Trying Conan

So here I am at the end of the two week reactivation trial from Funcom for Age of Conan.

For the first couple of days I replayed old characters, primarily Stropp the Aquilonian Dark Templar, and to be honest with you I didn’t find that character very engaging. I didn’t feel invested in the quests, and perhaps it was the area, those quests seemed to be a little disjointed and a bit boring.

So I decided to create a new character. Bargarse the Barbarian, a Cimmerian.

The Barbarian class in Age of Conan is effectively a rogue archetype. He’s able to stealth and do most everything a rogue does. At first blush this seemed a bit of a stretch for me, I’d never have pegged Arnie’s portrayal of Conan as anything but a warrior. But, I’ve never read any of the Conan books so I don’t know how Howard portrayed him. And at least for part of the film he’s involved in somewhat roguish behavior.

Anyway, I took Bargarse through all the Tortage quests, getting him up to level 20 over three nights, before heading out to Conarch Village and Conal Valley over Saturday and Sunday. With the help of an experience potion claimable throughout November, I took my Barbarian through most of the quests and nearly to level 27. I figure there may be enough quests left to get to level 30.

Some things I noticed:

• Tortage works like a charm now. It seems the bugs introduced throughout the release period have been fixed. Not that I expected they wouldn’t be.
• There is still an occasional crash to desktop. I had it happen once.
• There appears to still be a memory leak, but it’s nowhere near as bad as when I first played. Some of the map textures disappeared from time to time as before, but only happened once. I don’t know if it’s related, but every time I exited the game, a dialog popped up asking me to report a bug (and then the Microsoft one immediately after.)
• Funcom has some of the post-Tortage quest givers talking now. At release that was one of the big complaints. Tortage set everything up beautifully with fully voiced quest givers, and as soon as I left Tortage, no-one spoke anymore. Now, not every quest giver does, but there are some.
• There are still huge gaps in the destiny quests. I met up with the destiny guy in Conarch Village and he said, “Hi! Come back at 30.” Funcom needs to fill out these quests with at least a quest chain every 5 levels. Otherwise the destiny quests are nothing but an interruption.
• The combo’s are useful now. At release, it really didn’t matter if I used a combo or not. Just swinging my weapon did as much damage. Now, swinging wildly doesn’t do much damage at all. But using the combos correctly can really knock a mob down.

The biggest difference though was that I began to enjoy the game. I reckon it was the Barbarian class coupled with the usefulness of combos. The rogue aspects added to the gameplay since I could sneak up behind a mob and sneak attack which was kinda fun, especially when using one handers.

Perhaps the quests in Cimmeria were more fun too. It seemed to be a fairly logical chain of quests that were presented, and even though they ended up being kill x bad guys for the most part, they made sense. And there was the whole bloodlust thing too. Grrr.

Having said all that, I have unsubscribed before the trial period was up and my credit card charged.

I did seriously consider keeping the subscription going. but there were a couple of reasons for cancelling.

First, I’ve got too many games on the go now and, while a 2 week trial doesn’t hurt too much, I really don’t have time for AoC. The other is that I am now officially out of work (finished my contract at 5pm this afternoon.) That means some belt-tightening is required, and I don’t need the cost of another subscription.

But for you my friends, I think that if you played Age of Conan at release but left out of frustration at the time, then you might find the game has improved sufficiently to warrant resubscribing. That’s especially the case if you wanted to like the game and found it hard to leave.

If you want to do the trial, you had better be quick since it expires on the 27th, today.

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Professor Syp’s Homework Assignment

Professor Syp over at the Biobreak School of MMOGenomics and Appliance Repair has set all of us bloggers who also play Everquest 2 a little homework assignment. And just before the Thanksgiving holidays* too. Hrmph. What a killjoy!

The work he is asking us to do is to list five features of EQ2 that are better than those in World of Warcraft. Fortunately he didn’t set a word requirement.

1. Housing. Everquest 2 has the best housing system in any MMORPG I’ve played. WoW doesn’t have housing.
2. Guild Amenities. Guilds in WoW are simply a group of like minded players. It’s the same in EQ2 except that guilds can level up. At certain levels various amenities become available to the guild such as trade quest givers, guards, crafting component storage, and mail boxes. Not to mention at certain levels guilds can move into bigger and better guild halls.
3. Crafting. I really don’t consider World of Warcraft’s crafting system to be a real crafting system. All you do is have the required components and hit a button. That’s not crafting, that’s mass production, Jetsons style. However, while EQ2 requires more involvement while crafting, it’s still not the best system I’ve seen. ATITD is the gold standard as far as I’m concerned, even if it does require a PHD to work out. Still EQ2 crafting beats WoW Crafting hands down. Not to mention crafting is not tied to adventure level. A player can just be a crafter if he wishes, and never step into the wilderness.
4. Quest Variety. While EQ2 still has much of the same quest structure of WoW, they have a bigger variety of quest types. You can do heritage quests, epic quests, heroic quests, and a couple of other quest types as well. The rewards also include furniture and trophies that can be put in your house or guild hall.
5. Collections. These are a kind of sub-quest where a player must find shiny objects around the world to complete collections. Completing these collections often offer a reward. Collections are not critical to the game, but they do offer a nice diversion.
6. Alternate Achievement Points. Can I add a sixth point? WoW has Talents, but I like the way EQ2 uses AA points (which is a similar system), and how I can acumulate them faster than I level. It’s also optional to do this, so players can choose to race to the level cap, or to accumulate AAs for a stronger character before moving to the next level. Nice little feature.
7. Flexibility in Appearance. Can I have Extra Credit, Professor Syp? In EQ2 you’re not restricted to the look of your armor. After a certain level, players can equip gear in appearance slots. These don’t provide stats, but only affect the look of your character.

So there you go. Not five, but seven features in Everquest 2 that I consider to be better that the equivalent features (if they exist) in World of Warcraft.

While I believe that WoW does parts of the MMORPG experience better than other games, and while the bits it does do better are the ones that count, it’s my opinion that Everquest 2 is a superior game to World of Warcraft. The points I listed above are only some of the reasons I believe that.

* BTW, Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Australia, so Professor Syp hasn’t interrupted our vacation with this homework after all.

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Blog Discovery Channel – Two Good Reads

A couple of new blogs have popped up on my radar over the last few weeks that have provided some insightful discussion into the topic of games, gaming, and game design. These are quality blogs that I’d like to give a shout out too.

First up, I saw a post by Wolfshead recommending a blog called, That’s A Terrible Idea. It’s written by a couple of self-confessed amateur game designers, Evizaer and Motstandet and covers the area of game design focusing on MMO design. These guys have put up a number of thought provoking posts on the subject of game design, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all they have to say, there’s a lot that I do agree with. But it’s definitely not light reading, at least not without my big cup of coffee first.

The second blog that I discovered, was from a post by Genda where he mentions getting involved in a collaborative blog with a few other well known game bloggers: JoBildo, Brent Breaux, and Oakstout among them. The blog of course is I’m Talkin’ Games or ITG for short. These guys have each been blogging about games in general, and MMORPGs in particular for some time now and the quality of their writing reflects that. I was also pretty darn impressed with the look and feel of the blog itself, very well done, very professional look.

Both these blogs are definitely worth reading, and if you use a feed reader like Google Reader, they are well worth adding so that you won’t miss any posts.

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What Conan Wants, Conan Gets

If Conan wanted me back in the game, he has his wish, to a certain extent anyway.

I decided on Saturday afternoon to accede to the wishes of the muscle-bound warrior king and took Funcom up on their offer of two free weeks. After all, I didn’t really want 6′6″ of angry muscle smashing down my door and screaming, “Get to da CHOPPA! Da CHOPPAAA!” (Sorry wrong movie.) Doors aren’t cheap to fix you know, let alone the hassle of getting a locksmith on the weekend.

I did however decide against actually subscribing for any of the payment plans. I’m currently more interested in seeing how Age of Conan has improved since I last played. That was nearly 2 years ago. If I recall correctly, I quit after the first or second month because of the following reasons.

• The game was woefully incomplete. There was a considerable lack of content in the middle levels. While I hadn’t got that far, level 21 was my highest level, even post-Tortage felt lacking.
• Funcom was breaking more that it was fixing. At release Tortage was polished and smooth (for me.) Less than a month later, I was falling through geometry and not having a smooth and polished experience.
• I was experiencing a crash to desktop regularly. Some form of memory leak I think was responsible.
• Gear and equipment were not properly itemized. At that point it made no difference wearing or upgrading armor, or even fighting naked. Item stats didn’t seem to do anything.

So after clicking on the trial button and refreshing my details, it didn’t ask for my credit card details by the way, I started the patching process.

And boy, was there a lot of patching to be done. A bit over 3GB of patching to be exact. Here’s what I learned. Three gig of patching takes a lot of time. I started just after 3pm and it finished close to 10pm. The patcher also crashed halfway through, but recovered the process when I restarted (otherwise I might not be writing this post.)

The problems that encouraged me to previously cancel my account were the things that I wanted to have a really good look at in this trial period. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

1. Most importantly, the memory leak issues and bugs appear to have been fixed. Not unexpected, I would have been profoundly disappointed if after this amount of time Funcom had failed to have fixed these problems. No CTD is a good start as far as I’m concerned. All the geometry issues I found previously in Tortage seem to have been resolved.
2. Gear and equipment look like they are working as in any other MMORPG now. Items have stats, and from what I could tell, better equipment made a difference. It’s all good, except I have no reason to flash my hairy chest in public anymore, even on my male characters.

I wasn’t able to see if the lack of content had been addressed since all of my characters are still too low level. I played Stropp my Dark Templar for a while today and dinged up to 22.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll have enough time in the next two weeks to get any character to the levels that were reported as being inadequate. I figure there will be other bloggers with higher level characters taking advantage of Funcoms trial offer. It might pay to seek them out for that info.

There are still a few bad points though.

• I think there are still a few bugs. One quest target was marked on the map, but I was unable to complete the quest because she did not appear to be at the specified location.
• None of the servers were registering more than medium load, and still showed green, but there were moments of lag. Actually, there were some very long moments where I thought I was going to be disconnected, mostly in the middle of fights. On the plus side, the system seemed to handle them and I didn’t come out of the lag dead, only where I left off.
• Unfortunately the UI is somewhat confusing. That hasn’t changed, but I didn’t really like it back then; it’s still a poor UI now.
• Global chat appears to be channeling World of Warcraft’s Barrens chat, except without the restraint.
• Someone ninja invited me to a guild, while I was in night time mode in Tortage. Must have just done a \who all and invited folks not in a guild. Not even a hello, hows it going…

So where does this leave me?

Primarily with a much better impression of Age of Conan before I left. The shame of the matter is that a game has to work much harder to regain a players trust if it loses it, than if it gets it right in the first place. My view of AoC is probably a little tainted by those poor first impressions. If I were playing for the first time ever, today, I might feel a lot different about Age of Conan.

It is a graphically gorgeous game, with a lot of imagination behind it, and a lot of potential too.

However, at this stage, I’ll continue my re-visitation of Age of Conan for the remainder of the two week trial, but at logout today there was nothing there to make me want to pay any money to resubscribe.

That might change if I find some compelling content before the trial ends, or if the game succeeds at recapturing my imagination, but like I said in my last post about this offer by Funcom, there are too many games around at the moment that I want to play. There’s so much going on any game, not just AoC, is going to have to stand out in a big way.

Now a Barbarian breaking down my door might catch my eye, but if Conan sent that assassin my way. That, might get my attention.

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Modern Warfare 2

Wow!

That exclamation isn’t because I’ve played it and have been thoroughly impressed, it’s because I’ve seen the sales figures for the first 24 hours, and then the price of the game on Steam.

1. In the first 24 hours MW2 sold over 4 million copies.
2. The price for the game on Steam is $89.99.

That would make it (if the price is the same in stores) the most expensive software only game (in US dollars) that I’ve seen. I think there was something called Armored Fist (or the like) that sold for $250ish with a big chunky hardware controller, but as far as I’m aware MW2 is only software. Nor does the Steam price seem to indicate the version is anything special, like a collectors edition.

Despite that huge price, 4 million copies have sold. It sort of makes the sales of even World of Warcraft look a little sick. Blizzards 4 -5 million Western players were amassed over 5 years. MW2 over 1 day, with more to come.

It kinda looks like the MMORPG market has a ways to go in order to catch up with the traditional single/multi-player game market.

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Conan Wants Me Back

Like a few other bloggers today, this morning I received an email from Funcom offering a bunch of benefits to encourage me to resubscribe to Age of Conan.

These range from some free time to give the game another go, to a beta spot in The Secret World in exchange for a three month subscription. For longer subscriptions there are also additional benefits.

Quite honestly, I find myself a little tempted by this offer. Even the concept of paying for a guaranteed place in the TSW beta doesn’t bother me all that much, after all if it helps what is looking like a very interesting game make it out the door, then what’s wrong with a little creative fund raising. And if I choose not to resub for three months, then I still have a chance to get in to the beta free of charge.

Where the temptation gets a bit more help is that I have always intended to return to Age of Conan at some point. I was planning on giving Funcom a chance to get their game systems working properly, add some more content, and apply some polish. From all accounts this has happened, but I also understand that there are still problems. Still, it’s been on my mind recently.

The big drawback to resubbing to Age of Conan, for me at least, is that there is so much gaming going on for me at the moment. There’s Dragon Age, Torchlight, Everquest 2 (having some problems there though), Fallen Earth, and a dabbling of DDO. Adding another game to the mix is problematic, especially considering I’ll be looking at getting my freelancing business going again from December.  I may need to pull back from some gaming at that time anyway.

Personally, I think Funcom has jumped the gun with this offer a little bit.

They’ve picked a time when gamers have so much to choose from, and with more releases coming for the Christmas season, they’ve got a lot of competition to draw people back who weren’t all that happy with it in the first place.

It may have been better for Funcom to make this offer sometime in the new year when gaming is a bit quieter.

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EA Layoffs – Piracy Is Not To Blame

Tobold has just posted a thought for today: That the EA Layoffs are due to the piracy of their games.

Now first of all, after re-reading, I’m not sure if he’s being serious or just being a tad sarcastic. For the purpose of this post, I’ll assume he’s being serious when he says: “What did people think would happen to a company making bad games and being constantly robbed, in the middle of an economic crisis? If you wanted to save an EA programmer’s job, all you had to do was buy some EA games legitimately” in response to the amount of ‘outrage’ today against EA for laying off 1500 employees.

Now me, I think that piracy-is-a-bad-thing, it is a violation of a long standing set of laws designed to protect those who create those things that we love against the unscrupulous. It’s not theft as such, technically anyway, since no-one is actually deprived of anything, but that can be a hard distinction to make. It seems like theft.

But that’s where I think Tobold is off base. There is no real evidence that the people who pirate software, music, or other media were actually going to buy those things in the first place. So a single act of piracy cannot be logically equated with a lost sale, or a lost amount of revenue or profit. I’m not sure if anyone even has any statistics on what the ratio of pirated goods to lost sales really is. Is it one in a hundred? Or would one pirate in a thousand have bought that copy if a legitimate sale was the only option.

Having said that, I do believe that piracy results in lost income, but I don’t think it is anywhere near as much as publishers are saying.

In fact, I’ve seen in print statements made by the RIAA and MPAA where the figures they are stating for lost revenue seem indicate that their ratio is more than a lost sale per act of piracy.  Does that seem a bit strange to you? How can you lose more than what was pirated?

Secondly, and as Tobold points out in his post, it is an economic crisis. People haven’t just lost jobs and have less disposable income to buy games, a lot of people — a huge number in fact — are turning away strongly from using debt to buy things. This I think is the first key to EA’s financial woes. Less disposable income plus a reluctance to use credit means people are buying less of everything.

Which leads to the second key to EA’s crisis. They do a lot, and I mean a huge amount, of sales of their sports franchise games. They’re the only game in town for the US football games, yet each year they produce what is basically the same game with a few enhancements and a set of roster changes. These games also appeal to the more casual gaming sports fan, a fairly giant demographic.

Less disposable income plus a reluctance to use credit plus casual gamers owning the five previous versions of the same game equals cutting out Madden from the discretionary spending.

The clincher for me is that up until this last year, the game industry reported strong growth year after year. I’m sure you read the reports that said that the computer game industry was going to overtake Hollywood in revenue in just a few short years. This strong growth was all happening at the same time as people were pirating games. Computer game piracy hasn’t jumped by 200 percent in 2009 has it? How much of an increase in piracy would it take to drop revenue by 20 percent, especially considering that those pirates must come from the buying customers. People who would normally buy a game, but have defected across to the pirates.

If nothing else has changed, then EA’s woes must surely be the result of something other than piracy.

Saving that programmers job would have been a little more tricky than buying that sixth version of Madden.

By the way, I agree with Tobold on this; Piracy is a crime. It’s a bad thing to do. If you want to play a game — buy it!

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EA – Mass Layoff Effect

The game-o-sphere is all a flurry about the big layoffs at Electronic Arts at the moment.

With 1500 job being dumped at EA, including 80 at Mythic which is a bit less than half their staff, you’d be forgiven for thinking that EA is in financial difficulty. And you’d be right as this year their revenue has declined by something like 20 percent.

There aren’t too many business that wouldn’t lay off some staff under those kind of circumstances.

Still, EA hasn’t really got that great a reputation for employee management. Even in the best of times they tend to work them like dogs, and then dump them when projects fail, and sometimes even when they are successfully completed. So it’s no surprise that the same happens when times are tough.

1500 employees though. That’s a lot, and considering many of those would be the creatives. The people who make the games, there may not be as many in-house games being developed by EA over the next few years.

Which could be a silver lining in all this. EA is certainly going to want to sell as many games as it can, so we can expect it to go outside to get them. This could be a good time for non-affiliate game developers (I’m not talking small indie developers here) to develop their own IP and look to EA to do the publishing. This may even lead to us seeing some break-the-mould games appearing somewhere down the track.

The Mythic layoffs are concerning though. With many of their development staff layed off, it’s hard to see how they are going to do more than just maintain Warhammer Online. It’s entirely possible all we’ll see from now on are patches and minor content updates. New expansions, difficult to see them happening with such a heavily reduced staff.

I’m even going to go so far as suggest that Warhammer might now be on life support with the hand of the EA board hovering over the switch.

I think it also shows that these internal teams are regarded by EA as only as good as (the board of directors perception of) their last game. If Mythic, a popular and successful developer, can be gutted because Warhammer didn’t meet expectations, then perhaps no team is safe.

I’m sure the Bioware team is completely aware of that little fact.

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NaNoWriMo: Beginnings

They say every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Well, mine officially has a beginning.

I spent a few hours after I wrote my last (first) NaNoWriMo post trying to work out what my story is going to be about, and have a very thin (so far) theme.

I considered going the fantasy route, possibly even some fan fiction based on one of the games that I play, but ended up deciding against that option and going for an original science fiction piece.

And since time and busyness is against me, I’m hoping to complete a long short story, or perhaps a short novella. Instead of aiming at the 1666 words per day necessary for a NaNoWriMo novel, I’ve decided to just make sure I write something each day. That might be a paragraph, or it might be a page, the point is that something is getting written and progress is being made.

Speaking of progress, tonight I put down approximately 200 words, including the first and last sentences in the story. It seems the writing Muse saw fit to give me that bit of inspiration at least. I hope she sticks around for the long haul.

Now comes the hard part.

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Dragon Age Time Tip

Warning: This has some slight spoilage ahead, but not too much. I won’t be giving away storyline.

There are at least some quests in Dragon Age: Origins that have an element of time criticality, and I’m not all at sure if ’some’ should read as ‘all’ since I’ve only done about 15% of the game after nearly 15 hours on this one character. It may be too soon to be conclusive about that.

Now for the spoilage.

The first village I came to offers a quest to deliver notices of conscription to three individuals scattered about the kingdom. I’m not sure if the quest indicated a timed element, but I instead went off and did two of the premium downloadable content quests before I went to Redcliffe and (as part of my other activities) delivered one of the notices. I then saved the village… hurrah! Checked my journal and noticed the quest was missing.

It turned out the Blight was on the move and had overrun the village I received the quest from. That was something I wasn’t aware of. It may be that completing the major parts of the Blight quests advance the Blight across the map, in which case it’s a good idea to do side quests when they are received rather than let them pile up and do other quests first.

If only I hadn’t dilly dallied.

Although, in keeping with the game play aspects of making choices that matter in Dragon Age: Origins, it may be that whatever I do in one direction, the big bad will affect something else.

Tis something to keep in mind for the other quests.

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