Yet Another AoC Update (YAAOCU)
Scott Jennings over at his Broken Toys blog has a fairly dead-on writeup about AoC, I think. I’m not quite as fired up about it as he is (then again, my character can’t set stuff on fire), but he does capture the joy of playing a totally fun, unbalanced, buggy, exploitable game. It reminds me of early City of Heroes.
If full PvP was randomly enabled on WoW PvE servers, if they drastically changed my character’s power level from week to week, if core abilities were just randomly broken and fixed, I’d probably be pretty upset. (Although I did love the plague.) Age of Conan is new enough and rough enough that they can still do that kind of stuff. As Scott points out, at some point it may have to grow up, but for now it’s good fun.
Update: one of the links on Scott’s writeup leads to a post describing, well, that female melee characters do something like 2/3 as much damage as males. In case I hadn’t driven home “buggy” yet.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
This just reminds me that mmos play by a different set of rules - for a persistent mmo to take off the game has to stabilize; at the same time they need to have predictable updates to bring in new content. I think a major part of that is player expectations - to know they want to invest so much time into a single game, you need to know that your hard work will have paid off. Still, I think the early days can be pretty fun - individual discovery is usually fun, you get all the crazy pvp/bugs/exploits happening, and in general those make some pretty good youtube videos.
So which AoC class is going to pull off the equivalent of Hunter vs World? Or even better, the adventures of Fancy the Famous Bard?
June 18th, 2008 at 2:35 am
Hmm, “email me whenever a comment is posted” got borked for a couple days.
I don’t know. Stealth seems pretty good in AoC, so there might be some great griefer exploits there. Rangers get stealth and long range, so maybe they could pull a Fansy. It’s hard to know, though– the dps/healer classes are pretty uber in some situations.
I haven’t been keeping up on AoC, so there are probably plenty of cool exploits going on right now.