MMO Gamers

When Funcom began marketing Age of Conan as a mature game featuring decapitations and even more controversial female nudity it created quite a stir.  Governments across the globe, Classifications Departments, and the blogoshere all had a say.  Tipa said her piece on the matter and I commented on it myself.   It’s actually quite good to go back and read these posts again to see the attitudes of the community pre-release.  So now that the game has been out for nearly a month, what does it all mean?

Funcom produced a game with mature themes and tools (nudity) to aid players wishing to develop mature content.  A lot of the early criticism of the game from the gaming community was that it would be full of teenage I33t d00dz running around naked on their female avatars.  The game’s boobs would attract young, immature gamers who would ruin the whole immersive experience, driving away many players who would eventually go back to World of Warcraft or whatever other game they were playing and we would slowly see the demise of Age of Conan, until Warhammer came out and totally decimated its subscriptions.

Now before I continue I’d like to say that during the two months I played WoW I saw plenty, and I mean plenty, of female humans and blood elves standing around towns and cities in their underwear.

So what has AoC’s mature content meant?  Certainly there are more female avatars in AoC then I’ve seen in any of the MMO’s I’ve played.  I can vouch, to the best of my abilities, that some of, if perhaps not all of, our guild’s female characters are played by real females (Woot!  Girl gamers).  But I have no doubt that males are playing female characters too.  But has AoC attracted more women?

On the topic of gamers running around nude fighting each other, I haven’t seen any of it on my server.  And I seriously doubt it’s happening on a PvP server.  I doubt any PvPer would risk getting PWND just so he could have his tits out.

What I have seen is a lot of roleplay.  And this is not on any official RP server either, but Wiccana, the unofficial RP-PvE server.  It shows the strength of the RP community when they can name their own RP server and have a presence.  And not just guild RP, but inter guild RP and even random RP.  I was standing outside Sanctum waiting for my group to arrive when two Cimmerians came up to me and started random RPing.  In Everquest 2 you can flag yourself as a RPer and this changes the colour of the name above your head to purple.  But AoC doesn’t have such an option.  I was mightily pleased to find such a strong and mature RP community.  There are still I33t d00dz but they don’t RP so their impact is negligible.

So what else has Funcom’s mature rating brought to the game?  There have been a number of guilds advertising mature content.  Harlots of the Pirate Isles is one such guild and a snippet from their website describes the guild “…..is about prostitution, assassination, ‘black markets,’ shady secrets, and having large social connections around the world founded in shady dealings and dark alleyways…”.

Another guild, The Devoted, is even more riske offering “……the idea of the male high-class courtesan. To the public, members offer their service from simple escorts at social events over entertainment to sexual pleasure…..”.

If I were to sum up what Age of Conan’s mature rating, decapitations, and bare breasts have brought to the game, it would be a strong, mature, adult roleplay community.  At least that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.