AOC - Age of conan - Hyborian Adventures

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:07:01 +0200

Long title but interesting folklore backing the game up, instantly Arnie is brought to mind with muscles galore and big swords.

The game however is something far from that sparkly image of hollywood.

Age of conan - drops you into the world of hyboria and allows you to play out your gritty conan styled wishes.

AOC starts with a crash your then dragged from the ocean depths by magic and placed on a beach where the adventure begins (and use the term "adventure" loosely).

The city of tortage island is the noob(new player) island of AOC, its here where you learn the new combat system and then also quickly realise how little time in character development has been spent.

Skills appear at odd levels and are inter-spersed with updates, also every 5 lvls or so a new move, pity it that looks exactly the same as the last one but does soemthing else that you cant quite see the effect of, making each move/combo non sequential.

Once in the city and again I use city loosely, its more a town, you can play solo at night - destiny type quests your intro to the lore and story or multiplayer ie daytime.

A clever idea that again doesnt work that well.

You will hit many a time the next part of the destiny night time quests and find your lacking in skills, level, and or equipment and so have to revert back to mulitplayer to gain some more before coming back again, the mulitplayer side is camped bosses and spots were everyone runs around in solo or mini groups, theres nothing social to this game in the opening stages at all.

Also this games employs game zones, I wont say instancing as this gives you the impression of specific zones for you and your party to enjoy.

Oh no theres none of this in here.

It employs the method people who played Guild Wars will be familar with, it duplicates zones when a certain limit, with one is reached and it duplicates another, also employ more for the better in EQ2...but this fools many a group member thinking they are having glitches in the machines, due to the fact that theyre standing on the spot as the rest of their group and wondering why they cant see them.

Guild Wars instigated this for one main reason - cost.
To keep costs down and allow it still to be free.

AOC and Funcom are a big franchise with a good track record this factor eludes me to why they have put this into the game and then charge for the pleasure where Guild Wars doesnt.

This then proceeds to pull away the big open world feeling and make it less an MMO and just a very large multiplayer game.

Beyond the city of tortage the content the skills and so on starts to dwindle and its get less and less interesting as it progresses.

Zones are everywhere from walking into a dungeon to travelling down a road, there are bugs too lots of them, armour and stats are non-sequential ie they dont matter and pvp is riddled by the bad profession balancing that has been put in place.

The forums are full of people moaning and crying out for another class to be nerfed(ie fixed) then as Funcom are now being ruled by the masses in an effort to please them all, the game is flipping one extreme to another.

But at the end of it your left with one good thing the combat system, fatalities like chopping peoples heads off are good and weirdly satisfying. But you cant base a whole game one thing.

Avoid the game until they manage to settle it to a workable state, even then only take a look if you liked Guild wars.

Best described as Guild Wars on steroids, this games lack polish so much so Pledge could be the main sponsors.

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(Disclaimer - I am not a wow fanboi, i hated the game for years for what it did to grouping and the solo grind thats its instigated but in the marketplace it really has the most to offer and it takes the fun out of itself, theres a serious game with underlying comical content)

On the WOW subject I would like to just pose this question - everyone claims how this game isnt like WOW and or this one doesnt want to be, lets face WOW is one of the best MMO's out there and has been for 4 years now.

Whats so wrong with taking WOW format and adding another style to it, all the best of WOW but in star wars setting for eg?

The ease of WOW pick and play and something for the more serious is the attractive part. Its easy to play it, the game isnt easy but to get into it is.

I would happily purchase a copy of Blizzards Star Wars if it had all the same features as the current WOW with a Star wars skin and characters over the top of it..

Wouldnt you?

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Welcome

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:19:45 +0200

Welcome to Gortz's Gaming

A review and general overview on the PC gaming and more importantly MMO industry.

I have been writing reviews for years whilst I have never taken the hobby full time or posted anywhere of note, I have recevied many an acclaim from readers and fellow writers.

Such boards as MMORPG.com and other similar larger known review sites.

These are purely my views and to be taken into consideration only, as with all things everyone has a different angle, experience of the game so to take any reviewers word as gospel would be plain silly.

However I have been remarked before that I have "potential" and that I should persue a journalism career.

So here goes read away people.

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