Age of Conan : Impressions

I don't know what it was that drew me to seek out AoC. Perhaps it was the generally positive response that it has been receiving. Maybe I just wanted to see for myself if it had a chance of making a dent in WoW's death grip on the MMO market. Regardless, trying to find the damn game became a quest itself. I started by hitting half a dozen stores to discover all were sold out. Interestingly, I was never the only person in the store looking for the game. Combined with the news that AoC was quickly approaching the half million mark, I figured something must be going right in this game.

So, one week of store inventory watching and a four hour install and patch session later I'm finally sitting in front of the game. I like the two-tier concept for the character generation. The top level is standard "pick your parts from presets" chargen. But, you can go one level deeper and get sliders for your face and body. Granted that still suffers from the same problems we've seen in the likes of Oblivion or Mass Effect... that being it's really hard to make something look good. I like the concept at least.

After playing for a bit, the game really doesn't strike me as an MMO (as many others have already noted). It's not great if you want to jump right onto the grief-train with all your buddies, but I found it kind of refreshing to see them at least try to make a game experience in an MMO that goes beyond mindless grinding or following raid orders in vent. It falls a little flat thanks to its preoccupation with its M rating. The dialogue options tend to be offensive with little reason, and everyone seems to be a thief, murderer, or whore. So it's a "game for boys" as a friend put it. Fine, at least they're in the right market.

The gameplay is actually growing on me. On the surface it seems like more of the same MMO button mashing... but the attack directions and combo system really make it more engaging than the click and wait auto-shoot WoW sometimes degrades into. Also, the soft(er) targeting system really works for the feel. You can hit multiple things with your standard swings based on positioning. It's such a small thing but it's huge for the experience. Pro-tip: don't hit your attack keys when running by a city guard. Turns out they don't take kindly to being stabbed in face, even if you really didn't mean it.

So, AoC is decent and I'm having fun with it. Have the stars finally aligned for someone to take down WoW? Unlikely, but Conan stands in a good position to make a dent in WoW's absurd market share... and some competition is always better than none.

Retrospective

I'm breaking my strict one post per month maximum rule to reflect on a couple of realizations that struck me quite recently.

First of all, I've now been on the job for six months. That one was pretty startling to me as it certainly doesn't feel that long. Looking back, I really threw myself into this world, and that time just blew by me. It's not a bad thing... quite the contrary considering how much I enjoy my work, and I guess it just comes with the territory to an extent. I've really been fortunate to not only get into the game industry, but also work on an amazingly awesome game.

Which brings me to the second point. I realized that the first time I ever heard of Spore, I was sitting in CIS 300, my first game design class in college. It was the prof's lecture on his trip to GDC, and that seems so far back to me. There was a lot (nearly 3 years) of game development I did at school after that moment. As someone pointed out to me (at GDC of all places), several generations of GDIACers left Cornell with the hopes of working on Spore. I don't know if that's funny or sad or just weird. Anyway, it struck me as interesting at least.

inane is too good for this

Seriously. I sat down, determined to show signs of life on the interwebs. The motivation was there... hell, I even had some things I really wanted to get down on paper... er, well whatever you'd call this.

Nothing. I must have half-written half a dozen things and ended up deleting each one. I'd just get part of the way through it, realized that even I didn't care what I was writing about anymore and trashed it. And this always came after spending the time to meticulously rework that first half to my obsessively particular satisfaction.

I'm not sure what my problem is. Not like it sits very high on the list of worst problems to have, but still. I can't even seem to write for me anymore, and that's just damn irritating.

Maybe I'll feel it better tomorrow... who knows?