flare gun. Oops.

Gonna be one of those nights…

Now I remembered why I didn’t do this with other alts. I seem to recall a hazy memory of trying to get everyone in a group long ago to complete this quest and various folks having missed the Xiggs/flare gun portion requiring lots of hearthstoning and cross zone traveling (no warlocks FTL:\ ) and general frustration. As one of the comments said, the time to figure out that you forgot the flare gun is NOT when you’re at the island. /agree.

A quick read through the Thotbott comments reveals that I’m not the first to have missed this little detail. Now, had I not JUST hearthstoned back to IF from WPL a few minutes before, it would have been inconvenient to go back and then do the return boat/bird/run/swim. As it turned out, it was only a few minutes faster than waiting for the cooldown to do the reverse travel the hard way and then travel all the way back to the damned island.

Still, at this point, it had become personal and at some point the time invested demands that you seek vindication for your efforts, so back to Azshara I went. Flare gun in hand, I signaled and Xiggs dutifully arrived in his aeroplane.

Of course, here is where I learned of my other misrememberance: Xiggs picks up the rubbings, not you. Double oops. Didn’t I just do that travel twice a few minutes ago (three times if you count the original journey)?

/snip omitting expletives and rant /snip

Cut to screen shot of Nodens dinging 58 as he finally turns in the quest in IF.

Only one more place to go for the night:

See you on the other side.

EA Announces Battlefield FTPMT Game

The New York Times is reporting on EA’s announcement for a new dumbed down free to play microtransaction (FTPMT) based version of EA’s wildly successful Battlefield series. In light of recent discussions on FTPMT games, there are some interesting tidbits in the article worth noting.

Players can pay not only for decorative items like shoes and jerseys but also for boosts in their players’ speed, agility and accuracy. Mr. Florin said that while most users do not buy anything, a sizable minority ends up spending $15 to $20 a month.

With Battlefield Heroes, E.A. hopes to bring that basic system of “microtransactions” to Western players, along with increased advertising. Mr. Florin said the licensing agreements around the soccer game prevent E.A. from inserting in-game advertisements from companies that are not already sponsors of FIFA, the international soccer federation. By contrast, E.A. already owns the Battlefield franchise and will be free to insert whatever advertising it wants.

And it continues, quoting EA’s EVP of publishing, Gerhard Florin:

“The existing Battlefield games are fairly deep; you have to be pretty good or you’ll die pretty quick,” Mr. Florin said Friday in a telephone interview from Geneva. “Now we’ve toned down the difficulty, shortened each game session to 10 or 15 minutes and made the visual style more cartoony.”

Hmm. Microtransactions, advertising revenue, dumbed down gameplay, dramatically simplified graphics…. Sounds like all four horsemen of the apocalypse. I have no doubt that it will be successful. Probably wildly so.

I’ve managed to condense my own view on FTPMT games down to two sentences: Microtransaction games are shopping not playing. I want to play, not shop.

Of course the rest of the article gets it wrong and conflates World of Warcraft’s success with that of microtransaction based games and the operating margins of games distributed online, of which it is neither. But hey, its only the New York Times. I’m sure they’re still in awe of Second Life too.

World of Guitar Star Duty Hawk Craft-lo

Of course, what’s merger Monday without the blockbuster game publishing deal of the century? As widely reported Vivendi Games and Activision are combining forces to create the “world largest and most profitable pure-play video game publisher”.

You can find a Fact Sheet from Activision’s web site here. There’s more fluff on Blizzards FAQ here. Lots of commentary floating around in the business press and in the game world. Mike Morhaime (CEO of Blizzard) did a Q&A with Gamespot/CNET which is worth a quick browse. Note the quick sidestep about Sierra Entertainment.

Way too much to think about when you have a deal of this size and scope, but a couple of thoughts. Interesting to see which strategy ultimately pays off– Activision Blizzard is trying to go horizontal across PC, Console and Online games v. SoE’s vertical strategy of integrating many online games under one roof.

Say what you will about SoE, but at least they are focused on the online game experience and seemed poised to remain a major pipeline through which online game content will flow. There is something to be said about keeping all the subscription income under one roof. SoE seems to understand that its important to create and maintain sticky relationships with subscribers.

Activision Blizzard really has only one MMO (albeit a monster) to its credit. Otherwise there will be a lot of PC and Console game DNA in the combined company. That business is all about selling boxes which is something that Blizzard actually knows quite a bit about having made 4 of the 5 best selling PC games of all time. I’m not sure whether this a good thing or a bad thing. With such breadth, I’m worried that the PC/Console mantra of “sell something, anything, to everyone” will ultimately dilute Blizzard’s primary focus which has always been “sell everyone our one great thing.”

No doubt this looks like the right business move based on the Activision FAQ, but I’m always pessimistic since studies show that quite often mergers neither result in better shareholder results or better products for consumers, particularly in a “merger of equals” (cough AOL/Time Warner; Daimler Chrysler, etc. cough). Despite the press and spin floating around now, it will be interesting to read the information Activision will put in its shareholder proxy statement for the special meeting to approve the merger by Activision shareholders. It will be filing that shortly with the SEC and all the gory and yes, perhaps, boring details will be disclosed in the filing. That’s the document companies get sued about, so it should be a decent read– especially the background of the merger section to see how and when the deal came to be.

Stay tuned.