No, my issue is not with a few bugs or technical issues that a new title experiences, but rather the lack of content. I don’t mean quests, I have plenty of those even at level 54, but it’s the lack of things to actually do. Let’s have a look at what the game offers.

Harvesting. This is so mind numbingly boring and I refuse to waste any of my game time doing this.

Crafting. In my opinion, crafting should be completely scrapped and rewritten, but that’s just my opinion.

PvP. This is where a population decrease is most evident. I usually flag myself for a PvP mini-game when I log on. In the first month of release I was getting a few PvP games in, but I haven’t been able to get into a game for a week or more now. The fact that I can’t find 12 likeminded people to PvP with is a concern. Whether there is an awesome PvP game at level cap I don’t know.

So if I’m not harvesting, crafting, or participating in PvP, what am I doing? The main part of any MMOG, and I’ll include all these under the one heading, is adventuring. By adventuring I mean questing, grouping, exploring, running dungeons, levelling; all those aspects of an MMORPG.

I’m not a huge fan of the way questing is handled in the modern MMORPG and it’s no different in AoC. Funcom tried something different with their cut-scene type approach but whether you are reading a wall of text or listening to a voice-over in the end you still want to get to the point and find out how many of X you need to kill. And this goes hand in hand with my next gripe.

Soloing. I don’t really like it all that much. For me it’s the sort of thing I like to do when I don’t have much time or the servers are quiet or I just can’t be bothered grouping. But I’d like a game to be 60% group content and 40% solo. I’ve soloed 50 out of 54 levels and it’s getting really stale. I’ve had a total of seven groups in the entire time that I’ve played, eight if you include the PUG I joined where the whole group wiped three times without killing a single thing and I bailed. What will the remaining 26 levels be like?

Grouping itself is dissatisfying. Group XP is less than solo XP and it’s quicker, easier, and safer to level solo than in a group. And I’m not entirely happy with the group dynamics and how the classes work, or at least how the healers work. AoC’s combat is fast and furious and this works in the solo game, but grouping lacks the challenges and rewards that I’m used to seeing in a group. Tobold made a comment that really hit home for me:

My last example is combat. Having played several different MMORPGs this year, I noticed that one typical fight in each game takes a different amount of time, and a different number of keystrokes. For example in Age of Conan combat is very quick; at level 1 some casters can kill a level 1 mob with a single spell. World of Warcraft has a medium speed combat. And other games are even slower. Again that is an important design decision which is completely numerical. If combat is faster, it becomes less tactical.

I’m pleased that Funcom went the way of mature content. Having heads fly off enemies and blood splatter the screen will never get old, and the character models look fantastic, but I hope there is more to this game than headless corpses and boobies. If it wasn’t for the strong roleplay community and a guild that I’m really enjoying I would probably cancel my subscription. As it stands I shall persevere a little longer, maybe I’ve just had a couple of bad days, but right now Age of Conan feels a lot like a console RPG of a decade ago, lacking the depth and complexity that defines the MMORPG genre.

It’s not the first time this topic has been addressed but I thought I’d revisit it, for no other reason then to express my opinion on the whole subject in as few or as many words as I can.

Reminiscing about Dark Age of Camelot I don’t recall doing many quests at all.  Certainly in the first dozen levels it was very quest oriented, but by the time I was able to join the first battleground (back then the first one was lvl 20) questing became a rather infrequent pastime.  RvR gave you XP so that was one way to level.  The other times I would group and we would sit on a hill pulling giant toads or camp a hallway in a dungeon.  Darkness Falls, when we held it, was another good option.  But questing, I might have done one or two quests every 10 levels.  They were usually a pain in the arse, requiring a lot of travelling back and forth.  Questing was what I did on those quiet nights when I couldn’t get a group or when I was sick of camping and grinding.

Everquest 2, being true to its name, introduced me to questing as a way of levelling,  and every MMO I’ve played since has done things in much the same way.  Grinding, for the most part, is a thing of the past.  Vanguard is an exception because it requires grinding faction for certain quests, and questing in VG feels like grinding half the time anyway.  This is how questing goes for me.

I’ll enter my new zone/area and go to the village/town.  I’ll run around the town, clicking on everyone who has an exclamation mark floating above their heads.  I don’t bother reading the text.  In the first few levels I might but after a while I lose all interest.  Once I have my objectives I’ll go to the spots marked on my map, complete the objectives, and head back to the quest giver to turn in. 

I don’t like questing in the modern MMOG.  Don’t get me wrong, I like some quests, but too often they’re uninspiring and serve no other purpose then to have you kill X amount of Y and return to claim a reward.  Quests that serve a purpose, such as directing you to a new area or sending you into a dungeon, I like.  But to collect a bunch of kill tasks only to return after completion to get a pair of boots is dull.

For that kind of kill task I’d prefer they were done differently.  I would rather grind a type of mob and then for every 20th mob of a type I kill consecutively, I would get bonus XP and a decent loot drop.  When I enter a new zone a quest NPC might say something like “The cannibals to the north west have a rich horde”.  Then I would know that I can gain bonus XP and phat loot by grinding this mob.

I don’t want to go back to the days of grinding mobs like in Dark Age of Camelot, nor do I like the way quests are done in today’s MMOG.  I’m not sure what a realistic solution is but this is one area that truly needs some innovation.

In previous MMOGs there has always been a shortage of healers. You always required at least one healer for any group, and some encounters may have use for a second, or backup, healer. And understandably they were always in short supply. Playing a healer required a particular kind of player; someone who preferred group over solo play and who found the success of a group more rewarding than individual success. Healers were, for the most part, difficult to play solo. They never did high damage to mobs and in some cases wore light armour. Levelling a healer could take considerably more time then other classes.

But MMOGs are ever evolving beasts and over the years the healer class has come under a lot of scrutiny. Gamers have complained of a lack of healers and developers have introduced more solo content to their games, not the healer’s strong point. So we’ve seen the healer evolve to make it a better solo class in the hope that it would appeal to more players. And it seems to be working. No longer are we just a heal bot. But why would someone want to play a healer now anyway? There are still better solo classes after all.

I think it’s because most MMO gamers don’t want to solo. We want to be able to solo of course and want solo content, but for those times when we can’t group for lack of time, or just don’t feel like it. And that’s why we’re seeing a lot of healers these days. People are rolling this class in the hope that they’ll be in demand and be able to get a group whenever they want one. I mean, who wants to solo for 80 levels so they can raid or PvP? No doubt there are some of you out there but it’s not me.

In the end the popularity of the healer class in Warhammer will come down to how well it does in PvP. The popularity of the healer class in general will be influenced by how much demand there is for them in groups. Initially I intended to play a healer in WAR but that’s no longer my first option. The loss of the Knight of the Blazing Sun and Blackguard class has negated my next option. So I’m seriously considering rolling a Swordmaster or Shadow Warrior as my first character. When you consider that I’ve played a healer as my main in almost every MMOG that I’ve played, I guess it’s a significant moment for me. If I can’t get a group as a healer then there’s little point in playing the class, it becomes obsolete.  No longer will I need to worry about speccing my character to optimise my healing abilities at the cost of being able to solo and dish out damage.  I can selfishly spec him to be a solo beast or PvP killing machine.

There are a ton of folks coming out on the side of the Mythic team, which is really heartening to see. I agree that it’s better to ship with fewer, better features - MMOG Nation

I’m not worried about WAR because of this announcement…far from it. We will see these features in either an expansion or a future update - Common Sense Gamer

But not all are this positive.  The Grouchy Gamer had this to say.

I’m really starting to get concerned that WAR is going to be a (relative) market flop.  Not because of the quality of the game.  Not because of anything I have seen in beta. I’m just concerned because I’m hearing way too many people put their eggs in this basket.

And then there’s these comments from Keen.

The game is still in development and changes are often made.  These changes are huge changes to be made months before release but at least Mythic came out and told us about it ….. In the end we’re still going to receive a finished product …

I’m not surprised by Keen’s comments.  I know his a DAoC fan (as am I), but they come across as hypocritical when juxtaposed with his topic on releasing unfinished MMOs.

I simply do not understand where people picked up the notion that simply because MMORPGs are ever evolving and changing worlds that they can be underdeveloped and unfinished.

Warhammer will be a success despite this news provided there are no major issues on release, and this is where I owe Tipa an apology.  She argued that it would be the masses fleeing World of Warcraft that would be the ones playing Warhammer.  I didn’t agree with her, since I planned to play WAR and I never really got into WoW.  But I have to say that now I agree with her; it is the WoW fanbois who are and will be the WAR fanbois.

“…….the introduction of two new classes…..fitted out in heavy scale armour the Shock Troop provides a much needed soldier class for the Stygians …. the Scholar, a powerful Aquilonian wizard ………discover the new lands of Darfar and Kush and venture deep into the Black Kingdoms ……take the battle to the Hyrkanians in the new battlegrounds of Turan and conquer NPC controlled battlekeeps and claim them as your own, then defend them against other players in new constant PvP…..”

None of this is true. I made it up. Sorry if I got anyone excited out there, but I did it to highlight a few things.

When I started playing Dark Age of Camelot it had already been out a while and was onto its second expansion, the Trials of Atlantis. By the time I’d picked up Everquest 2 it was with the release of Kingdom of Sky, their second expansion. I held off on trying EQ2 because it lacked a PvP element. KoS introduced one and I spent about five months on a PvP server before I decided I didn’t like their PvP much and changed servers. World of Warcraft had been out for over a year before I tried it.

Of the dozen or so MMOs I’ve played, not including betas, only three of them I purchased and played from release; Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Age of Conan. So what’s my point?

When I played DAoC, EQ2, and WoW they were all polished games with an expansion or two under their belts. Like all MMOs they were constantly evolving, introducing new features and improving on existing ones. Hell, EQ2 only introduced the Dressing Room with which to view armour before purchase last year. Conversely, TR, PotBS, and AoC were not polished; missing key features, buggy, requiring optimising; the list could go on. Actually, listing AoC with TR and PotBS doesn’t do it justice because I think it’s monumentally a better game. 

So if we look to the future, what kind of game would Age of Conan be and what might an expansion include? We already know to expect new zones and new battlekeeps in a future update, though the delivery date is still uncertain. And assuming that AoC doesn’t get decimated by the Warhammer release, and I think it won’t, or go the way of Vanguard, 18 months on from release and still no expansion, well then what would you want to see?

You have truly painted a different picture here than what 99% of so many other forums and websites have shown.
How about your guild? How are logins? Are people still coming in on a regular basis?
Any boss fights yet?
Any work on the Trader yet?
Try to rebind any hotkeys?
Have you gone into Arena?

What class are you…ToS? PoM? these are the 2 favored classes right now for Funcom, with others getting various sundries broken.
I am willing to listen to an alternate view, because the masses are speaking very low of this game,…I mean beyond Vanguard failure talk.

But, if i can see someone else is really having fun then I would like to continue to hear that.

Thanks

 The guild I’m in, Eternal Coil, is one of the highlights for me right now.  My guild mates are a great bunch of people and great roleplayers.  It continues to grow steadily and there hasn’t been many complaints directed at Funcom or people threatening to leave.  Generally most people appear to be enjoying the game, with some exceptions of course.  The female  avatar dps issue continues to surface as well as problems with the Dark Templar class.  We had an issue with one of our members not being able to zone into the guild city but that seems to have resolved itself.  And it seems we can’t enter our city’s temple due to some invisible wall where the door should be.  Funcom’s response to this problem has been comical.  Our options are to ignore the problem and hope it gets patched.  Tear down the temple and rebuild it or lastly, and this is my favourite, disband the guild so our guild city goes “Poof!” and then reform and rebuild.  Funcom has stated that they will not reimburse us any materials or costs.  Considering that we have built all our tier 1 structures that is a lot, an aweful lot, of materials and probably in excess of 70 gold.

Boss fights.  If you mean end game raid bosses then I can’t comment on these.  No one in our guild is over level 60 yet.

I’ve been using the trader regularly, selling materials and buying whatever upgrades I can get.  I’m a Gemcutter and Weaponsmith but I haven’t done much smithing.  My gemcutting’s coming along alright though.  I bought a player crafted level 50 hammer from the trader and placed my own crafted gems in the three slots.  At first one of the gems wouldn’t show up at all but that only lasted a couple of days and now they’re all there and I haven’t lost any while zoning or anything like that.

I haven’t tried rebinding hotkeys.

For the Arena, I was able to speak with Aquilus a while ago and enter the Arena.  I’m up to the Pict Chief fight but wasn’t able to solo it so haven’t been back since.

My class is a Tempest of Set.  I’ve tried most of the other classes but never beyond level seven.  I tried rolling a Guardian and a Dark Templar because of the lack of a tank class for Stygians and a shortage of them in our guild, but I keep going back to my Tempest.  I really like this class and happily haven’t seen any mention of it in the patch notes, not since the earlier days where it was brutally assaulted with the nerf bat.  Of course, there’s always the possibility of a stealth nerf but there’s nothing I can do about that so no point worrying about it.  My only concern is whether I should have rolled a Priest of Mitra instead.  I have it in my head that the PoM is a more capable healer.  I don’t know if that’s true or not and I’m not in the mood to roll another healer at this stage. 

I’ve said it before but I’ll reiterate; I’m really enjoying Age of Conan.  Sure, there are things about it that I don’t like.  The UI for a start, guild management tabs, chat channels.  I didn’t like instances at first but lately I’ve been using them to my advantage so the jury’s still out on that one.  Funcom’s title is not the best thing since sliced bread and it’s no WoW killer, but when I look at the six MMO shortcuts that are still on my desktop, none of them make me want to reactivate their accounts.  Hyboria is a place I want to visit again and again.

 Greetings fellow players. While it has been some time since I last gave you an update, I wanted to touch base and let you know what we are working on at the moment and where we are going in the times to come. I want this update to focus on what is actually happening to the game now, what we have done, and also some of the reasoning behind our choices going forward. As you all know we have been live for some seven weeks by now, and what a period it has been! While Conan has sold more and performed better than even we could have hoped for, we also know that there have been things we had to work on. I will not try to hide from this fact, but I hope you have seen our steady stream of improvements and additions, in fact, even more than I would have thought possible! I am definitively proud of the team and what they have done after launch, and I think everyone agrees that we are making Conan better, all the time.

We are also keeping almost the entire development team ON the Age of Conan live team for the foreseeable future, meaning we can make exciting new content updates on an ongoing basis. Still, let me underline that our main – main – focus at the moment are bugs, stability and performance! I might not talk very much about the details here, but the frequency of the patches and their contents speak for itself. (more…)

Oddly enough another pattern is emerging.  I get through each patch unscathed.  I may have noticed a bit of hitching, but maybe I just thought I noticed hitching because a lot of people were talking about it.  I’m not saying that these problems aren’t real, or that they don’t affect anyone, merely that I seem to be lucky for some reason.  I played for six hours today and experienced no problems whatsoever and had a blast.  Fortunately PvP isn’t an issue for me yet because I’m only level 52.  I feel for those people that have reached level 80 and are trying to get some decent battlekeep PvP happening.  Considering Age of Conan was touted as a PvP game it must be disappointing for those people that are heavily focused on this area.

On a lighter note I found myself in a duo with a Bear Shaman (BS).  Now I don’t recall ever being grouped with a BS before and I don’t see too many about.  The BS was level 53 and I was 52.  The two of us were ripping through groups of level 55’s without even breaking a sweat as we worked our way through some quests.  We then followed a path and came across level 57 and 58 mobs which we handled without a fuss.  Our highlight was a level 60 mammoth that we took on.  It was an epic battle, with adds popping up and entering into the fray, and it took a long time to bring the mammoth down.  I even had time to enter spell-weaving in our bid to drop this beast.

I really hope Funcom sought their shit out.  For me Age of Conan is a lot of fun and I’d rather see a healthy, vibrant community then one with whiners, cancelled accounts, and a fear of server mergers.