Below are one or two things that really stood out for me.

I love the class I chose, even though I did mention that I thought it was a glass cannon. The Assassin is great fun and the DPS I can deal in phenomenal. I always try to attack from hide mode, and after I’ve done the initial attack, the NPC is already down to half health, then it’s just a matter of going through my combos in order of DPS and there dead. The Assassin is also really great looking, I love the whole Assassin’s Creed, hiding in the shadows and duel wielding look. Roll an Assassin and you’ll know what I mean. All of the equipment you get through quests and grinding, all suit the look of what I think an Assassin would look like.

I like the choice of races you can have. Each of the three races are very unique and special. I chose an Aquilonian because I think it suited the Assassin class better than a Stygian. Each of the races homelands are beautiful and very unique. Their capital cities are each a real site to look at and I spend most of my time in ALT + Z mode running around each of them in turn.

The quests are very different and new. I thought the night time quests in Tortage to be very spectacular and interesting. It felt really good to kill all the “baddies” you had encountered so far in the game on the way to Strom. Slitting his throat was perfect. Once I moved to the Wilds as my next zone, I was a but miffed at having to read all of the quest conversations as was everyone. Some of the quests were incredibly evil, burning down someones house for the bastard mentioned below’s power, telling a husband I had just killed his wife who had been cheating on him and bribing a priest into helping a complete bastard out. I have to say I did feel quite bad after a few of them.

My only meh

I’m still getting those graphical problems where textures won’t load until I’ve stared at them for a few seconds, I have a very good PC as well, (Quad core CPU, 8800GT 512MB GPU, 4 GB RAM, 22 inch monitor, Windows XP, Raptor HD 10,000RPM.) I’ve tried changing the options to no luck at all. If you have any tips feel free to write in the comments.

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On another note, I have the following week off from school, and at the time of writing I’m level 26, I hope to get to 40 in this week. I’m on the EU Ymir PVE server, because that’s where my guild is.

In the near future, I’m going to write up my journey so far in game with lots of screenshots, so make sure you catch it.

Conan Watch

I’d like to thank Funcom for a relatively good Early Access release compared to other MMO’s. After the original delays of a few hours, I thought the performance was good and there wasn’t much lag. I played quite a lot over the weekend, for me, and I got to level 11 with my Aquilonian Assassin on Sunday. Maybe not very quickly in a lot of peoples books, but for me, it always takes a while to get the hang of a new game. I found switching between the Quest panel to the Talents difficult at first, I was constantly forgetting which button did what.

Without any Beta practise as well, I was a complete noob to the game. I suppose that’s why I didn’t join the Beta, I wanted that first “5 minute experience” and I was happy that I could experience the really awesome intro, character creation screen and first few quests for the first time. There are quite a few problems with the game but they will probably get ironed out before the “official release” on the 20th for US and the 23rd for EU.

Dislikes

I didn’t like the opening instance, after the amazing entrance to the game, I didn’t like the fact that you had to kill every enemy to get to the a high enough level for the next “section” of the instance. It was too formal, there was no space for freedom or adventure, I liked the actual fighting and learning the combos and techniques, I just didn’t like the way Funcom presented it.

Graphics

I thought that the graphics were pretty awesome, I managed to crank all the options to the highest and still get an average of 20 fps, I’m not going to keep it like that, but I think that the game is beautiful that high. I found that some textures to be bland and they looked like they didn’t even try to texure it, until you practically walk on top of it and then it suddenly becomes brilliantly textured. It kind of breaks the immersion a tad. I like the bloom feature a lot. The port of Tortage after looking in dark alleys is amazing. Below are a few screens of what I mean.

You can really see how the natural eye would react to seeing such a bright scene.

It’s a very beautiful game and with such a vibrant selection of scenery, from deserts to mountainous areas, I doubt I’m going to get bored very quickly.

Quests + NPC’s

Throughout about level 5 to 10 I was very confused about which quests I should be doing, I was either fighting people much lower level than me, or getting repeatedly killed by getting overrun by adds, which were levels above me. I was hovering between the day and night modes of Tortage, constantly stuck between quests which were ever green on my questlog or red. I’m pretty sure that I’m the only person getting these problems, mainly because most people had that Beta experience, and were pretty used to the games mechanics. I’m not complaining too much though, it’s a learning curve and I’m not expecting them to “spoon feed” me the way through the game.

The quests in game, despite me being a bit confused about which level I should be doing them, are very good at immersing you in all the back story of the NPC’s, from spying to stealing, there are a lot of interesting tasks to do. There are still quite a lot of kill 10 rats quests, but they have to put them in there in order to level you up. I especially like just walking around Tortage and speaking to random quest givers, each of the stories are usually about the same topic (in the case of Tortage, The red hands tyrants). I very much like the fact that you can “talk” to the quest giver, you enter a cutscene when you talk to one, where the NPC does some excellent voice acting. I often found myself reading the subtitles of what they said, but waiting for them to finish talking anyway. You develop a real hatred for certain people (Red hands) and you are often in the good books for different people (Prostitutes and market sellers). For some reason, I often forgot that the game isn’t nice, and that you don’t always have to be a goody two shoes. Despite this, it felt good to be congratualted for your efforts, and it’s nice to be the “hero” even though I didn’t necessarily want to be. Unfortunately, one problem I did see, is that there were “good” answers (e.g. Yes I’ll help you) and “bad” answers (e.g. Find someone else whore!). Usually if you choose the “bad” option, the NPC closes the conversation with you, and in order to get the quest, you need to click through all the “good” answers to get there. They should make it as though, if you decide to be mean and harsh, they treat you differently. They could fear you and offer a greater reward, or just ignore you altogether. This would provide a great risk for the snide, evil-doing players out there.

Tortage is a great city, day and night, theres a huge appeal for me, I love the dark alleys, and long winding streets. The people walking around are very realistic and act extremely human like. With the immersion of the quests, everytime I walked into a Red hand Guard, and was stopped, I always felt a bit on edge and a lot of bad feeling towards the level 20 NPC’s, I’ve never played a game that actually grabbed me enough to be almost a bit afraid of a computer character.

One thing I did find a bit odd, is that at level 6, when you walked into a courtyard it was empty, but when you get a quest, suddenly it’s filled with pirates, I personally think they should have left all the kill quests for outside Tortage, unless it’s an assassination quest or similar. They should keep all the really inovative quests, like the “spying on” one for inside the city.

The NPC’s are always very well distinguished from their peers, you can tell who’s a pirate and who’s a prostitute, the costumes are very well represented with who’s wearing them. The one time I thought was quite funny, was when I talked to a quest giver, and her chest, which was clothed with a dress, flickered in between being textured and not being so textured, A lot was revealed during that conversation, and I’m not talking about the story line. (Nipples, if you didn’t see where I was going with that!)

Combat and Gameplay

I really like the directional striking system, I do find the fact that you have to use your left hand to move, press 1, 2 or 3 AND use 4, 5 onwards for the combos, a bit tricky at times. With a melee class like the Assassin, it is quite difficult to keep on top of all of it.

I really like some of the combos however, they are very well animated and I love some of the finishing moves, the decapitation and the resulting blood splatter is perfect for the gameplay. It’s very rewarding after a close fight to lop of the enemies head.

I haven’t yet tried  to be a caster, and haven’t seen any of the animations, which I’ve seen other players use. They look absolutely amazing, they look as though the caster has just called upon all the storms of the world, it makes it seem as though it requires a huge effort to cast.

I’m not that happy with the class I chose, the Assassin is quite meh. It’s basically a glass cannon. Lots of damage can be dealt, but none taken. I was fighting some crocodiles for example, I killed 1 in about 4 seconds, but, 3 more came at me because I was a few centimetres into their agro range, I thought to myself, ok, I can deal with this. Before I had started my first combo, I was dead. Literally in seconds I was finished. It’s a lot easier to fight multiple mobs for questing and experience, and without being able to do that, I don’t think I’ll enjoy the Assassin. Once I get to 20, I’m probably going to roll a different class, like the barbarian or Hunter.

Overall

I wasn’t hugely impressed with the game. For all the wait, I did expect a tad bit more from Funcom. Now that isn’t to say that I didn’t like it, I thoroughly enjoyed the first few hours that I played, it was just that it wasn’t great.

I’ve heard a lot of great things about level 20 – 40, and my opinion is likely to change a lot. Even so, for the time being, my mind is set.

Conan Watch

]]> http://conanwatch.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/some-thoughts-on-the-early-access-release/feed/ 2 Conan Watch http://conanwatch.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/technical-problems-with-servers/ http://conanwatch.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/technical-problems-with-servers/#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 19:09:20 +0000 Conan Watch http://conanwatch.wordpress.com/?p=85 ]]> As pretty much everyone else from 4.30 PM GMT, I checked the client constantly. Unfortunately, I was stopped at various stages, like, “Downloading Patch Information” and “Cannot Authenticate to server”. At 5.30, I was quite annoyed and after my post hoping that everyone would get it easy for the 5PM server opening, I was quite pissed.

With the Age of Conan official forums down at the time, there was no way to talk to other players about what happened with the servers. Expecting it all to be sorted out tommorow, I restarted my computer for the 5th time (in case the problems were client side) and was very happy to see this (See Image Below). At last Funcom had released an official note on the matter, and I’m happy that they bothered, instead of letting the community sort out the problems of communication.

Basically, it says that the servers will be back online at 8PM GMT, so be on at that time.

It also seems that the official site and forums are down but I might be wrong, I’m guessing it’s because they don’t want thousands of posts a second, complaining about the servers not working.

Heres what it says if I try to login:

“You have entered an invalid username or password. Please press the back button, enter the correct details and try again. Don’t forget that the password is case sensitive.”

Right now, I’m probably going to put the idea of the “Thinking aloud” plan aside, and try again in a few weeks, probably when I go into a brand new city in game. Sorry for all of those who wanted it, just have some patience, and I’ll try to help you out.

Conan Watch

First off, I personally want to wish everyone who is going to play today, a happy time in AoC. I hope no one can’t connect to the servers or cannot download patched etc. etc.

It’s been a very long wait for everybody and From here on outwards we can all enjoy ourselves in Hyboria.

I wrote this post to tell everyone what I’m going to do in the release. What I’m going to do is record myself via microphone, and basically “think aloud” everything going through my head as I play those first ten minutes. Afterwards I’m going to write up everything I said in those ten minutes and publish it. I also want to say, that it will include from when I double click the icon for Age of Conan.

I’m going to publish the writeup probably on Sunday, so lookout for that.

I hope everyone will enjoy what I want to say, I invite everyone to write in the comments, your most significant thought you had in the first 10 minutes of play.

On another note, I have recently surpassed 1000 hits after a few weeks of being live and I would like to thanks each and everyone of the readers. Remeber that my Digg link is on the front page so don’t hesitate to digg me.

Conan Watch

Funcom have recently revealed the names, locations, and types (PVP, PVE or RP-PVP) for Age of Conan servers.

All the servers are available for the Early access 17th May players. Find the list here.

I counted about 30 odd servers, quite a lot for a new game, most starting out with maybe 10, or 20, then making more available as more players start coming. I suspect that they will easily fill up the majority of servers, in no time, but there could be a few empty-ish ones.

Quote from Funcom:

“Funcom has been working very hard towards setting up gaming server capacity to launch this game comfortably for all the people who want to play Age of Conan.”

Basically Funcom believe they will have enough space for all players and wanted to make sure that there were no unhappy players. Not being sure how big each server is, it’s quite difficult to estimate what will happen

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In other news, Funcom a few days ago, revealed that the Early Access Programme was full of players and any preorder customers who didn’t pay the £5 in time were, well to put it bluntly, screwed. Funcom’s official word can be found here.

Here are a few things Tarib Senior Community Manager said:

“We measured how much capacity we thought we would need for this program and registrations have been on pace for this capacity – until two days ago. On Monday the registrations spiked and on Tuesday they increased even more. Early on Wednesday the capacity limit was reached and automatically shut off. The entire program is now mostly sold out globally, with some local variation. We had no way of anticipating the spike we saw at the end.”

“Now we have few choices. We could shut down the Closed Beta and reformat those servers to set them up for Early Access instead, but the fact is that the Closed Beta is supplying extremely valuable information that we would not want to miss. Quality is always our first goal and we would not want to compromise that but rather focus on the experience for all of you at launch.

Our best course of action is to move as quickly as we can to finalize the adjustments of the full range of launch servers, and to concentrate on being completely prepared for launch. It is only a matter of days even for those who are not in the Early Access programme to set foot in Hyboria.”

It looks like there isn’t a chance any people who missed the Early Access Programme will get another chance, so unlucky if that’s you, At least you won’t have to wait too long to play.

As reported from IGN, Theraldsen says that…

” We want them [Xbox 360 gamers] to be able to play with their PC friends if they like to… But obviously the control mechanism, the communication, all this is stuff we are solving on a daily basis. The patching, the install, the footprint, the payment, the servers, the customer service… it’s a challenge. But we will get there eventually,”

I think, this will be a huge challenge and difficulty for Funcom, as mentioned in the quote, they would have to make everything fair between the two platforms, view distance, essential gameplay graphics (e.g. Casting animations) and because the Xbox version is expected to be released a year after the PC version comes out, A lot of Xbox 360 players will be flattened by the experienced PC players. Of course eventually the Xbox players will have the same skill as the PC players, but if the game is not well balanced for the Xbox players it will be even more difficult. This means that Age of Conan could get a bad reputation on consoles for being unfair. To counter this I suggest that Funcom make it optional whether you want to play with the other platform.

Another way of looking at it, is that the ammount of time to get the cross platform play all sorted and tweaked, with all those hours they could have improved the game for both platforms seperately. More content and gameplay for a better experience on the platforms separetely, for me would be better than playing against or with eachother.

On top of the above, there would also be the problem of controlling the game with different controls, many people think that the game is easily played with the well adapted Xbox 360 controller, and not so easy with the keyboard. Funcom would have to do lots of testing and tweaking in order to give one platform an advantage over the other because of a inferior controller.

All in all, I think that, in other games like Shadowrun, the crossplatform gimmick doesn’t really work, in the few years since the release of Shadowrun, maybe one or two other games have implemented it. Not really a sucess in my opinion. I think Funcom should forget it, and use the time and money elsewhere.

Conan Watch – Georges

One of the things that I spend my time on in MMOs is talents and feats. The exact combination that gives me the most fun can sometimes take hours, so why wait for launch? The website http://feats.goonheim.com/ is a great source for every class’ specific feat tree, and are very accurate. The arrows connecting linked feats are sometimes hard to see, but once you know where they are this is a wonderful tool to determine your build for the games launch. (Not to mention that you’ll be able to kill those long hours waiting for tommorow!)

Not knowing exactly how each spell works, or how each talent will exactly affect the spells (some simply say they “increase”, whatever that means) makes choosing difficult, don’t stop to look at them though, because the majority have good information, but you can always look at the end talents and imagine how cool they will be.

Conan Watch – Jake

Ten Ton Hammer have recently released a new list of short videos showing quite a few /emotes. If you’re not entirely sure what a /emote is, I suggest, the next time you’re in pretty much any MMO, type /dance and press enter. You can find the “Video Emote Guide” here.

Before you do however I suggest you take a minute to think whether you really want to watch them. It’s like that “first 5 minute” experience that I’ve been avoiding the beta for. I want to be able to have that first 5 minutes for proper, in the real game with my character which I could spend years with. You only have your first time once, and it’s a bit like with novelty things like /emotes.

It’s not life changing if you don’t see the /vomit for the first time in game, but for people like me, I’m going to wait for Saturday to mess around with stuff like that. If you’re excited about the game, I don’t blame you for trying to get as much in without actually playing it, but think ahead about if you will be dissapointed for not seeing those things before.

Your call, but I’m the kind of gamer who will get excited about /emotes and similar things, but wants to wait to really use them.

Conan Watch

Hey again, just a quick word, I visited https://register.ageofconan.com/ earlier today as I usually do, to check for the pre order download, and was happy to see that Funcom had updated the page to read the following

Welcome to the Age of Conan Early Access Program!

You’ve chosen to be among the select few who can venture into Hyboria to carve out your destiny and establish your name before the masses arrive.

To start your journey you will first have to download and install the client from the link below.

Once installed the client can be patched to the latest version from May 14th, so that you’re fully prepared to start your journey.

The gates to Hyboria will open on May 17th.

Welcome to Hyboria!

One word really, w00t. But seriously, all you need to do is login to your account on the register site and make sure you’ve paid for the early access programme, to begin downloading.

As Funcom said a few weeks ago here, There is a limited number of spaces available so be quick.

You will download a Funcom Download Manager, and from there you can download the game.

At the moment, Im at 0.1 %, It has completely stopped while, when I started it was at 400kb/s. I’m a bit worried but hopefully it should sort itself out. Pausing and pressing play sorted out the problem.

The Funcom Download Manager is trying to download almost 14 GB worth of game and at 400 kb/s it will take a day and a half.

I’m just hoping I will be able to keep my computer on for that long. One problem I do hope isn’t the case, is that on the Mozilla Firefox download, I was downloading a huge file and had to turn it off for the night. I pressed pause and when I turned it back on in the morning I couldn’t find the file anywhere. If I was you I would just keep your PC on all night just in case.

Quick edit, I’m at 5 % and the download hasn’t gone below 390 kb/s and it will take 16 hrs, which is good news for my internet connection. Hopefully it will be the same for you.

If you are having any difficulties or tips for downloading the file, be sure to post them in the comments for other readers who are having problems.

Have a good download!

Conan Watch

On another note, I’ve recently bought an Age of Conan book and will be posting about it soon, so stay tuned (via rss on main page if you feel so obliged) just a heads up you can find the book here.

I will be writing on my views on the book and what kind of stories are inside.

Conan Watch