My game friends are hammering me to buy this… so what’s the word on it? Everything I read says good things, but that happens with every new MMORPG. Is this gonna be another one that I drop $50 on and play for 2 hours then put it up? Or is it really going to be something different?
It’s got a very cute rabbit at the start. 
I too am interested. I grew up with the Conan books. I’ve never played a MMO before except for Aces High which doesn’t really count here. But I’m wondering what its unique selling points are. If it’s just Conan, then I think I’ll pass. Similarly, if it requires a cutting edge machine, I’ll pass too.
The selling points are pretty much:
[ul]
[li]Conan[/li][li]PVP-centric. For me, that is a drawback.[/li][li]Realm vs Realm combat[/li][li]Combat that is presumably more involved than skill-queuing[/li][/ul]
You can see Gamespy’s write-up of the beta for more.
RR
Just as an amusing side-note, the Google ad served up for me on this page is . . .
Undo Circumcision Damage - The Your-Skin Cone will make you supple and sensitive like uncut men!
I find that strangely hilarious. Was it trying to match up “Conan” and “Your-Skin Cone,” maybe?
RR
I’m wondering if the age-rating will also be a selling point? No kiddies. As for the milieu, how’s LOTR Online doing? (Though I think the latter did themselves no favours by placing the setting as the Fourth Age - better would have been the First.) The point being that WOW has a lot of inertia on its side and a sufficiently interesting milieu.
It’s not RvR, it’s FFA PvP.
Also, it’s not PvP centric, it’s been touted from the start as a hyrbrid game, and it does indeed have a good amount of PvE.
It’s an interesting hybrid, to be sure. The first 20 levels (of 50, IIRC) are played almost entirely solo and possibly offline. The combat is touted to be very complex at higher levels, and requires a far greater deal of user interaction than, say, WoW. The numbers crunching is toned down and as far as I can tell without violating the NDA, the different characters play fairly differently.
Funcom’s ideas are good and they’ve got the follow-through to make good games. Their storytelling abilities are not in doubt - The Longest Journey and Dreamfall - but some raise doubts about their capability to produce the next big MMO.
My personal chief concern is the level of polish of the game at launch. I was at The Gathering in Hamar this easter, where their representatives (one Norwegian and an American) showed up with some beta version to showcase the game. While to their credit they were able to get it up and running and actually quickly connect and play with people working on the game in the US, for the presentation, the game looked like it had a lot of polish-time left to be well-received at launch. And I mean a lot.
That said, I’m very confident in Funcom’s ability to make good games and I trust them explicitly when it comes to delivering good stories and good support for their games.
To conclude, I highly recommend the game; just not at launch. As with any other MMO, the first three weeks after launch will be a chaotic crash&burn-fest with servers going down, up, sideways and into the roundabout, patches being released on a weekly basis, etc. I’ve got my pre-order in already, since I’m a nationalistic asshole, but even I probably won’t play for the first month.
This intrigues me. Can you choose to continue playing offline? Is there any offline aspect to the later part of the game, if you so choose?
Heh. Unfortunately I remember the launch of Anarchy Online. My confidence in Funcom’s ability to launch a game is dubious at best.
That said, I put in my preorder. We’ll see how it goes.
I found this chart which shows the overwhelming popularity of WoW. Almost everything else is down in the ‘noise’. How is Conan going to compete?
That is pretty amazing. I had no idea WOW was at that different a scope. That being said ive been into EVE and I am into Lotro, and both seem to have a nice little niche, with good communities, and making money(for now). If Conan is a good game, I’m sure it will find a little slice for itself. If it is a bad game it will fade and die.
LOTRO is set in the Third Age. Turbine only has rights to use material from The Lord of the Rings; they can’t create any content based around First Age characters/events.
I’m sure you’re right; I am most likely thinking of the other new one in the works. WarHammer Online, maybe?
RR
Age of Conan, according to their press spokesman Erling Ellingsen, is aiming at a sustainable 500k membership. While he somewhat sidestepped the question “Is it a WoW-killer?” at the interview I attended, he seemed to be of the opinion that it didn’t need to be. People migrate from MMO enviroments a lot; different MMOs cater to different desires in the audience and AoC is intended to cater to an adult (if not mature) audience, with a crossing demographic of a) people who are tired of WoW but still like MMOs b)people who are Conan fans and c) people who are exited about the new features AoC brings to the table.
Whether it succeeds at that is of course a matter of rabid fanboyism and remains to be seen, but I’d bet that a 500k membership is well within their reach. If that actually pays the bills or not, I couldn’t say.
Interesting: I’d assumed that they had rights to the lot.
Actually, they mixed it up a bit. There are 80 levels, the first 20 have a dual nature:
(Note there is no offline mode)
The first couple are a “beach tutorial” which is you washing up on shore from your slave ship, this is single player and eventually you hit Tortage main. At first you get there in the day, this is multiplayer and you do non-story quests here. After getting in the city you go to the Thirsty Dog Inn and start your destiny quest, which requires you to sleep in a bed until night, which is a single player portion. All Destiny Quests are done at night, after finishing it around level 20 you go into the big bad game world and it plays like a normal MMO.
If you have a computer that can handle it its a very good game. Most people won’t have a computer able to handle it. Nothing can compete with wow on the sub numbers, but nobody is going to play the same game forever, if they can grab even a small chunk of the people who are currently bored with wow they will do quite well.
I am playing Age of Conan…preordered and $5 extra for 3 Day early start.
Definatly cool, and has a mature rating. Under 18 aren’t alowed to activate it techincaly. Lots of blood, decapitations etc. WoW is like the Care Bares compared to AoC. There will be Guild built PvP cities etc. No offline play…MMO’S don’t have offline.
I only watched the game trailer for it, but the “gore” in AoC looked just plain silly. Giant blood gouts, “lens” splashes on the screen, etc. It was like LoTRO meets Mortal Kombat.
I mean, it’d have been funny if played for laughs but I can’t believe that they’re shpwing that over-the-top stuff and trying to play it straight…
Guilds build PvE cities, in which they have access to special crafting facilities and the ability to destroy enemy NPC cities, you can capture and fortify battlekeeps and towers however. Those are in teh Border Kingdoms though and you ahve to capture them (they’re on a one week recapture timer so you don’t have ot defend them 24/7 just for a small window every saturday or so).
They thought the same thing and toned it down quite a bit (as far as I could tell at least).