Play PvE

JoBildo pointed this out first, I can't take credit for the insight, but most of the yummy goodness and polish in Age of Conan so far is within the PvE content. It's not perfect, but when I reflect on the PvE I find myself gushing:

• Immersion is king. The quest dialog is beautifully written, the best I've seen in any MMORPG.
• The zones are gorgeous, large and well designed to hide little secrets that you'll find over time.
• PvE combat is simply amazing, every class has big goodies that can make you cackle with glee.
• Line of sight aggro, sneak up behind mobs ala Thief.
• Gear, while sparse in variety at low levels, is deeply detailed and looks amazing. Funcom is intentionally keeping stats low so that while collecting gear is fun, it's not overpowered.
• Animation and the overall appearance of characters is spectacular. Subtle gestures in the emotes, visceral weapon swings in melee, pyrotechnic flames and lightning with the casting. And of course the much talked about death animation finishing moves.
• The instancing, while at first odd to get used to, supports player choices: Questing area swarmed and overcrowded? Change instance. Run into an annoying griefer or piggybacker? Change instance. Boss spawn too long? You get the idea. It's a convenient solution to a variety of problems.
• Best roleplay community I've seen in years, it's significant, mature and involved.

There are downsides too: The crafting is incomplete, many quests are still bugged, etc.. but I think there's so much raw fun in the PvE experience that it's easy to be patient for the fixes which Funcom is pumping out.

I'm not going anywhere else anytime soon, I'm loving this game on the PvE side.

PvP = meh

Meanwhile, if you're a PvP fan I would guess that eking out entertainment from Age of Conan right now comes coupled with frustration:

• Border Kingdoms are a ghost town, they're too far separated from the rest of the action, with no good reason to go there.
• Sieges are still buggy and involve large guilds, large grind.
• Mercenary system was never implemented.
• PvP free-for-all servers are a circus. PvP is available in good volume, but much of it's baseless and lacks depth. Asshat ganking abounds.
• Mini-games are very basic and poorly designed.
• Mounted combat is lacking, aside from the amusing rear kicks.

Age of Conan's PvP does beat WoW's, but that's a pretty low expectation since WoW's PvP is barely worth noting, of course it was easily sliced and diced with AoC's incomparable combat system.

While I hate to accolade an unreleased game, Warhammer clearly has the leg up in the PvP department. WAR's key element will be in the ease of jumping in and out of PvE-to-PvP interaction from most any zone while including tangible questing throughout.

AoC's PvP content is such a mess that it's going to take Funcom months to redo a bunch of this stuff. They need to pull their PvP out of the fire before it gets cooked.

Funcom should have marketed this game more as a PvE experience.

I'd like to see some sort of anti-zerg code put into WAR, because zergs just aren't much fun whether you're on the die-in-a-second recieving end or the I'm-just-another-robot zerging end.

Simple formula:

If more than 3 players attack a single targeted player, apply diminishing returns on further attackers. I'd suggest cutting it by 50% with each additional attacking player beyond 3.

This would put a stop to the abuse of automated focus-fire assist addons in Scenarios and overall it'll make RvR battles more balanced and require more tactical thinking. Warbands would divide into smaller groups, you'll see more flanking and clever strategies. Classes would have to rethink their pairings, whether they should stick with Tank, Heal & DPS or push for DPS, DPS, DPS or any combination in-between.

Preferably it should only affect damage. Leave holds, knockbacks, interrupts and other crowd-control or utility abilities to work as normal.

Heals may need to be adjusted similarly however.

Anti-zerg code should only be applied during PvP activities and should not affect PvE at all.

I'm aware that it's probably more difficult to implement than it sounds, but I think it's worth doing. It would would go a long way towards making RvR a lot more interesting.

If not this, then please come up with something.

I'd just logged into WAR's Open Beta for about 10 minutes. I'd poked around and settled on a Squig Herder which I'd obtained the lofty height of Rank 2 (that's Level 2 for people who don't speak Mythic terminology). I decided to explore but got not much further than over the next hill.

A large group of players were assembled near a shoreline. The kind of crowd that makes you think some kind of parade must be starting. Suddenly this big Ogre appears and starts shouting "get these Squigs off me!" or somesuch. I find myself caught up in the excitement, killing the beasties, then finding beer barrels and then finally after a few waves of Dwarven troops I'm tossing my arrows at a Boss.

It was one big Woot! moment that lasted for several minutes. There were a ton of players participating and incredulously after I was awarded my share of loot, a timer popped up for the whole thing to start again in a couple of minutes.

I'd experienced my first Public Quest.

I ended up repeating it several times, dragging Nelg along with me and we both had a blast. This past Sunday that was my introduction to WAR.

My friend Chris would have described this as one of those "Oh wow" moments. He figures every MMORPG needs at least one big glorious moment, like the first time you take a flight path in World of Warcraft, or your first fatality in Age of Conan. Without those experiences there would be nothing epic about these games. And an MMORPG without epic-- well it just wouldn't be epic. =P

The Public Quest magic is so simple, it's basically just an event that players can jump into, even if it's in-progress. This is something we've needed in these games awhile, a chance to just run in and have a blast, without worrying about organizing the proper group to do so.

I hope Mythic can maintain this kind of magic throughout all of WAR's lifespan.

Dear Funcom:

It's not the combos that make your melee combat so fun. It's easy to think that, but it's not.

It's the fact that I can swing a weapon and everything that it hits, it hits. It's running up to mobs and just going at it. That's visceral joy.

Don't nerf that. You'll be watering down the best part of your game.

Funcom's stealth changes have been decreasing the damage dealt on multiple mobs. I don't know all of the details, but it's a noticeable difference as I play. In the next patch, they're taking this even further:

So now we'll have to pay more attention to our targets.

Weeks ago I could handle 5 mobs my level with ease and even push it to 7 mobs (although my death rate would go up considerably). I'm playing a Polearm "Frenzy" Guardian, a class and spec that's specifically aimed toward holding and dealing with crowds of mobs.

Lately however, I cannot handle the same mobs in groups of 3 and even 2 can cut it awfully close. I could previously clear a Villa without any deaths as long as I paid attention, but now I'm dying repeatedly. I realize this is in part to leveling up higher, but even scaling back like that feels odd, shouldn't I be more powerful at Endgame?

I understand getting nerfed, I could accept that, but that's not what this is about.

The number one joy of this game has been the combat. I love not having to target, I love running in and grabbing mobs like some kind of berzerker warrior. I love that my polearm hits what it swings through, that it's NOT target-based combat. Or at least that it's less-emphasized on the target, there should only be a marginal difference. I should sweep my weapon through mobs again with the thrill of watching them all take noticeable damage.

Funcom, please, don't reduce the best parts of this game to appease players who are demanding what they're accustomed to in other games. I understand you want to balance, but don't water down your game in the process.

Let the balance-obsessed players decide to play the classed they perceive to be overpowered, they'll do that anyway. Don't nerf away the biggest thing this game has going for it. This is 100% about the fun factor.

Well Funcom is starting to get to me. It's not the bugs, it's not directly the lack of content, but it's related.

Removing experience from grey quests was a big warning sign, after much negative reaction to that, they're reversing it, but the situation is now clear: Funcom is starting to stretch content.

Now the big blow to myself and everyone within my guild: Apprenticeship has been reduced to just 20 levels. This makes it nearly useless, because they don't have a reverse counterbalance (like City of Heroes' Exemplar / Reverse-Sidekick), so most players of disparate levels can no longer group together in a meaningful way.

I accoladed the Apprentice (Sidekick) feature prior to release. Now they've just flushed it down. In one move, they've removed a large chunk of the fun factor out of the game for me. It's hugely disappointing, even moreso that it worked. Members of my guild had become well accustomed to it.

This game is already lacking a great deal of the features and content that many were expecting. Removing one for the sake of trying to slow people down in the leveling process, that's just mind-boggling to me. This game didn't need any steps backwards.

I sure hope they come to their senses and revert this in the next patch or two.

Good old Lum the Mad has written the quintessential Age of Conan review, where he hits the nail on the head with the subject line "It's the Fun, Stupid" and then brings it home with this little ditty:

Read the whole thing, it's worthwhile.

I'll note that my most recent AoC article was about putting undead zombies to rest. =)

The raw fun factor is what also drew me to City of Heroes a few years back. The rest of the features will be the deciding factor over how long I stay. For me the most important of those are the immersion and world setting appeal, where I also find Hyboria a win-win.

Blogs and press will focus on competitive Endgame and certainly the more aggressive players will continue to do so as well, but dammit I'm just having too much fun to worry about whether Sieges or Crafting are all that they were supposed to be.

Funcom will have to fix things up sooner or later though, some of these other MMOs might wizen up to this concept of fun.

Funcom has Fun in their name, but of course, fun is subjective.

As Age of Conan approaches its release date, I'm noticing the MMO blogosphere is questioning whether it will perform on launch.

Syncaine @ Hardcore Casual outlines the most important part of all this in "Too WoW-like, a positive or negative?": The Fun Factor.

When WoW was released, it had plenty of problems. It wasn't a clean launch by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I'd say WoW was downright messy even compared to most MMOs, but.. and here's an all-important but... it was still a good launch. Why? Because it was clearly and uninhibitedly fun in a mass-market way. It was obvious within the first couple of weeks that WoW was going to be a resounding success, that it was going to surpass just the Blizzard fanbois and EQ migrators, it was going over the top.

Not too many people remember the problems associated with WoW's messy first few months, because why bother dwelling on it when it no longer matters?

Tycho writes eloquently about WoW's state of dominance, better than I could have put it.

This doesn't mean that there isn't room for other games, in fact I think there's plenty of room within WoW's shadow.

It doesn't matter whether there are bugs, or even if the launch is messy, a game.. any game makes or breaks on the fun factor. The question you should ask yourself when you're deciding to buy a game or not, to invest your dollars and your time, is whether you think you'll enjoy yourself.