Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Creeps’ numbers on our server are down. That is, in Player versus Monster Player play, we have fewer monsters. This makes sense: these are the Killers, and Age of Conan is designed for them, while the freeps are the folks who have done 50 levels of PvE. This will presumably repeat when WAR launches. This hurts when the creeps’ main advantage is having more bodies. The creeps can only hope for a PvE grindfest to arise and deplete their foes’ numbers.
: Zubon
Jeromai had a good comment that deserves a post in response. After listing all the stuff that City of Heroes has added in the past year, he asks: “Does ‘content’ just equal progress of story, or does it include all of the above?” I leaked terms. I started the post by discussing “gameplay,” then switched to calling it “content” at the end. It all goes back to sphexishness:
The actual content is what is new. “Kill ten rats†and “bring me ten rat tails†only add content to the extent that the quest text is novel. If you add an “orc shaman leader†that also has a freezing spell, that is new for the seconds that it takes me to work out “orc shaman + purple tint + second fireball with less damage and a slow effect.†City of Villains has endless newspaper missions, but really it is the same mission with a narrow range of variation.
The storyline is frequently the smallest addition because there is so little of it. A big update will have 10-15 minutes worth of reading, spread out across a number of quests and contacts. You read it once and you’re set. A new enemy group is added; most of them will have 2-3 powers, and the interesting ones will probably be using existing powers.
Take Issue 9’s Statesman Task Force. This is good stuff, and it probably took a long time to make. It is also 5-10 minutes of reading, 3-4 novel fights, and 2-3 hours of fighting the same Arachnos enemies that were already around. Take Issue 9’s revamped Hamidon fight. This is almost entirely new gameplay, with new things to learn and do. It is one of the purest gameplay additions City of Heroes has had. But that is one raid encounter.
I am not an especially visual person, so graphic upgrades don’t mean a lot to me. Issue 11 added dozens of new hairstyles and weapon appearances. You see them once, done. Issues 10 and 12 added new tilesets for missions. You learn the half-dozen new rooms and hallways, done.
A wolf is a rat with different numbers and graphics, maybe a different ability. The fundamental is the same. A goblin is a bipedal wolf, an orc shaman is a goblin with a fireball spell, and a dragon is a flying shaman. Almost everything in the game can be understood as fiddling with variables on a fairly simple template.
Most new content is a way of fiddling with the existing variables, possibly with new decorative touches. Hours of padding and repetition hide the fact that the “new” is only a few minutes long. Some of these are really great, but we are still killing ten rats. Really exciting new things go beyond the template.
: Zubon
Our playgrounds and virtual worlds are getting larger. This isn’t something that catches people by surprise; it’s pretty much commonly agreed. And they will only get larger and larger.
Donning my prophet hat on, I’d say that at some point -not really far away into the future- these games will become so massive, in terms of their own virtual expanse and number of subscribers, that “business as usual” as it relates to the way these games are managed, just won’t cut it anymore.
Perhaps in 10 or 15 years (no further than that, I’d say) we’re going to see the emergence into the mainstream of two very important things which will shape that generation of games. No, it won’t be the number of polys they cram in there, or how many gigs of VRAM you need on your card to hold all the textures properly, or anything like that. It’ll be something much less technical: The adoption into the mainstream of user-created content and the emergence of the Police Department.
We had cake and grief counseling. She sang the little song. Because my wife is awesome. I thought you should know.
: Zubon
“lolstalkers” has been a long-term issue for City of Villains. It is a great class for running newspaper missions solo or for ganking people in Warburg. For anything else in the game, you will want another class. Stalkers are one-trick ponies: burst damage from stealth. It is a very good trick, the kind of trick that one-shots lieutenants, but that’s all. The last attempt to bring them up to parity went a bit too far, so that small groups of Stalkers could take out Giant Monsters quickly. Now on test:
- Increased Stalker Melee damage multiplier from 0.9 base to 1.0 base.
- Increased Stalker Hit Points multiplier from 0.95 to 1.125
- All Stalker melee attacks now have a chance to critical while not hidden. This chance is equal to 10% plus 3% per additional team member within 30’ of the stalker at the time of the attack. This only applies to PVE targets. Stalkers old chance to critical Held or Slept targets now only applies to PVP targets.
- The Critical portion of Energy Transfer operates exactly as if you were criticalling from Hide — it eliminates the Self Damage, rather than increasing damage to the target.
- Using an Assassination attack and missing will no longer suppress Hide (though lesser stealth and invisibility powers will still suppress) if the attack misses. If the attack hits, Hide suppresses normally.
- Hide Suppression for Stalkers reduced from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
- Assassination attacks now cause a demoralizing effect on PVE targets that survive the attack. Demoralized targets To Hit value is reduced, and the target may be frozen in terror.
Adding all those together, that is about a 50% sustained DPS increase in full groups, plus more survivability and utility. Is this enough without scaling Assassin Strike? Is Assassin Strike love coming? Stay tuned!
: Zubon
This is what happens in Age of Conan if you get set on fire too many times:
– Ethic
My favorite bugs for this patch are not officially “known issues,” although this one is a humdinger: “Using the /option_toggle command will cause a client crash.”
There are probably more. Personally, I might have waited until after the first bug-fixing patch to re-activate all accounts for the weekend to let people try this. But that’s not my call.
: Zubon
– Ethic
I have played through all the new Issue 12 content you can with an existing hero. It is a long evening of play: a story arc to unlock the Midnighter’s Club, reading things in the Midnighter’s Club, a new task force, look at architecture on the new island, a few missions that are all about reading backstory, and a contact with endless template missions. The new gameplay is pretty much that task force. The new enemy group has fewer than a dozen enemies in it, so you mostly fight the same three minions, one lieutenant, and one boss until you hit an elite boss or three. The last mission includes “defeat 300” of these, so you will be on that map for a while. The guys in my supergroup want that Oracle costume for all their female characters.
This is a time for new characters. I have one more villain story arc to try, then the remaining new content is the villain epic archetype. There are some new powers to try, but most of Power Proliferation is porting existing powers to different archetypes. I can’t knock that, as we had a hoot rampaging with low-level characters using the proliferated powers, but it is a new way of hitting old content. Oh, and I should poke around the redecorated Hollows more, although we hit the zone on our new characters.
Issue 11 recycled old content via flashbacks. Issue 12 recycles old content via new characters. I am hoping that Issue 13 has more new content, although I am not expecting it until October. We are somewhat slower than the stated plan of three new issues per year, although I suppose we could count 11.5 as a significant update. It just feels like Turbine puts out this much content every month or two for its games.
: Zubon
I got my hands on a copy of Age of Conan a lot earlier than I had planned on buying my own, so I went ahead and installed it. The following are my first impressions from playing through the very first area on my way towards the town of Tortage. You’ll have to excuse the scattershot topic jumping.
It seems all the male faces are portraying the “less than a full deck” look. I had to play a female instead because of that. Really, are nipples *that* important to the game? One of the first cut scenes used a generic character to represent mine, that bothered me. Can we get some *more* splash screens to click past during log in? Where is the log out option so I can switch characters? I don’t want to exit the game and then log in again. I found a helmet and put it on, did not like it so I chose the “don’t show helmet” option and it took off my hair too (update: I’m told this bug was actually the result of changing into and out of the demon form – I did both around the same time). I crashed at log out most of the time and once when I tried to get a screenshot. I don’t really have any opinions on the user interface. It didn’t get in the way of me doing what I needed to do, so I guess that is good enough for now.
The scenery is lush and amazing (keep in mind this was just in the single player area so far). The male characters run funny. I had a few of those bloody critical kill blows but the only way I could tell is because blood splashed on my screen. My character blocked the view of the big moves. Combat is fun so far, a little different – but nothing amazing about it. It makes you pay more attention, which is good. The world (again, intro solo area impressions only) makes me feel walled in, restricted to certain areas. Does not feel like a seamless world, which is an important thing for the explorer in me. The hints might be helpful but I went out of my way to get them off the screen and did not read them.
Class choices seem very interesting. I tried a Herald of Xotli and a Ranger. The Herald of Xotli could turn into a demon, which is always a cool thing. When I was the Ranger I needed to switch from bow to sword frequently. The key to do that is “Shift + R”. G15 keyboard to the rescue. The sound your character makes when you find something is silly. “Aha!”. I found a broken bottle on the beach, picked it up, and used it as a weapon – cool. I seemed to level up really fast.
It looks like the launch was quite solid and I’m impressed. If you like Conan, this appears to be a big win. There is a lot more to the game I’d like to discover and so I will continue to play it as my second game for now. Congratulations to Funcom for fixing the multitudes of problems I was hearing about from beta testers. I will post more as I get time to play.
– Ethic