With the basics of the game explained in the previous entry, I can now move onto a more detailed account of my adventures in Age of Conan. As mentioned earlier, you first emerge from the water half-drowned and clutching only a broken oar. You then have a few moments to sit back and enjoy the graphics, and twiddle with the settings, before you speak to the quest NPC in front of you.
The area looks fantastic, and really needs to be seen firsthand - the screenshot really doesn't do it justice. Determined to try the combat that everyone had been talking about for ages, I picked up my broken oar and ran straight into the nearest group of pict savages I could find. The combat system really is excellent, and while it is easy enough to learn you can't help but feel it's going to be tricky to master. Essentially your 1, 2 and 3 keys are bound to directional attack buttons (it doesn't matter where you're standing relative to your opponent, so long as you're facing him and in range). Both you and your opponents also have directional shields, which reduce the amount of damage done by attacks from that particular direction, and those are shifted with the Ctrl button - though by level 20, I still haven't really learned to use them. You can also dodge in any direction with a quick double tap of the appropriate direction key, but as a ranger I have to stand still to use my bow and thus I don't do that much.
All this is made more complex by combos, which are like the class skills in any other MMO. They appear on your hotbar and you click them (or press the appropriate hotkey) to trigger them. Then a series of directional attacks that you have to complete comes up, after which your character will perform the selected attack. To start with, I was mostly just mashing the keyboard, but as I've got more into the game I've calmed down enough - but sometimes I can't help feeling I'm losing time on my autoattacks by not repeatedly spamming directional attacks in combat that often, especially if I'm using a fast-firing weapon. The combat noises and animations are both superb but, in the early stages of the game at least, the formula doesn't depart much from traditional MMOs. Instead of running up to an enemy with my shadowknight and pressing the same series of keys every battle, from level 6 upwards I just pressed 8, to select Pierce Shot, then 1 and 2 to set off the combo - which does enough damage to kill pretty much anything within a level or two of me instantly. However, there is more of an emphasis on fighting groups of creatures rather than single monsters, as individual ones go down quite easily, which makes things more exciting and more realistic too. So, while the formula is basically the same as in other MMOs so far, it's done much better and is much more enjoyable for it.
So, after battering half a dozen savages to death so I could learn the combat system, I actually got on with what I was meant to do. A conveniently-placed damsel in distress is in front of you, begging you to free her from her chains by forcibly taking the key off the slavemaster on the beach nearby. Getting quests is very much like it works in other MMOs, except the quest givers and the quest targets are marked on the map, which makes the whole process considerably more simple than in previous MMOs. Though I do somewhat miss the days of EQ1 where quests could be decidedly cryptic and could sometimes take hours, the genre has moved on since then and now quests are less about lore and entertainment and more a tool to steer players to various areas of the world so they don't miss out on content. Age of Conan has taken this to its logical conclusion and virtually holds your hand throughout the entire process, though in a convenient rather than patronising way. It proved suitably easy to free the girl, and then she agrees to follow you back to the nearby town, Tortage.
What follows is a linear fight down a long path to the city, designed to get you familiar with the controls of the game and to help you gain five or so levels. You also become familiar with the game's appalling voice acting, which is delivered in the conversational cut-scenes you have with NPCs. It's not quite as dire as the faux-Scottish accents of some of the dwarves in EQ2, but generally the NPCs sound like a borderline-retarded Russian putting on a silly voice (it makes you wonder if Blizzard actually own the only competent voice actors in the MMO industry). Thankfully the voice acting ends after Tortage, but it does make you wonder why they bothered with it in the first place.
Getting back on topic - once you complete your little journey to Tortage, you find yourself zoning into a communal multiplayer zone - it turns out the previous area was a single-player instance. Ahead of you is the city of Tortage, but at this point you'll have to twiddle your graphical settings again because the communal zones perform considerably worse than the single-player instances. Anyway, there's a couple of errands you have to do to get into the city, and then it's on to standard MMO fare - running about, questing and killing things, to level up. The city of Tortage is beautifully modelled and textured, and the entire zone looks like it's come straight out of Pirates of the Carribbean. However, there is a twist in the tale, as Tortage is actually two different zones. Bear with me, because this takes a little explaining.
The first twenty levels were initially intended to be a single-player tutorial that would be skippable by subsequent characters, but this has changed somewhat along the way. This is definitely a good thing. Initially you weren't even going to choose your class at the start of the game, but you'd specialise into an archetype at level ten and then into an actual class at level twenty. This will sound familiar to veterans of EQ2, as the launch edition of this game pioneered this approach before eventually (and wisely) dropping it in favour of the standard character creation method. This transition left some unresolved issues in the early game of EQ2, but happily Funcom have done a better job with Age of Conan on this count.
The relatively elegant solution they have come up with is to split the newbie town of Tortage into single-player story mode (nighttime), and the standard multiplayer mode (daytime). These can be switched between by speaking to one of the NPCs in the inn that will act as your base for your time in Tortage. For the first twenty levels, whether you play with other players or not is entirely up to you. The single player missions are actually pretty good, and there's a different set of quests depending on your archetype. Rangers are part of the Rogue archetype, so my quests involved quite a lot of sneaking about. This means there's actually four sets of quests, and as you'll presumably play a different type of class for your alt characters, it means Tortage won't be as repetitive as it could be. The quests also do quite a good job of subtly introducing you to your class skills, which can only be a good thing.
Overall, though, I still have a few gripes with the zone. There's a chronic shortage of vendors to sell your loot to, as well as no vendors who actually sell bags in the town. Worse, there's no vendors in the single-player nighttime missions, and I found myself switching to daytime just to sell things, and then having to come back. As you have to zone to change from one mode to another, and then zone out of the inn to find a vendor, and then zone back into the inn and then shift mode back to night-time again, this is a pain in the ass. They should put a vendor in the night-time version of the inn. If there's one there already, he needs to be made more obvious. The layout of the quest givers I also found a bit irritating. They were dotted all over the place, which meant you'd spend half your time running around the city to hand in various bits of quests. I much prefer quest 'hubs', with four or five NPCs in a little outpost with all the quests. Once you're done with that hub, the game steers you onto the next one. Tortage reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate II, in that after a couple of hours of play I had about 20 quests going at once and no idea which monsters and NPCs were involved in which quest chain. Also, sometimes NPCs standing right next to each other would give out quests of completely different level ranges, which just to me seemed a little odd.
The rest of the Tortage zone involves several other zones, some public and others instances that you will encounter in your single-player exploits, and they range from a volcano to a desert island. Generally all look very polished, and the monsters are all very well animated and there's a good variety of different types. The only I really had with the communal zones is the community. While I admit I'm pretty sheltered, having played EQ2 as my most recent MMO, the game with probably the most mature and helpful fanbase in the MMORPG universe, it seems like Age of Conan attracted an awful lot of the WoW-kiddies. It might be because I'm playing on a PvP-server, but the General chat was just an uninterrupted stream of newbies spamming questions that could be answered by spending ten seconds either reading the manual or the extensive in-game tutorials, or by people just generally being assholes.
This failed to improve when I left the immediate proximity or Tortage to do some quests on Whitesand Isle, at which point I became PvP eligible. While I'm used to playing on PvP servers and thus I'm quite used to occasionally getting picked off when I'm hunting, the amount of griefing in the game surprised me. One of the issues is that the respawn point is unprotected, and you only have ten seconds of invulnerability before you become fair game to everyone again - by which point you'll be on about 1/3 health. Higher-level people camping the graveyards and just insta-killing everyone that spawns is infuriating, because there's nothing you can do about it at all. Funcom need to make the areas around the graveyard PvP-ineligible, so people can at least gate back to town if they're getting ganked too much. On a similar note, people also like camping the entrance to zones and killing anyone who tries to zone in, over and over. There's no material gain to PvP yet, so the persistence of some of the griefers is remarkable.
Another issue is the rather steep increase in power between the levels (at level 16 I was attacked by three level 13s and managed to kill them all), which means that newbies really get shafted if they try to go hunting in the multiplayer zones. I imagine things will improve as the zones get less populated, but still. I much prefer the WoW system of PvP-realms, where you can kill anyone of the opposing side pretty much anywhere. There's no confusion there - if you see a red name, you try and kill them, and if it's a green name then they're friendly. In AoC everyone is potentially hostile and, as you can't really just attack everyone you meet if you ever want to level up, things are less clear cut. This is almost certainly the intention, but it makes stuff like grouping up is quite hard. Trying to talk to someone is as likely to leave you trying to pull a throwing axe out of your face as it is to find you a group. Generally you'll just find higher level players one-shotting you just because they can (I'm not complaining, I do it myself), but a few people seem to have made it their mission to ruin things for everyone by camping the graveyards and generally griefing.
Overall, though, the first twenty levels were really good. The single-player storyline is pretty cool, the zones look fantastic and the combat is superb. If you've got a good enough PC to run it, I wholly recommend it - and I'd recommend it even more if they put a vendor in the Tortage inn. It's also worth noting that playing on a PvP server is quite a commitment. If you found PvP servers too much to handle on WoW, I wouldn't touch the AoC ones with a barge pole.
The area looks fantastic, and really needs to be seen firsthand - the screenshot really doesn't do it justice. Determined to try the combat that everyone had been talking about for ages, I picked up my broken oar and ran straight into the nearest group of pict savages I could find. The combat system really is excellent, and while it is easy enough to learn you can't help but feel it's going to be tricky to master. Essentially your 1, 2 and 3 keys are bound to directional attack buttons (it doesn't matter where you're standing relative to your opponent, so long as you're facing him and in range). Both you and your opponents also have directional shields, which reduce the amount of damage done by attacks from that particular direction, and those are shifted with the Ctrl button - though by level 20, I still haven't really learned to use them. You can also dodge in any direction with a quick double tap of the appropriate direction key, but as a ranger I have to stand still to use my bow and thus I don't do that much.
All this is made more complex by combos, which are like the class skills in any other MMO. They appear on your hotbar and you click them (or press the appropriate hotkey) to trigger them. Then a series of directional attacks that you have to complete comes up, after which your character will perform the selected attack. To start with, I was mostly just mashing the keyboard, but as I've got more into the game I've calmed down enough - but sometimes I can't help feeling I'm losing time on my autoattacks by not repeatedly spamming directional attacks in combat that often, especially if I'm using a fast-firing weapon. The combat noises and animations are both superb but, in the early stages of the game at least, the formula doesn't depart much from traditional MMOs. Instead of running up to an enemy with my shadowknight and pressing the same series of keys every battle, from level 6 upwards I just pressed 8, to select Pierce Shot, then 1 and 2 to set off the combo - which does enough damage to kill pretty much anything within a level or two of me instantly. However, there is more of an emphasis on fighting groups of creatures rather than single monsters, as individual ones go down quite easily, which makes things more exciting and more realistic too. So, while the formula is basically the same as in other MMOs so far, it's done much better and is much more enjoyable for it.
So, after battering half a dozen savages to death so I could learn the combat system, I actually got on with what I was meant to do. A conveniently-placed damsel in distress is in front of you, begging you to free her from her chains by forcibly taking the key off the slavemaster on the beach nearby. Getting quests is very much like it works in other MMOs, except the quest givers and the quest targets are marked on the map, which makes the whole process considerably more simple than in previous MMOs. Though I do somewhat miss the days of EQ1 where quests could be decidedly cryptic and could sometimes take hours, the genre has moved on since then and now quests are less about lore and entertainment and more a tool to steer players to various areas of the world so they don't miss out on content. Age of Conan has taken this to its logical conclusion and virtually holds your hand throughout the entire process, though in a convenient rather than patronising way. It proved suitably easy to free the girl, and then she agrees to follow you back to the nearby town, Tortage.
What follows is a linear fight down a long path to the city, designed to get you familiar with the controls of the game and to help you gain five or so levels. You also become familiar with the game's appalling voice acting, which is delivered in the conversational cut-scenes you have with NPCs. It's not quite as dire as the faux-Scottish accents of some of the dwarves in EQ2, but generally the NPCs sound like a borderline-retarded Russian putting on a silly voice (it makes you wonder if Blizzard actually own the only competent voice actors in the MMO industry). Thankfully the voice acting ends after Tortage, but it does make you wonder why they bothered with it in the first place.
Getting back on topic - once you complete your little journey to Tortage, you find yourself zoning into a communal multiplayer zone - it turns out the previous area was a single-player instance. Ahead of you is the city of Tortage, but at this point you'll have to twiddle your graphical settings again because the communal zones perform considerably worse than the single-player instances. Anyway, there's a couple of errands you have to do to get into the city, and then it's on to standard MMO fare - running about, questing and killing things, to level up. The city of Tortage is beautifully modelled and textured, and the entire zone looks like it's come straight out of Pirates of the Carribbean. However, there is a twist in the tale, as Tortage is actually two different zones. Bear with me, because this takes a little explaining.
The first twenty levels were initially intended to be a single-player tutorial that would be skippable by subsequent characters, but this has changed somewhat along the way. This is definitely a good thing. Initially you weren't even going to choose your class at the start of the game, but you'd specialise into an archetype at level ten and then into an actual class at level twenty. This will sound familiar to veterans of EQ2, as the launch edition of this game pioneered this approach before eventually (and wisely) dropping it in favour of the standard character creation method. This transition left some unresolved issues in the early game of EQ2, but happily Funcom have done a better job with Age of Conan on this count.
The relatively elegant solution they have come up with is to split the newbie town of Tortage into single-player story mode (nighttime), and the standard multiplayer mode (daytime). These can be switched between by speaking to one of the NPCs in the inn that will act as your base for your time in Tortage. For the first twenty levels, whether you play with other players or not is entirely up to you. The single player missions are actually pretty good, and there's a different set of quests depending on your archetype. Rangers are part of the Rogue archetype, so my quests involved quite a lot of sneaking about. This means there's actually four sets of quests, and as you'll presumably play a different type of class for your alt characters, it means Tortage won't be as repetitive as it could be. The quests also do quite a good job of subtly introducing you to your class skills, which can only be a good thing.
Overall, though, I still have a few gripes with the zone. There's a chronic shortage of vendors to sell your loot to, as well as no vendors who actually sell bags in the town. Worse, there's no vendors in the single-player nighttime missions, and I found myself switching to daytime just to sell things, and then having to come back. As you have to zone to change from one mode to another, and then zone out of the inn to find a vendor, and then zone back into the inn and then shift mode back to night-time again, this is a pain in the ass. They should put a vendor in the night-time version of the inn. If there's one there already, he needs to be made more obvious. The layout of the quest givers I also found a bit irritating. They were dotted all over the place, which meant you'd spend half your time running around the city to hand in various bits of quests. I much prefer quest 'hubs', with four or five NPCs in a little outpost with all the quests. Once you're done with that hub, the game steers you onto the next one. Tortage reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate II, in that after a couple of hours of play I had about 20 quests going at once and no idea which monsters and NPCs were involved in which quest chain. Also, sometimes NPCs standing right next to each other would give out quests of completely different level ranges, which just to me seemed a little odd.
The rest of the Tortage zone involves several other zones, some public and others instances that you will encounter in your single-player exploits, and they range from a volcano to a desert island. Generally all look very polished, and the monsters are all very well animated and there's a good variety of different types. The only I really had with the communal zones is the community. While I admit I'm pretty sheltered, having played EQ2 as my most recent MMO, the game with probably the most mature and helpful fanbase in the MMORPG universe, it seems like Age of Conan attracted an awful lot of the WoW-kiddies. It might be because I'm playing on a PvP-server, but the General chat was just an uninterrupted stream of newbies spamming questions that could be answered by spending ten seconds either reading the manual or the extensive in-game tutorials, or by people just generally being assholes.
This failed to improve when I left the immediate proximity or Tortage to do some quests on Whitesand Isle, at which point I became PvP eligible. While I'm used to playing on PvP servers and thus I'm quite used to occasionally getting picked off when I'm hunting, the amount of griefing in the game surprised me. One of the issues is that the respawn point is unprotected, and you only have ten seconds of invulnerability before you become fair game to everyone again - by which point you'll be on about 1/3 health. Higher-level people camping the graveyards and just insta-killing everyone that spawns is infuriating, because there's nothing you can do about it at all. Funcom need to make the areas around the graveyard PvP-ineligible, so people can at least gate back to town if they're getting ganked too much. On a similar note, people also like camping the entrance to zones and killing anyone who tries to zone in, over and over. There's no material gain to PvP yet, so the persistence of some of the griefers is remarkable.
Another issue is the rather steep increase in power between the levels (at level 16 I was attacked by three level 13s and managed to kill them all), which means that newbies really get shafted if they try to go hunting in the multiplayer zones. I imagine things will improve as the zones get less populated, but still. I much prefer the WoW system of PvP-realms, where you can kill anyone of the opposing side pretty much anywhere. There's no confusion there - if you see a red name, you try and kill them, and if it's a green name then they're friendly. In AoC everyone is potentially hostile and, as you can't really just attack everyone you meet if you ever want to level up, things are less clear cut. This is almost certainly the intention, but it makes stuff like grouping up is quite hard. Trying to talk to someone is as likely to leave you trying to pull a throwing axe out of your face as it is to find you a group. Generally you'll just find higher level players one-shotting you just because they can (I'm not complaining, I do it myself), but a few people seem to have made it their mission to ruin things for everyone by camping the graveyards and generally griefing.
Overall, though, the first twenty levels were really good. The single-player storyline is pretty cool, the zones look fantastic and the combat is superb. If you've got a good enough PC to run it, I wholly recommend it - and I'd recommend it even more if they put a vendor in the Tortage inn. It's also worth noting that playing on a PvP server is quite a commitment. If you found PvP servers too much to handle on WoW, I wouldn't touch the AoC ones with a barge pole.
1 comment:
A lot of people reported the same thing in regards to their level 1-20 experience. I really like your detailed writing and I am much interested to know your view of how the game plays after level 20.
I recently went back to EQ2 with the Rise of Kunark expansion. Played the game a number of times before but I always stopped around the time before I hit 30. I am very curious about Age of Conan but I am not sure I'd be willing to leave EQ2 for it at the moment. Looking forward to your next article.
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