Profile: Tarka
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• • I'm starting to get mad :(

  • AOC a disaster?  Are you talking about how you, personally, don't like it or how the game fairs relative to the whole MMO industry?  If its the latter, where is the evidence to suggest this?

  • Posted: 7/27/08 5:33 AM
    The Chronicles of Spellborn
• • Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: Welcome Back to Vanguard

  • Originally posted by Gorrex
    

    Quite honestly I left AoC to go to Vanguard why..

    Vanguard is 20-30 times the size easily. It has 5 or more dungeons at ANY given level range over 5.

    The "zoning" lasts a couple of seconds on the lowest end pcs that can really play it, and is near instant on high end rigs now.

    Quests can range from run over to this person, to a multi-week journey across half of the game with very little camp time anywhere along the way.

    Crafting is among the best I've seen. Diplomacy is a nice side game (some play it as I do the adventuring portion).

    Raiding is fun, engaging, and has tons of promise.  Classes each have a roll and a need, there are a few balance issues, but nothing compared to most mmo's.

    After the completly shitty launch and the straight out lies from McQuack. Sony really has turned this into the gem that it promised to be two years ago. There really is no way to explain how far above the rest of the MMOs including WoW, EQ2, and EQ it is at the moment. VG you can log on for an hour and get something done, or log on for twelve hours straight for months and never run out of things to. It truely is deserving of the word massive. It is truly beautiful.

    My only current complaint is the amount of END END game content. Right now there is about three months of lvl 50 hardcore raiding five days a week content. However this is about to expand in august. Then expand again every couple of months for the forseeable future.

     

    McQuack promised a lot and never delivered, the current team however is rapidly delivering on all of his failed promises. Brad is an excellent idea person, but should never ever be allowed to manage ANYTHING ever again.

    Tbh, I feel the opposite to you.  But its all relative.  I've played VG since Beta and left last February.  I then started playing AOC and felt that that game was more polished and was being handled far better than the VG team can handle their game. 

    Firstly, I left after realising the empty words of the Producer of VG at the time had made (no, not McQuaid but the guy who's also the Producer of another SOE game) .  There was an uproar in December when there was talk about the Isle Of Dawn and how that flies in the face of what they were trying to accomplish with the game.  The producer said that they would re-evaluate the idea and come back to the community and talk further.  January came and the playerbase soon realised that NOTHING had been discussed, they were going ahead regardless. Don't get me wrong, THEY are the devs and its THEIR game to do with who they please.  But devs cannot ask for feedback and then blatantly ignore it when they get it.   That's just trying to pacify the playerbase and not actually do anything.

    Which is something that FC aren't doing.  FC brought in a new community team to "patch" up the communication holes in the forums.  This new team also collate all the players suggestions (the list is about 1 1/2 pages long on the forums at the moment).  And in fact, some of these suggestions are actually being implemented 2 patches after the list was first created.  Now THAT is listening to feedback from your playerbase!  Yes the FC team have had to make their own decisions on how the game should develop without consulting the playerbase in the past, but at least FC realised very quickly how not listening to the playerbase can cost them dearly.   Yes, FC has its share of issues, it ain't perfect.

    Secondly, I left the game because not enough was being done to get the game back on track.  Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that only so much can be done in any amount of time.  And for that reason I don't solely blame the VG team.  I also blame SOE for its' refusal to expand the team or provide extra resources in order to cope with the mammoth task of getting that game back on track. 

    However, I do applaud the VG team for a number of reasons:  The diplomacy "sphere" was innovative, but under developed.  The crafting "sphere" is involving but repetitive after a time.  Well done to them for (finally) getting permanent flying mounts and the respective quests in place.  However, that alone won't bring people back in droves.  Especially those who have already gotten to maximum level.  Raiding is a step forward, but from what I experienced, its pretty mediocre and lacks lustre, especially regards to performance when theres all the other Raid groups in there with you.

    With regards to relative size of the landmasses; Considering the sheer size of the zones in AOC, I'd say that AOC actually has MORE playable and complete landmass than VG has.  Its just that in VG you can see a lot of the "zones" from certain vantage points in the game.  But, just because you can see it, doesn't mean to say that theres equally the same amount that you can't see.

    Incidentally, many of the current team are the very same people who worked for Sigil and Brad McQuaid, this is why I don't call them the SOE team, even though they work for SOE. 

  • Posted: 7/27/08 5:16 AM
    General Discussion
• • So whats the point of a storyline in an MMORPG?

  • Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not one person speaks for all.  Which is why the OP will find that a lot disagree with his points. 

    There is EVERY point to having a story arc in an MMO. 

    Firstly, its for those who actually enjoy them and dont just run round every quest giver, gathering up the quests to be completed in the least amount of time possible. 

    Personally I watch films and play games to enjoy the story.  To me playing a "Sandbox" game is like playing checkers online, utterly boring in its concept.  This is because the majority of the time all the players do in a "Sandbox" game is declare war on each other and kill each other without any reason whatsoever.  So the whole idea of players creating a rich player driven scenario just goes completely out of the window.  I wouldn't class myself as an RP'er, but doing so has no sense of purpose at all.  Therefore, to me "Sandbox" games are extensions to the PVP gameplay style and don't lend themselves very well to a PVE environment.

    However, I also have the opinion that going out to kill 20 rats in a PVE environment for no reason is also utterly tedious.  We are humans, and as such we like to feel that there is a purpose to everything. 

    Secondly, a story arc provides such a purpose by making the players feel that they are involved in something bigger than there immediate concerns.  Not necessarily because the player is "the one", but still made to feel that they have some part to play in it all.  Even if its a small but nevertheless significant part. 

    Thirdly, the story proves to the player that the devs have actually given some thought into how and why the environment was designed the way it was.  And not just slapped together without a second thought on the matter.

    Now, coming back to the OP's statements, nowhere was it stated that AOC was a sandbox game.  Everyone knows its based on the works of Robert E. Howard and therefore includes the characters and scenes from his books.  That alone gives you a good idea how the game would be laid out.  Putting Conan into an MMO without any reason whatsoever would have been a pointless exercise, and even calling it Age of CONAN would have been pointless for a sandbox game. 

    And so, to ensure that suggestions of any kind of linearity were in a sandbox game, the devs could have just called it "Realistic Medevil Online" and have done with it.   But they didn't.  It's based on an IP and will therefore involve characters and scenes from that IP.  And to involve them means creating story arcs.

    It seems that what the OP is looking for, just like others have said, is a "Sandbox" game where there is freedom to do what you want, when you want with the minimum amount of restrictions.  Unfortunately for the OP, AOC was never touted to being a sandbox game.

  • Posted: 7/27/08 4:48 AM
    Age of Conan
• • Funcom: update notes May 23rd

  • Their main issue yesterday that the Plains problem.  If no big issues arise soon, then we may start to see a bigger list of bug fixes.

  • Posted: 5/23/08 8:34 AM
    Age of Conan
• • NO OPEN WORLD IN AOC!!!!

  •  

    Originally posted by Zorndorf
    

     

    Originally posted by brihtwulf
    

    Ok, this game is NOT WoW, thankfully!  People should stop complaining because it isn't exactly like WoW.  The areas are broken up into multiple instances (much like EQ2 and TR) to prevent massive lag that would be there from hundreds of thousands of potential simultaneous players.  The game would just lag out and drop if it were an "open world".  And it uses "zoning" for a similar reason.  There is just too much data and too many players to be in a single continuous world.

    Now, Warcraft can do this for one main reason: their technical quality is outrageously sub-standard.  Their characters are extremely low-poly and their textures are very low-res.  So the data both takes up little room and takes little time to load.  They can therefor "stream" in the content as needed when the player crosses a geographical threshold.  With AoC's visual quality alone, this is NOT possible.  And I'm not sure of the number of max players per server in AoC, but because they use this instancing formula, I would imagine it's higher than the few hundred you can have in a WoW server (before queues set in).

    As for the dungeons, there aren't many MMOs at ALL that don't instance them in some way (except perhaps EQ1).  Technology, quality, and gameplay almost require dungeons to be instanced in some way to prevent overpopulation and players standing around screaming because the creature they need for their quest has been camped for 2 days straight by other players/guilds (EQ1 anyone remember?).

    Ultimately it comes down to the question: is the game fun for you?  If it is, then play it.  If it's not, then move on to something else or go play your previous game again.  I would, however, give anyone playing this game the advice to get a bit past level 20 to experience the gameplay beyond Tortage (which is meant to be an introduction to the game).  If anyone remembers, the first 20 levels that encompass Tortage were originally meant to be single-player until the testers begged for them to include other newbies in the experience from day 1.

     

    Biggest crap I have ever seen.

     

    More then 50 people in a city and even your 9800GTS cards stop functioning. Instancing .

    
    Ah, so now its 50 people that cause your system to hang.......before it was only "a handful" that was causing serious issues for you.

     

    Wow, keep going zorf.  I think you're nailing what the issue is here.....you're simplification of the truth in order to suit your argument.

  • Posted: 5/23/08 8:07 AM
    Age of Conan