Special subscription offers and double XP throughout November!

Today we launched a new campaign with some massive rewards on purchases of longer period subscriptions.

If you extend your subscription to Age of Conan in November, you will receive some amazing rewards:

Extend by 3 months and get a guaranteed access to the beta test for The Secret World *

Extend by 6 months and get an epic helmet for Age of Conan with a 10% XP boost + the reward above

Extend by 12 months and get the Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer expansion for free plus both rewards mentioned above **

If you just recently extended your subscription, don’t worry. Those who have committed to the 6 month or 12 month subscription after the 6th of October 2009 will automatically receive the corresponding reward too. Gametime purchased now will immediately give Veteran Points.

This offer is available until December 1st 2009, so don’t miss it!

To properly celebrate this campaign we also activate double XP in Age of Conan for everyone all through the month of November! Use the /claim command to receive potions of double XP!

* Access to later stages of the closed beta, date of access to be announced
** When launched in first half of 2010
Each bonus item can only be received once per account. The helmet is made available to all characters on your account.

This will require some quick contemplation. Most likely I’m going to pass.

- Ethic

They are giving things away in game, like fireworks and extra character slots. Congratulations, Funcom!

It’s definitely been an interesting year, full of challenges and adventure, and we are really looking forward to the coming year as well. So the toast at the King’s Table is to the year that has passed and in anticipation of the year that is to come!

- Ethic

Warhammer does this very well. Tutorial? More or less none; proceed straight to the war. You start on a battlefield. I started as a Greenskin, which is probably why I bought the game. Take a few steps forward from the log-in spot, and you can see dwarves attacking. The Dwarf area is much the same, with squigs and goblins running around the cave next door and giant cannons pointed at the enemy. NPCs are blasting each other in case you did not get the idea. The elf pairing has the gentlest, and therefore worst, introduction. Your starting spot feels safe, and your first enemies are tiny fairies. Even there, you have attacking forces 10 seconds away, and the good guys get to shoot down harpies with a ballista. Win.

The Lord of the Rings Online™ does this pretty well. The opening is pretty tame, but it immediately tosses in the things you want from Lord of the Rings. If you are a hobbit, you immediately see a Black Rider. Dwarves start next to Gandalf in a scene referenced in The Hobbit, and they proceed to a troll fight. Elves get a troll too, and humans and elves both start with the world burning down around them. It is not a great, action-packed intro, but it gives you the setting while you get your bearings.

City of Heroes is a mixed bag. Outbreak is very weak, notably the “run in a straight line” bits. Breakout is better, with a more interesting map and a mass NPC slugfest. The real awesomeness of City of Heroes, however, is the costume designer. Even before you put your character in the world, you pick from a mess of powers, see the cool toys that lie in wait, and then probably spend a ridiculous amount of time playing with paper dolls. That kind of thing makes the slow start of actual gameplay tolerable.

Many other games do it badly. I don’t even bother to mention most that I try. They were not worth the time to download, even if I downloaded while I slept. That thread has a bit of hate for Age of Conan, but they had the presence of mind to make the 1-20 game one of the most celebrated bits of content around.

: Zubon

Anyone want to comment on WoW’s opening? I tried a few way back in beta. The Undead was the most impressive. Dwarves were kind of meh.

- Ethic

If the game is irredeemable dreck, there is no point in discussing its problems.
…
Bugs, queues, and crashes are upsetting because they stand between us and the fun that we know to lie just beyond them.

Or as Rog puts it, “It’s because the game is good that makes it worth discussing and even bitching about the bugs, issues and design oversights. If it wasn’t good, who’d care?”

Or sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

: Zubon

Bonus points if you thought of Marit Larsen.

With a hat tip to, oh, everyone, female characters do less damage in Age of Conan. Not on every possible attack, but at least on that revolutionary melee combat that will change everything, female characters do less damage. They have longer animations with no corresponding improvement in damage. There is no evidence that this was intended, although you can easily find comments about how women should do less damage in a Hyborean setting (and if you think so, try a Gorean setting). No one properly tested the differing animations. [fixed that for you - ed.]

And it will not be fixed for months. This is understandable: check and possibly change every animation in the game, get it right this time, and see if there are related balance issues. These are good things to check before selling the game, but they are biting that bullet. In the meantime, this is very convenient for bloggers. You get stories when the bug is noted, when players test it, when Funcom confirms it, when Funcom announces the delay to fix, when the fix eventually arrives, post-fix testing, each of several patches to fix the fix, and every patch in the meantime when you can snark, “Funcom is looking at female characters’ animations again. But they’re still just staring at the boobies! lol!” So I’m getting my shot in now, between waves.

: Zubon

Lord of the Rings Online had been my main game for the past year and I was not expecting to stop playing it until Warhammer Online came out. After a few weeks of AoC, I can’t even bear to play LotRO at all. I love the lore of Middle-earth and I know next to nothing of the Conan world and yet, I find myself eagerly reading all the Hyborian quest text presented before me.

So why am I having so much fun? I expected bugs and poor design. Instead, the bugs encountered are hardly noticed as I run past swinging swords in a flurry of blood and guts. The visceral feel of the game really pulls me in. Instead of a sleepy auto-attack system, I feel like I’m right in the heat of battle trying to pull off intricate 3 and 4 maneuver combos dropping every foe before my feet. I rush into crowds and usually end up the only one standing. I *feel* powerful and I love it.

Admittedly, when I started playing I was put off by the heavily instanced areas and did not feel like it was a world I could happily explore in. All of that changed once I finished the first 20 levels of the new player experience and left the city of Tortage behind. As I emerged in the “real” lands of Hyboria, the instancing seemed just right. I could climb the mountains before me and travel to what is beyond. Still, I really feel the instancing is what allows each area to be so heavily landscaped and lush without breaking my computer. The world feels so real to me now. The fog rolling across the valley is exactly how I would expect it to look.

I’ve played most every class and they all feel wonderfully over-powered at some point in the early game. The mages are a bit tougher to play in the beginning but they get better as they level, which is not unusual. The melee classes are just super powerful from the start. Taking on groups of 3 or 4 mobs at once is a treat. Each swing of the sword damages all of them. Perhaps they will tune their power down in the future, but that would be too bad in my opinion because right now the combat is a blast. I hope to never see auto-attack again.

The attack combos of the melee classes and the Ranger are where the combat really shines for me. Using most skills will enable a follow up directional attack (or a chain of several directional attacks) which, if done properly, will cause a you to gain a buff or inflict more damage on the enemy. The casting classes are left behind in this area as they just have a spell to cast. There is no follow up attack you can use. Hopefully the “spellweaving” feature will make up for this. I am hoping to take a caster up high enough to try it and find out.

The quest text is fed out in a conversational style and I really enjoy it being done this way. All future MMOs need to use this method. AoC’s conversation options do not make a difference which is certainly a bad choice. I should be able to impact my quest by choosing how I respond to the quest giver but here all the choices appear to end up in the same place and that is a shame. Still, it is an improvement over the “page of text to read and click OK” of previous games’ design.

I am having great fun exploring the world before me. Just the other day I came across some rough steps in the mountains. I followed them up for a while and then came to a tunnel into the mountain. I passed through that and came out in what appeared to be a huge abandoned temple. I crossed a rope bridge into the temple and spotted a large statue a *long* ways off. I was really impressed with the size of this place and the level of detail provided for as far as my eye could see. I ran for a good while toward the statue and finally realized it was of a giant snake and I literally got frightened. I turned around and high-tailed it out of there. It has been a long time since my gut reaction overruled my brain rationalizing that it’s just a game. I really felt like I was going to get in trouble for walking on sacred lands or something.

So are there bugs? Yes there are. Does the game need work? Yes it does. Is it fun? Very fun. If this is the direction game design is going, focusing on fun even at the expense of some finishing touches, I’m all for it. It is weird for me to be so forgiving of issues with a game. I’ve got a pretty extensive experience playing most of the major MMOs going back to Asheron’s Call and it feels really good to be having fun at this high of a level again. It has been a while… I hope it lasts.

- Ethic

My favorite example is the classic wall of fire. If you run through it, will you (a) shrug it off and crash into the cowardly wizard behind, setting him ablaze as you cleave him in two (in slow motion, with blood spray); (b) take a level-appropriate amount of damage, slightly softening you up before the big fight; (c) slip harmlessly through the gap in the jets of flame that you keenly identified; or (d) be instantly incinerated down to your skeleton, you idiot, why did you run into a giant wall of magic hellfire?

In the world of Conan the Barbarian, muscle beats magic. (This is by reputation; I have not read much of the original.) Spells are time-consuming, difficult and, easy to disrupt. If the wizard begins chanting as you enter his chamber, you will probably have time to dispatch his bodyguard, clear any obstacles, flex your mighty pectorals, and plant a large blade in his chest before he finishes his spell. Tying up your victims for sacrifice is popular when battlefield magic can get you killed.

Please see this Age of Conan spellweaving video. Explanation here. Yes, that person is spending more than two minutes straight spellweaving, with a few fun debuffs that leave him vulnerable the whole time. The special effects build in impressiveness as the magic reaches its crescendo. You can imagine the dark wizard summoning his forces of fang or flame about him, calling together eldritch power with a look that vacillates between triumph and terror as the hero catches his eye and rushes across the field of battle. The air becomes hazy and palpably vibrates. Our hero briefly contemplates throwing his axe before committing to the charge, weapon held high, ready to slash the wizard from throat to hip. Will the villain cry the last word of his spell, turning the blood in our champion’s veins to fire, or will he simply cry as he chokes on his own blood?

: Zubon

Thanks to F13.net.

- Ethic

Brian “Psychochild” Green (I think he legally changed his name to that, complete with quotes, since I never see him called anything else. I forgot to check his license at IMGDC) spoke of the early stages of MMO development. This one is good enough to come back to single time, but I’m telling you now so that you can read it a few times before we discuss it. (via)

Alex Taldren suggests that Princess Peach should get a job.

Alex also suggested that MMO Gamers are lazy and not really gamers.

Should this t-shirt remind me of Scott Jennings?

Saylah at Mystic Worlds discusses We We Solo in MMOs. (Okay, that was April, but I read it in May.)

How about (the apparently nearly most influential person in the MMO world) Scott Hartsman on being organizationally broken? Bonus chance to hate on Dell, if you like. I have commented previously on an outsider’s view of organizational failures in MMOs.

“The Midnight Squad” trailer from City of Heroes is pretty good. I have some editing disputes, but their call. The other one for Issue 12 is less entertaining, but it has some fun with costumes in the crowd. If you missed the magic and Rikti connection in Issue 10, this is a good time to hit that part of the story again.

Many people reviewed Age of Conan. Many many many, too many for me to remember whose I’ve seen. Here are Ethic, Saylah, Keen and Graev, ferv0r, and pretty much all of Tobold and Bildo’s sites for late May. Need a leveling flowchart? Jalum’s review that I linked earlier is probably non-relevant, especially since the miracle patch(es) seems to have miracled pretty well (by varying accounts). I hear a strange mix of “great launch,” “meh, yet another WoW clone with 5% difference,” and “game-breaking bugs and exploits” (to say nothign of the early launch).

Are you reading Ding!? Also pre-May (February), but I think it is a recent addition to our blogroll. WoW-themed webcomic from Scott Kurtz.

Another new friend on our blogroll: The Battered Shield. He has some interesting stuff to say.

Ending off-topic, Greg forms words to list 100 Must-See Movies.

: Zubon