All Posts by Shelil

Originally posted by Mysk

Originally posted by Aguitha

Apparently many, many peoples not happy with the game are returning it to the retailers and get the game refunded.   That would'nt be a problem with most games, but this is a mmo.   Once the cdkey has been registred and used, you dont need the cd anymore.   So basicly Funcom is forced to pay back retailer for game that have been used.   Many of the peoples who got their refunds, still plays the game, in fact they got the game for free.   Guess Funcom is the only one's to blame, if your going to print stuff on the game box and not put them in the live game, it could be considered as false advertisement.

 

You've either been misinformed or you need to try harder.  Everyone knows that it's not possible to return software for a refund.

Practice makes perfect, though.

Yes it is.  Software is not above the law.  The misrepresentation of goods act in the UK and other similar laws in other countries cover ALL goods, software included.  If a game advertises a feature on the box that is not in the game then that game is being misrepresented and mis-sold.  In this instance the retailer has no choice but to issue a refund.

Originally posted by minocin

I've only been playing 3-4 days and so far I've enjoyed everything except:

1. Instanced to death.
2. Everyone can stealth.
3. Same stupid start for every class.
4. Guild City built and yet not actually 'activated' in game yet, lame.
5. Bugs galore.
6. High specs I guess are an issue for some people lucky I'm not one of them I guess.

It does feel as if I'm using my free 30 day sub to beta test the game although I do enjoy it. I think people should try it rather than be put off by people on these forums as it isn't as bad as most make it out to be.

You have only played for 4 days mate, come back and judge it again once you hit level 50 or so and all the broken stuff has been biting your ankles for awhile.

Originally posted by SioBabble

Hardcore MMO gamers are so desperate for something, anything to come along and wisk them off their feet with superb gameplay, immersiveness, and fun, and they're not finding it anywhere.  WoW is too 'simple' for them, and the reason is that WoW is the ultimate 2nd generation MMO, and they've all been looking for that breakthrough 3rd generation MMO, and it's just not in the offing.  SWG preCU might have been it if only it wasn't released half broken, with only a small fraction of the content it should have had.

So they latch on to every project out there as "the WoW killer", because they want to move beyond the 2nd generation.

But alas, they are a small niche, one that can't support the massive investment needed to take MMO development to the next level.

The MMO industry is past its peak creative phase, and now it's wallowing in mediocrity that does what the investors want: bring in lots and lots of money.  That's WoW, which, for all its polish and decent gameplay, way too linear and not ragged enough in PvP for the tastes of so many grizzled MMO vets.  But WoW is, and shall remain, the ultimate 2nd gen MMO.  That's fine for the masses, but the MMO vets want something else.

So we'll probably see a repeat of this when WAR comes out.  I hope not, but best not to let your expectations up.  Tabula Rasa and AoC have not done what everyone expected them to do.

QFT

Warhammer is the only MMO in development at the moment where money hasn't been a problem.  EA's everfull purse has been pouring the greenbacks all over Mythic whenever they asked for it.  If you can look beyond the graphics, which I admit are very WoW like, and if you want a DAoC style game with more bells and whistles then hope that from now until release they don't screw anything up :)

If anything AoC has shown everyone that good graphics do not a good game make and Mythic have put a lot more emphasis on gameplay than Funcom ever did.

Originally posted by Jackdog

Originally posted by Shelil

The plain fact here is that Funcom have become very adept at the smoke & mirrors school of MMO development.  The smoke of a reasonably stable client with the mirrors of good graphics to cover up what is essentialy at the core a bad game design.

 

Dude you nailed it there. I wish I had typed that, you are my idol. I might use that as a sig sometime.

lol be my guest :)

Be about a year or so for the X-Box release after the pc users have finished beta testing it for you.

I suppose this would depend on which country you are in.  The UK for instance has the misrepresentation of goods act and the product, software or not can be returned for a full refund if it does not do what was advertised at the point of sale.  The fact that the game has no support for DX10 straight out of the box despite claiming on the back of the box that it has is valid grounds for return.

The plain fact here is that Funcom have become very adept at the smoke & mirrors school of MMO development.  The smoke of a reasonably stable client with the mirrors of good graphics to cover up what is essentialy at the core a bad game design.  It constantly amazes me just how many players continue to be fooled by it.  Okay so some of them fool themselves because of an honest desire for the game to become what they wanted, but the guy that sells rose tinted specs must be making a fortune from the others.

I honestly cannot see any true veteran of MMO's being happy with this style of game.  linear, fully quest driven character progression is not what a persistant world is made of and despite all the bugs and missing pieces this is what the core backbone of AoC is made of.  It doesn't matter if FC fix the bugs, it doesn't matter if they add all the missing bits, the core design always stays the same. 

AoC will be neither a roring success or a dismal failure, rather it is destined to become one of the niche MMO's ( and I use the MMO tag loosely ) that will generate enough income to keep the servers active but will need a continuing influx of new players to remain at that level.  

AoC had at the outset a potential playerbase of millions, everyone loves the Conan franchise.  Funcom however have delivered a game with numerous flaws and badly designed systems.  Maybe this is as a result of an overwhelming desire to have a slice of Blizzards pie but in my opinion any MMO that starts off with that intention is doomed to relative obscurity.  SoE made just that mistake with SWG.  They had a perfectly good, sandbox  MMO with a steady, if not spectacular number of loyal subscribers, enough in fact to ensure the games future and to continue to turn a profit.  But then someone in a suit developed dollar sign syndrome and greed kicked in.  They wanted that elusive slice of Blizzard pie.  Enter the CU & NGE, a complete change of style and direction, quest based rather than sandbox, linear rather than open.  Exit the subscribers by the bucketload and hello obscurity.

It appears to me that Funcom had the roughly same idea.  Fully quest based with a linear path through the game rather than an open, sandbox type world in which players and characters just evolved.  AoC feels more like a single player RPG and I don't mean just the first 20 levels, the rest of the game feels that way also and this is a direct result of some of those bad design decisions I mentioned earlier.  FC have relied heavily on the look of the game at the outset and the endgame of massive battles, and in doing so have completely lost the feel of a developing, living world.  To compound this the look is held back by releasing without DX10 and the endgame isn't even there yet.  Ao took over 12 months to be anything like ready, AoC will take just as long for all those promised features to be delivered but we shoudn't really be surprised by that.  Funcom have always worked this way, the last couple of zones for Shadowlands were not there when the expansion was released.

WoW has been both a blessing and a curse to the MMO genre, much the same as EQ was before it.  A blessing in that it has attracted a great many new players to MMO's in general, a curse because everyone and his dog is trying to copy it's success.  Well here is a word to the wise, success can rarely be copied because those that got there first have already milked it for all it's worth, if you want success then look in a different direction and create your own.  It is here that Funcom have failed in spectacular fashion.  Look beyond the graphics, imagine them to be more cartoon-like and what you have is a pretty standard, quest driven, linear progression with fast level gains, or in other words a smaller and more poorly implemented clone of WoW.

Will the endgame, when it finally arrives elevate AoC beyond this?  nobody knows yet but if it fails to do so then AoC is destined for maybe 100k  to 150k steady subscriptions from those that really love Conan and his world, which is enough to keep the game going but hardly a massive success.  With Warhammer, Aion, Jumpgate Evolution, Stargate Worlds, TCoS and others on the way I feel that FC may struggle.

Originally posted by Zhqrxt

 "(....)what you have today is but the platform – the dawn of this world. I hope you enjoy the game as is, but I can ensure you, this is but the beginning(....)"

I find it disturbing that the officiel pow is that the game, after launch, isnt finished. Per default, they have shipped a frame where the fillings will be added step by step, with no sat dates.

If this is how companys will marketing MMO`s in the future, they really have to change som things. They need to state - clearly, before release, that you are buying a ~50% finished game. You shouldnt pay full price. You should not pay full monthly fee before the game are finish. With the exploding market for mmo`s we might see really shitty releases when companys desparetly trying to be the first to fill out gaps and sit on the sale...

There should be a clear ruleset and definetion on when a game is finished.  Patches should be for bugfixes not for downloading half of the game piece by piece, month after month.... And again, label the game "unfinished" if thats the case.

http://www.gucomics.com/comic/?cdate=20080603 

wait a couple of months

After the damge control of the letter here is what FC are really working on :

http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=29457

Greetings,

Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed . This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts. We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon. The plastic surgeons of Hyboria apologize for the inconvenience.

Funcom Development Team

Originally Posted by Gaute Godager - Game Director
Fellow Hyborians!

As you may have noticed we have had frequent patches the last two weeks. We hope this will soon start to quiet down, but as long as there are major issues – and there have been – we will dedicate the Conan team to fixing them and giving you these fixes as soon as possible! We have a plan on how to move this game forward because as you know, what you have today is but the platform – the dawn of this world. I hope you enjoy the game as is, but I can ensure you, this is but the beginning!

Our focus from now on can be summarized by these points:

1. We will add content, specifically in mid-late thirties and mid-late fifties and make the leveling speed smoother in those areas, reducing the need to grind.

2. We will have an overhaul of the PvP system – adding consequence and a host of small things.

3. We are fixing bugs you reported through all channels we can get information from.

4. We will add a new large outdoor region in the 55-60 range this summer!

5. This is only a small teaser! More information about the exciting summer and fall Roadmap will come the end of the next week!

6. We are staffing up Customer Service, Quality Assurance and Community departments!

I will spend some words on a bit more details now.

1. Filling “thin areas” in our content

We have seen that there are certain level ranges of these Hyborian Adventures that do not have the amount of quality we wish them to have. Most specifically these are the end of the Thirties and the end of the Fifties level ranges. We are addressing this in several ways.
Several mid-late thirties dungeons are getting a complete overhaul (Black Castle, Pyramid of the Ancients and Treasury of the Ancients)
Several quests are being made fuller and more entertaining. If people wish to revisit these quests, we will add a system to let them try them out again.
we are adding first a batch of quests in Eiglophian Mountains (lvls 55+)
We are also adding in a bunch of quests that didn’t quite make it for launch in the 30+ areas.
Around 60 quests through the game have been flagged as “Lore Quests”. They will now be patched out with full Voice-Over. (Roughly 1 quest per level after level 20).

All this will come in June! In July the first level 80 additional Dungeon will be patched out. More on that later…

2. Overhauling the PvP System

People like our open PvP system. There are many plans on how to give this open free PvP even more meaning and Purpose. In the meantime we will be doing some smaller tweaks, and we plan to get these out sometimes in June. I will not go into 100% detail here, but that will come next week! What I can promise is:
An update on how sneaking and perception works in PvP (nothing major, but an adjustment).
A change in the amount of information you get when you hover over an other player.
An added system of consequence to “ganking”. (Killing much-much lower level players).
A system of adding consequence to losing a PvP match, and winning a PvP match + turning on PvP Leveling.
A change in how Crowd Control (Root, Knockback etc) works in PvP.
PvP gear.

3. New Massive Region

We will unveil this location later, but it will feature a host of quests, new monsters and places of dreams or horror. It will be styled towards the players in the late 50s and bridge the experience on the way to Atzels Approach. We have plans for releasing several of the areas that didn’t quite make it for the release.

4. Fixing bugs and increasing Customer Service

Funcom has always prided ourselves with having great customer satisfaction. The success so far for this title has left us with the need to increase the size of CS. This will go in parallel with the constant fixing of bugs and other issues that lead people to petition. Included in this is even better testing of the game by increasing the size of Quality Assurance and informing you better about changes by staffing up the Community Department. I know a blurb like this will haunt me always, but I will still venture one: We aren’t satisfied until all our customers are! You know we had a very, very difficult launch of Anarchy-Online! That was a very painful process for all of us working on it – 4 years. You might not understand how driven we are to make sure you enjoy this game, and all the support around it!

The future is very bright for Hyboria. There will be many bright mornings following this, the very first. Together we shall surge ahead and build the world even bigger, better and more detailed!

Yours truly,

Gaute Godager

Game Director
Age of Conan, Funcom

I love the bit when he says what we have today is but the platform.  Okay then, so that's a clear enough statement that we are paying beta testers if ever I heard one.  Wouldn't be so bad if we were not being asked to pay a full subscription cost for the platform would it?

The big endgame battles for the battlekeeps are not in the game yet so nobody knows.

When Funcom launched Ao it took a full year for the game to start to shine and become a fully playable mmo which went on to win awards.  In my opinion it is going to take that long again for AoC.  Funcom didn't learn the lessons, not from their own mistakes or from those of other developers.

I have played since the 17th and have got to level 55.  I have played through the crashes, the bugs, the broken quests etc. but now it seems that everyday I discover a new bug or a game mechanic that doesn't function or that has not been implemented yet.  AoC's major selling points that were much hyped, DX10, sieges, mass battles, inovative combat etc.  The first 3 are not even in the game yet and the third is just a boring button mash.  It is obvious to anyone that plays the game that it was meant and built for console play, with the PC gamers making a useful set of paying testers.  I really tried to like the game but unfortunately today, after discovering yet another bug I cancelled my subscription.  Like so many others I am now looking towards Mythic and Warhammer.  At least they know how to release a game, DAoC was pretty solid at release unlike Ao & AoC which frankly are disasters, maybe not in box sales but certainly in quality.

Mounts are useless at the moment, unless you want to be a little higher up and still move slowly across a zone.

I have played the game so far up to level 55.  For me on a high-end system the main problem performance wise is SLi.  Running SLi with Vista causes the client to be very unstable, without SLi turned on it's much better but still crashes and hangs on occasion ( about twice a night compared with once every 20 minutes with SLi turned on ).  At the moment the game is very badly optomised and has tons of bugs.  It should never have been released in this condition but unfortunately that's the way the software market is these days.  It will not get any better as long as we continue to buy games that are not finished.

The problem with these so called professional reviews is that the reviewers spend all of a day or even less actually playing the game, this review for instance only shows Tortage.  If these people would play the game to the top level before writing reviews then we would have a much more comprehensive system to go by.

Bugsville online 5 / 10