AoC and WAR at GC 2007
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on September 6, 2007.
I didn’t attend this year’s Game Convention in Leipzig, mainly because I am too damn lazy to drag my nerd ass out of my parents’ basement, unless absolutely neccessary. Thanks to teh Interwebs, I rarely have to.
Age of Conan
There’s a video of siege gameplay. It looks like something that potentially could be fun if Funcom manage to reduce lag and turn it into less of a chaotic brawl. Then we have PvE dungeon footage that very much fails to impress.
And finally, there are some very mixed first impressions by gamers:
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Altair didn’t like what he saw:
Just came back from GC and I must say I pretty much expected something else. […] Honestly I’m trying not to be too negative, but what I’ve seen is not a game needing a polish, but a game which really needs way more time.
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Shem Asar really hates the combat controls:
Imagine playing "Tekken" and having to select a combo through a drop-down menu each and every time before you can even attempt to pull it off through the proper movement and button combinations…
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AoC rocks!
Oh, and boobs!! Nice, yes, but I suspect that 90% of AoC’s population will be "female" and that’s kind of gay.
Warhammer: Age of Reckoning
EA Mythic revealed some leet infoz on Elves. I’m not horribly interested in playing an Elf because I’m too insecure in my sexuality. The always entertaining Brit Paul Barnett recycles some jokes we’ve heard before (Elves are like British posh people, Dark Elves are like British posh people on drugs yadda yadda yadda).
He added a new twist to his Darf Elves characterization, implying that they were also like Americans, by noting that "they move around in enormous war machines carrying thousands of soldiers with enormous weapons of destruction, all across the world, wherever they want, and they invade places" and "they do whatever they want, no one can stop them, they’re rich".
Another relevant piece of information bestowed upon us by Paul Barnett is that the game designer who created the female-only Witch Elf class is a "sad individual, who lives with his mother, and has no girlfriend. As a result, every skill he gave the Witch Elf is, in his mind, the evil powers of women".
You can download a video of the presentation here. It’s only 500mb, too.
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I’m Glad I Quit Vanguard
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 25, 2007.
Looks like Vanguard Game Update #2 was patched to live servers about a week ago. It’s the first patch since SOE took over Sigil and fired more than half of the staff. After reading the patch notes, I’m glad I cancelled my subscription. What a letdown. Let’s have a look at the major changes and new features:
Guild Halls
The Brotherhood System
Bind on Equip
LFG Improvements
Rest Experience
Item Level Requirements
Crash Fixes & Optimizations
Guild Halls?! Who cares? Most guilds have either imploded of left the game a long time ago. Only few people ever cared about housing in Vanguard to begin with. Who needs a pointless house in some god-forsaken corner of the world, much less a guild hall? They have been wasting development ressources on THIS? Is this a joke?
The Brotherhood system allows players to share EXP as long as they’re within 5 levels from each other. A feature like this has been promised since beta but it comes at a time when it should have been very, very low on the priority list and that makes it another major head scratcher. A pointless feature and a waste of time. It’s not even as cool as EQ2’s mentoring system which allows higher level players to scale themselves down to a lower level.
Part of Vanguard’s initial "Vision" was that Bind on Equip / Bind on Pick-up mechanics would be used in moderation. It was a bad idea. EverQuest could get away with this because the rate at which items entered the world was extremely low. With the rate at which items enter the world in VG, BOE/BOP is a neccessity but it is yet another change that makes the game even more similar to its competitors. From what I’ve heard, they made most "rare" items not just BoE but BoP, which is extremely harsh. No self-respecting 40+ character would use anything but rares, so item trade has been effectively eliminated at the high-end. Wow.
Vanguard finally gets a useful LFG system with LFM functionality and the ability to specify which content you want to do. Players have been begging for a better LFG tool since beta 2 and I find it inexcusable that it took them until 8 months after release to implement something that is a basic neccessity for a grouping-centered game.
Rest Experience… oh, man. The last thing Vanguard needs is players reaching level 50 even faster. There is virtually nothing to do at 50 except some badly designed and frustrating grind/collect shit from the generic content assemby line. I’m not sure what to make of this. Not only does it sound like yet another "me too" feature but I never saw the leveling curve in VG as much of a problem. Yes, it was slower than in EQ2 and certainly WoW but that’s not why about 4/5 subscribers have quit the game. This new feature doesn’t help anything.
The second major change to items is the introduction of item level requirements. The Equipment Expertise system was canned and items now have a fixed minumum level like in WoW, supposedly because EE was too confusing for new players. Yeah, right. Like Vanguard has "new players". It’s a fucking shame. EE was novel and it worked. Replacing it with static level requirements simply snuffs another element of choice and uniqueness out of the game. With Vanguard’s item system being in such a pathetic shape, one wonders if they don’t have anything better to do than changing item mechanics that work perfectly well.
Crash fixes and optimizations… a reoccuring item in many Vanguard patch notes but these supposed fixes never seemed to work. From what I’ve heard, hitching is still bad and crashes are still frequent.
There’s more stuff in the full patch notes, some minor features and tons of bug fixes and small changes but that’s it, basically. Not what I expected. Where’s the new and fixed 40+ content? Where is the raid content? Where are the neccessary changes to the frustrating crafting system and its punitive and unfun mechanics? Is there yet a point to Diplomacy? Why didn’t they adress the most glaring character balancing issues? This "game update" certainly isn’t the step forward that Vanguard needs. Questionable changes, worthless features, a few fixes and maybe one or two genuine improvements? Screw it.
At least they finally fixed some of the issues with the rogue class that have been around since beta. Rogues still can’t sneak past mobs even one level higher than them but at least AoE damage, racial abilities and damage shields don’t break Stalk anymore. A very slight damage increase of rogue abilities across the board and some tinkering with cooldown timers. A new ability and a stun that actually is worth using now. Blackjack is now a lull instead of a short mez.
That’s all nice and good but it doesn’t address the problem of rogues being one of the three or so classes that can’t solo worth a damn, having to run screaming like little girls from mobs that virtually all other classes can chain-solo without risk. And fixing the rogue’s broken Vital Strike duration from 12 seconds to 4 seconds is a huge nerf to the class’s group DPS and it’s not like rogues had much to write home about when it comes to usefulness in groups.
If I hadn’t cancelled my subscription weeks ago, I would have done it now. I don’t see the devs addressing any of the issues that made people quit in droves.
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EVE is Unforgiving, Alright
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 24, 2007.
After weeks of carebearing in high-sec space, I finally had my first PvP encounter. I got popped in 0.4 space by a gatecamp consisting of 3 battleships, 2 battlecruisers and a speed-pimped cruiser acting as a tackler. A hundred millon ISK worth of equipment down the drain. Oh joy.
The experience was rather anti-climactic - my Drake battlecruiser didn’t even stand a fighting chance. So lesson one here is that EVE isn’t about fairness, it’s about might makes right. Lesson two is that if you’re acting like a retard, you die. From hindsight, I have been acting pretty retarded. I did check the map for recent combat activity but I disregarded clear warning signs, like that lonely red-blinking guy at the jump gate acting as a lookout. Or the containers labeled with clear warnings that there is pirate activity in the region. I guess I was just overly confident because I had entered that particular system several times without any trouble. Lesson three is: don’t be too confident, retard.
Losing 100 million ISK (after insurance pay-out) was a pretty big deal for me. Level 3 missions aren’t all that lucrative and the ship I lost represented a significant time investment. Yet, I found the experience less infuriating than being steamrolled by an Albion zerg every time I poked my nose out of the castle gates in DAoC. There is something inherently attractive about a game in which getting killed has consequences, unlike PvP in DAoC or WoW. This might not come as much of a surprise to seasoned PvPers but I’ve been trodding the Path of the Carebear for most of my MMO life. This is all new to me and I like it.
I’ve also been seeing a few visually more impressive missions than the usual assortment of ship and generic objects in deadspace pockets. Huge wrecks, enormous space stations, dust clouds… I wish there was more content like this. Running missions is dreafully boring. There are too few of them and that makes it every bit as repetitive as grinding always the same mobs in conventional MMORPGs. This isn’t helped by the fact that the missions aren’t particularly challenging.
Nothing I’ve encountered in level 3 missions so far can crack my Drake’s shield tank, and I usually aggro the whole stage and trigger als many waves as early as possible, just to have all the ship wrecks bunched up nicely for easier looting. It’s like playing in god mode, much better than running missions in an actively armor-tanked Gallente drone boat.
The Drake is also one of the most visually appealing ships in the game. It’s shiny, metallic and sleek and not as assymetrical as most other Caldari ships. I find it a bit curious that most spaceships in EVE, a game that is all about spaceships, look like crap. The Gallente Dominix looks literally like a sack of shit. Most Caldari ships look horribly deformed and Minimatar ships are essentially flying trash heaps that, admittedly, have a nice hobo charm to them. I hope that the upcoming graphics engine upgrade improves things but CCP will probably retain the basic design of all ships and some of these are simply beyond redemption.
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Age of Conan Delayed
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 17, 2007.
It’s old news by now: Funcom announced that the release date for Age of Conan was pushed back to March 25th 2008, citing "recent beta feedback" and a "need to polish some aspects of the game even further, especially when it comes to the entry barriers" as reasons for the delay. Huge shocker, I know. Somehow, I suspect that a lack of accessability is not all that might be amiss.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous entry, Funcom haven’t shown jack shit so far. No content, no advanced mechanics - it is astounding how little has been revealed about a game that is so far into developement. Instead, we get treated to retarded little details like the blood being modeled to look like in the movie 300, Zack Snyder’s homo-erotic orgy of violence.
A March 25th release date means that AoC will have to go up against Warhammer. That’s not as bad as Vanguard’s release a mere days away from WoW’s first expansion but it certainly won’t help sales. Unless, of course, I’ve been reading the tea leaves entirely wrong and WAR, not AoC, will turn out to be the unpolished, half-finished turd.
On a related note: check out this AoC screenshot. It’s hideous. Kind of looks like Vanguard, doesn’t it? That reminds me… I’ve been planning to write a blurb on why Vanguard’s graphics suck but I have lost all my screenshots when I temporarily turned into a moron and decided to install Windows Vista. I can probably make due without screenshots but it’s a bummer nevertheless.
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What’s Going on with Age of Conan?
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 6, 2007.
AoC has been on my rather short list of MMORPGs to keep tabs on for quite a while. I like FunCom as a company and I have confidence in their ability to innovate. I love the fact that AoC is supposed to be a game for mature audiences. I’m sick and tired of the current trend of making MMOs as unoffensive and politically correct as possible (no religions, demons and angels in Vanguard; the markedly Puritan clothing choices in EQ2 etc.).
Lately, I’ve been getting progressively more worried, though. AoC is supposed to be released in October, a mere 2-3 months from now. And so far, they haven’t shown anything of relevance. A couple of cinematic trailers, some UI footage and a number of short flicks showing some guys whacking a bunch of mobs. That’s basic functionality. Who cares? Let’s see what we have not been shown yet:
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Dungeons and quests
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Mounted combat and real-time archery
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Player-built cities, including sieges and defense
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mass PvP and formation combat with AI controlled soldiers
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the innovative, multi-tiered class-system
FunCom make quite large claims for AoC, don’t they? Every day we’re getting closer to the October 30th release date, with no substantial information released on the very features that are supposed to set AoC apart from the competition, I’m getting more and more convinced that AoC is, in fact, exhibiting the horrible trio of high expectations, overambitious goals and a looming deadline. If that stuff was ready for release in October, they would have shown at least something by now.
FunCom can’t afford to push back the release date too far. Going up against Warhammer in Q1 2008 would be a bad idea, WAR would slaughter this game. On the other hand, FunCom can’t afford to release a half-fnished shell of a game, either. Not after they did it in the past with Anarchy Online and certainly not since Vanguard proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that gamers won’t tolerate it anymore.
Games Convention in Leipzig (Agust 23rd to 26th) will probably be the last opportunity for FunCom to convince the public that AoC will not end up as yet another MMO debacle.
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Some Things Vanguard Did Right
Posted by ze Kranky Kraut on August 2, 2007.
I cancelled my Vanguard subscription a few days ago, I’ve rarely been playing in recent months anyway. Despite the flaws, Vanguard had kept me entertained for for about four months of intensive gaming and then some, which is more than the combined time I spent during my three stints in EQ2 and about half the time WoW managed to keep me interested. Despite of all the game-breaking flaws, the game isn’t all crap.
In retrospect, I think there are a bunch of things Vanguard does better than or at least as well as other MMORPGs. It’s not enough to gloss over the fact that the game is essentially an unfinished, bug-ridden and conceptually failed abomination but there are some things I wouldn’t mind seeing in future MMORPGs. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything else that’s worth a damn in Vanguard, this list of far from exhaustive.
Character Classes
Vanguard features 15 character classes: 3 heavy fighters, 4 light fighters, 4 healers and 4 casters. It’s an archetype system, not unlike EQ2’s. All classes are designed to fulfill a core functionality. Vanguard does it rather well. The classes aren’t equal in power or usefulness, far from it, and there are plenty of class-defining abilities, but all classes can get the job done.
While there is a certain degree of overlap in mechanics and functionality (it’s hard to come up with radically different implementations of tanking), it is camouflaged well. The classes feel sufficiently different from each other. Certainly not all of them and maybe not to the extend that WoW’s classes do but it works for me.
Vanguard successfully pulls off what EQ2 never could: a functional archetype system that allows all classes to fulfill their core roles without becoming virtually indistinguishable from each other. Even after EQ2’s radical class system revamp, their classes stink. Vanguard has interesting classes that aren’t revolutionary but well implemented, bugs notwithstanding.
Targeting
In Vanguard players can have two targets, an offensive target (mobs and NPCs, usually) and a defensive target (group members, pets). What sounds like a small evolutionary step actually makes a world of a difference. It reduces a lot of UI usage tedium, especially for healers who can now keep their party alive without having to detarget the mob and stop doing damage.
Besides being convenient, Vanguard’s dual-target system is also the enabler of classes like Disciple (heals by performing melee attacks) and Blood Mage (a life-tap based healer) and interesting combat mechanics like Rescues and Intercepts.
Equipment Expertise
EE is an interesting little game mechanic for restricting twinking. An item’s EE is expressed as a percentage value that depends on character level, item level, item type and rarity. The Übersword of Assrape +4 may have an EE of 34% for a level 20 character and 15% for a level 30 character. The combined EE of all items on a character cannot exceed 100% and there is also a cap of 20% maximum per item that can be equipped.
The degree of flexibility offered by the EE system is certainly nice, compared to the hard caps in games like WoW. Equipping one or two items that are of significantly higher level is possible, but it comes with a trade-off, as they use up a good amount of EE. The system could use a few tweaks but I like the fact that I am given a choice - within certain boundaries, of course.
Music
Todd Masten’s music is one of the high points in Vanguard. While the main theme isn’t all that great, pretty much everything else is. Vanguard’s in-game music isn’t big on instantly recognizable themes but the few themes that exist are outstanding. The ambient music is also good. It’s unobtrusive, diverse and it usually fits the mood of the zones very well. Some samples from the official website:
Aghram Theme, Shensho Ni Theme, Cobalt Deep.
User Interface Icon Art
Vanguard’s user interfact is bog-standard, similar to WoW’s UI. It could be a bit more customizable like EQ2’s UI, it could use better mod support and a better quest log but it’s functional as it is. What stands out are the beautifully drawn UI icons. I don’t think I’ve seen better icon artwork in any other MMORPG so far. It looks much better than the amateurish icons in EQ2 and LotRO, that look like they were ripped from an early 1990s shareware game.
Some Aspects of the Graphics
I’ll discuss Vanguard’s graphics in-depth in the near future. Visually, Vanguard is a very mixed bag, there is a stark contrast between stuff that looks stunningly beautiful and things that don’t work at all. The Human and Wood Elf areas of Kojan, for example, look amazing. Large parts of Thestra, on the other hand, look dreadfully boring. Qalia can impress with incredible long-distance views but most of the landscape looks like an acne-scarred mess due to the bad use of bump-mapping. Individual objects are often modeled in detail (compared to the low-poly models of other MMOs) but more detailed objects also mean less objects on the screen. The water looks nice but the line where water meets land looks pretty horrid. The dagger and martial arts combat animations look great, the combat animations for spears and two-handed hammers look retarded. And so on.
Mob, weapon and armor models are among the best in any MMORPG, though there could be more diversity. There are so many great pieces of artwork, it’s a shame that all is glued together by a horrendous fractal landscape that makes everything look disjointed because nothing really blends into it.
What’s definately well done are the proportions of characters, buildings and objects in relation to each other. A castle actually looks like a viable castle when it comes to size, unlike these tiny little castles in EQ2’s Antonica zone that look like they couldn’t even withstand an assault by a bunch of geriatric Orcs. The city of New Targonor is a towering bulwark of walls and fortifications. The strange geologic formations in Thestra’s southern swamp lands make players feel tiny and the Infineum Sanctuary, perched atop a mountain surrounded by steep cliffs, can be seen from miles away.
