When I first encountered the mobs in Atzel's Approach, I thought maybe their aggro was bugged, but now I'm not so sure. I think it's possible that their AI is a little too smart.

Perhaps the Atzel have worked it out that the best way to kill the players is to form up roaming squads that swarm players randomly. I'm being sarcastic of course, but quite a few times these mobs have tricked me into thinking they were players due to their odd behaviour.

Here are some things that have happened that I wish I'd thought of capturing on video:

• I hit a mob and he ran away. This has happened before, it generally means he's running to get help and he may run quite far. As expected, he came back with a half dozen companions. The odd part? Once they got to me, they ran away too! A few minutes later, I was murdered by a crowd of about 30 or so that caught up to me.
• Numerous times I've been fighting these same mobs and another player will walk by and end up with the aggro. Not from casting or fighting, just walking by. I've also adopted the aggro from others (see video below).
• One mob was doing laps around some tents. Literally. He ran and ran in this big circle like he was training for a marathon.
• I had to kill Atzel Watchers, I found a camp with a few in a convenient spot and got to work. After cleaning out the camp once, as each Watcher respawned, instead of fighting me it ran off up a hill. This went on for awhile, with every mob spawning, pausing a second, then running off. I assumed it was to some other battle somewhere. Later I discovered the possible cause and captured it on video below:

Trisco warned me not to destroy the wagon, so of course I had to. I was expecting mobs to spawn, not to come running from other points of the map, causing other players to gain aggro along the way. No wonder trains are commonplace on this map, I can't tell what's running around from unusual AI or what's just returning from some other player that was swarmed.

My best guess is that Funcom has been doing some experimenting with the AI in this place and that some of the behaviour piles up into... how can I put it... mixed results. It's certainly amusing, I've been having a great time, I just have to stay on my toes.

I'd love to hear some anecdotes from other players who've experienced some of the odd mob behaviour in Atzel's Approach.

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.

You hear this term a lot, I use it myself plenty, but what is Endgame exactly?

It comes from standard RPG gameplay, where the player "levels up" to progress. But an online world needs persistence, you can't trap players into leveling up forever. It has to plateau, it needs an End. At which point players begin a sort of new game, where some of the rules change and new activities are repeated or take a much longer length of time to complete.

Anyone who doesn't play these games could look at that description and shake their heads. We don't repeat the leveling grind into infinity, because the repetition without end would frustrate players-- So we give them an End, but then redirect them into other activities that repeat anyway. Or make them progress very slowly.

That about sum it up?

I think it's perfectly possible to have activities that aren't a grind, the plain and simple of it is: gameplay and content.

It's easier to repeat gameplay and stretch content than to provide more of it.

Clearly it's impossible to create infinite quality content, but I also think there's this situation in MMORPG development when they stop making a game for the players and start cashing in. Further development slows, they accept the monthly fees but the content trickles out, reducing cost and turning the whole thing into one big cash cow.

I'm generally not this sort of cynic when it comes to game developers, the ones I know are passionate about their games, but I can't explain the trend for MMORPGs any other way.

I think this market is wide open for the first game that keeps up a better pace with quality content and a greater variety of gameplay.

My guild (Left Hand Path on Wiccana) constructed our Keep last night. It's the first building for our PvE Guild City and the prereq for most of the other construction later to come.

One thing that has stuck me is the sheer size of the Keep and our surrounding plot of land within an even larger zone. The scale of the thing is astonishing.

Some things to note:

• Buildings cannot be placed just anywhere, there are pre-determined lots, although you can choose "Thieves Guild on this lot, Armorsmith Shop over there" etc..
• There are three city areas within our zone map. As more guilds book their plots the zone is instanced. Right now, Funcom is restricting travel between these guild city instances probably to give players a chance to build first. So no visitors to our guild city yet.
• The guild city zones are actually shared between city building and resource collecting, which is very convenient and lends for some busy activity nearby.
• These are PvE zones, even on a PvP server the buildings cannot be damaged. PvP Battlekeeps will be in a corresponding PvP zone and take a much larger effort to construct.

I love this stuff. It has a lot to do with Age of Conan being my MMORPG of choice. I'm helping construct a city in a world that's enthralled me.

My guild has settled on a server choice for Age of Conan: Wiccana, a PvE server which has been given an 'unofficial' RP status by a host of other guilds and websites.

I understand Funcom's decision to create RP servers only as RP-PvP, it fit in well with their originally planned features to reduce ganking, but unfortunately those features never made it into the release of the game. No doubt they have other priorities, but it's a shame. We tried the sole RP-PvP server for a couple days, but the spawn-point and quest-opportunity ganking was a bit much for us.

So RP PvE it is, even if Wiccana is not officially endorsed by Funcom for RP.

I know that a lot of my readers are more PvE-oriented, so to offset the PvP footage I just posted, here's an excellent interview and gameplay video of PvE team combat in Age of Conan, which highlights combos well.

The video was taken at E3 last month and is split into two parts. I love the polearm action that does look like something right out of a fighting game ala Soul Calibur. The Necromancer's small personal army of pets is pretty damn cool too.

Once again though, Funcom overdoes their god-mode cheats during demonstrations, in this case they 3man and Solo a raid dungeon designed for 24 players (standard team size in Age of Conan is 6), although that does let them show off a couple bosses.

I'm trying to be patient... March.. heh.