Age of Conan PvP Weekend

Posted by Stropp on April 21, 2008

Funcom opened up their NDA and offered a lucky 15,000 players the chance to participate in a weekend of PvP gaming goodness.

I wasn’t one of the lucky 15,000, but Keen of Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog was one of the chosen. Over the last few days, Keen has posted a few times about his experiences, and has recorded a few movies too. Here are the links to Keen’s AoC PvP Weekend Impressions Part One and Part Two, as well as his Final Thoughts.

As with all these things, there’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good news is that the PvE game is, in Keens words, magnificent. I’m pretty happy to hear this. As you’ve probably worked out by now, I’m more of a PvE’r that a PvP’r. While I do enjoy PvP, a good PvE game is essential for me. Good story and lore help a lot too.

The bad news is that the game is very resource intensive. I think we all expected that, but it looks like it will take a pretty substantial rig to play this game at the setting required to get the beauty that we’ve seen in the videos and screenshots that have been released.

Hopefully Funcom are not going to run into the problem that SOE did when EQ2 was released. Some zones were almost unplayable due to lag caused by the heavy graphics requirements. I dreaded going into North Qeynos or Qeynos Harbor — it could sometimes take a minute to turn 90 degrees. That alone drove a lot of players away, right into the waiting arms of World of Warcraft with its much more modest system requirements.

The other bad news, especially at this late stage of development, is that the PvP game is seriously unbalanced. Some classes were extremely overpowered and could nuke an opponent in one or two shots, while other classes could barely manage a scratch.

While this is a bit of a worry, I expect that this is precisely the reason that Funcom held this weekend PvP event. They would have been watching very closely, and would have gathered some valuable info. That data would be put to use in balancing things out.

Don’t forget that two weeks before the Tabula Rasa beta ended, a game that was barely ready for release was patched and put into a releasable state. It may have needed more content, but the bugs and many shortcomings were fixed.

I’d wager that is likely to be the case here. I suspect that AoC will go into open beta with a bunch of balancing done that will fix PvP, or at least go a long way in doing so.

And since the NDA has been lifted (for the PvP weekend only) if you were one of the lucky players who partook this weekend, let us know what you thought in the comments below.

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