AoC: The Bad

Age of Conan is not without its problems. Most games are like this. Age of Conan, however, seems to have more than its fair share.

System Requirements
World of Warcraft, for everything everyone says that sucks about it, runs on just about every machine you'd possibly think would run it. I ran it on a variety of old laptops for crying out loud. Age of Conan has no such ability.

My machine here is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo overclocked (most of the time) to 2.8GHz. It has 2GB of RAM, a 10K HDD and a 768MB GeForce 8800 graphics card. Age of Conan does not run fast on this machine. I have to turn stuff down. I don't think this is because the engine is particularly uber-awesome but I can't say for sure either. Normally I'd give a developer with a decent game the benefit of the doubt, but read on...

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs (not the wabbit)
All games have bugs. Anyone worth their salt who's worked on a shipping game can probably point at any of their products and point out at least one thing that's not quite right. Some may not be significant, but if a large portion of your client base is crashing every, say, 2 hours on an out of memory error, say, three months after release, I think I'm safe in saying that not everyone is going to be terribly understanding.

ButThatsNotAll! Seemingly every patch they break something, often in the process of, um, fixing something else. As a for instance: something that irked me to no end, is that in the process of fixing something related to conrols being saved per windows user, they broke the ability to bind your keys. This remained broken (with a convoluted work around) for the better part of three weeks. This also broke the handy thing that displayed the key combo on the hotbar. I had more than 50 things hotkeyed; yes, that's just about every button in the interface and it was damned hard to remember what they all were without the handy display.

So many bugs, so few words, so I will further share with you but one. The issue is that for crafting you need silk for mid/high level cloth gear. Silk of the normal type doesn't drop except for mid 50ish mobs. If you're higher than L50 (say, L80) you don't get crap for silk because drop rate is based on con level and, well, those L50 mobs are all super grey. Realizing the problem two months too late, Funcom decided to fix it. In the guild zones/crafting zones they added spawns of spiders. What do spiders weave? Spider silk! What do spiders drop? Cotton! Cotton is the lowest level cloth crafting drop. As it's been two weeks since I drafted this post,I'd like to check to see if it's been fixed but I can't since they've also broken the patcher and thus, I can't actually log in.

Everyone Wears the Same Gear
DAoC had the same problem but in DAoC's defense, the technology wasn't quite there for a huge amount of gear variation (circa 2001). Everyone pretty much wore the same shit, dyed it all black, and had the same spec until ToA which miserably broke the game. It's now 2008 and the game install for AoC on my disk right now is in excess of 26GB. They couldn't have found space to add a few more variations for player gear textures?

Post the starting island, everyone will pretty much be wearing the same gear. As an added bonus, my level 21 armor looks exactly like my level 80 armor! No, seriously, it's exactly the same. This is not hyperbole, they're exactly same models and textures. I'd post screen shots but as mentioned before, I can't actually log in. They've demonstrated that they have some great artists, so what gives? It's even pretty much the same boring crap between genders! Mr. Yahtzee got this one spot on.

Healing is Limited
I was reticent to put this under bad; I think they've done a very cool thing design-wise, but before talking about why it's bad I gotta explain how it works. If you want to avoid a long and somewhat arduous meander through the AoC mechanics, feel free to skip to the next section. Really, it's long, and I won't be offended.

There are three healer classes (Bear Shaman, Tempest of Set, Priest of Mitra). Each class has three basic heals: a large heal over time, a small heal over time, and a largeish aoe lump sum heal. The largeish lump sum heal has a 1 minute debuff that doesn't allow that same heal to affect the target. So two bear shaman can't stagger their big heals at all, though they do stack between the other healer classes. This is where it gets interesting: the big HoTs don't stack between classes, but the small ones do. It gets even more interesting for raid groups because the big heals are raid-wide while the HoTs are not. While there are other heals available, other than by potions, they're pretty small.

This is brilliant on one hand and terrifying on the other. Healing for any given group is fixed. You can swap out healer types and the amount of healing you get is pretty much the same. Your healers in a single group stack exactly to three, but you get diminishing returns after the first one. You can't increase healing significantly through gear or talents and since the vast majority of it is in the form of HoTs, you sort of let them go and that's pretty much it. This leaves the healer classes to go off and do other things like make the current target dead--generally agreed upon to be more interesting than watching little hitpoint bars.

What you can't do is deal with burst damage. I've called them "large heals" but they're about 1500 at L80 on a tank with probably 12K hitpoints. This is not a lot given that you can only fire it off every minute, i.e. maybe twice or three times per single-group boss. You can triple this by having three healers of different types but it's still not a lot. The long shot here is that you can calculate pretty easily and within some tolerance exactly how much healing is in an ideal group. Though I have doubts they did so consistently, you would think that it would be relatively easy to determine how much DPS an encounter could have. This seems ideal but is, in my opinion, quite flawed.

My main issue is that it means that encounter designers can't increase incoming dps significantly without blowing out the encounter parameters such that no one could beat it without luck. Perhaps they intended for this to spur their designers into more interesting mechanics. Alternatively, they might intend for a more interesting tanking game; who's to say?! The end result is that the dynamic range of encounters at least DPS-wise is fairly small.

A perhaps even more nefarious issue is that it fixes pretty significantly the make up of your groups in a way that not even the most ardent opponent of theorycrafting could ignore. In WoW, you could often get first kills by stacking heals, tanks, or DPS. This is good because you can keep making progress and picking up gear which will help you progress and keep morale up. Gear isn't that big a deal in AoC (largely anyway, by design) and you can't really vary the healing amount. So you're stuck with only one slider instead of two as a raid leader, and even if you bring down a new boss, it doesn't help your raid very much. I know that this topic was healing but its real effect doesn't really sink in until you consider it in context.

Poor Quest Distribution
Solo quests ran out for me at about L72 and I did a lot of grinding prior to that. You get some repeatable quests at L40 that you can repeat once a day until L80 but come on, that's boring as shit. There aren't even very many good places to grind beyond those so if you want L80 on your own terms, you don't even get many choices. City of Heroes had some of the same problem but there were at least a number of places you could grind. Even then, I'd like to think that the day of the pointless grind is long gone. Can we truly do no better in 2008?

There are a number of group quests in the range which are pretty good, but they're generally way too difficult for a not good group to succeed. Grouping in AoC is a very different game, moreso than usual for these typese of games, due in large part to the extremely limited healing ability. This by itself is not an issue, until you have to chance the feared pick up group who are used to the extreme levels of healing in other games. Now, I like the grouping dynamic in AoC, but it's really not obvious how it works on initial inspection. On the one hand, it's got a good bit of depth, but on the other hand, you'll never be all that effective without delving pretty deep into the mechanics. It's sort of like Vanguard in this respect; something I really like about both games.

The problem, as always, is it's not always convenient for people to group when playing and I really wish more designers would take that into consideration. AoC does a reasonably good job through most of the level range but the nearer you get to L80 the more spotty and less polished it becomes in this respect. I understand that work in this area has continued since I quit playing and that it's better than it was, but that's of little consolation for someone who had to grind eight of the most boring levels.

PvP Mechanics Are Broken
PvP mechanics in AoC are broken at a deep and fundamental level. Player hitpoints are too low and player damage is too high. They say they're fixing this in "the next big patch which is coming next week" which has been "coming next week" for more than half the time I've been playing. As a Bear Shaman (healer) with a good quality weapon and no damage gems, I crank out in excess of 2500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. For comparison, I have about 3800 hitpoints self-buffed. Bear Shaman is not a DPS class. Surely, that's not so bad, is it?!

With some well designed player crafted gear (i.e., fully +damage gems) and an epic smacker, I'm doing in excess of 4500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. When fighting normal mobs, I often don't use my damage buff because one normal combo will kill them outright. Imagine what this does to players! Nobody likes getting one-shot and in AoC right now, this is the norm. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you can't reasonably increase your hit point total beyond what the designers intended. So even in super-tuned crafted gear, I'm at the same 3800 hitpoints.

Everything in the Endgame Takes Lots of People
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a raider at heart. I love taking apart encounters and applying obscure class abilities at the appropriate times for loot and great justice. It's the same satisfaction I get from putting together very large Lego models and base busting in RTS games--it's a problem solving experience and I like those. What I don't like about raiding is the HUGE amount of coordination it takes to get any number of people >2 at the same place at the same time and moving in something resembling the same direction, not to mention the subsequent drama over the aforementioned loot should any actually be acquired. AoC takes this hassle and applies it to just about everything interesting in the post 70 game.

For example: I've always crafted. I like crafting because I like making things, especially if I can make useful things. Crafting in AoC requires buildings in a guild city. You need 24 people to create a guild. You can get lots of alts so ok, that's not so bad. You also need a guild city. Hookay, the tier 1 guild city is a pain, but not too awful bad, probably a good 10-20 man hours or so if you know what you're doing. This gets you to L70 items. The next tier of craftable items is L75. This requires a T2 guild city. This costs you a good 50-60 man hours if you know what you're doing (don't even ask about the T3 city).

If you're in a small guild, these requirements are heavy which is a problem, because no one wants to run around a resource zone gathering materials as a full time job. Forget making L80 stuff; I don't think anyone in the game has built a full T3 city yet. You can't be a solo crafter. This is unfortunate, because crafting has traditionally been a solo endeavor; something to do when all your pals are sleeping off a hangover (or whatever).

Raiding really goes without saying, and compared to WoW's 40 (at least, when I played), 24 is way more attainable. But what if you're broke and want to make some coin so you can buy some new gear? Well, you're largely screwed because there's such a dearth of soloable content; doubly so because normal mobs drop so little coin. So your best bet is getting a group together and running through whatever instance pops into mind. You probably can't use the drops because for the most part, they pretty much all suck, but they at least vendor for pocket change.

Ok, what about PvP? PvP has been a pretty good bet while solo for most of the games I've played. PvP in AoC has three basic categories: world PvP (just about any zone on a PvP server or frontier zones on PvE servers), mini-game PvP (FPS type scenarios like CTF for small teams), and large scale siege warfare (think: keep raids in DAoC but not relic raids--it doesn't get that big). I don't play on a PvP server so I can't talk about that but I suspect it's the same as most PvP servers--there when you don't want it, hard to find when you do. Mini-games are pretty much nonexistant on my server (Dagoth). Siege warfare, well, that's a whole new ball of wax and one that I didn't get to participate in so I won't even rant about it here. Suffice to say that you need a T3 keep and enough goods to build another keep in a contested zone. That seems a bit extreme.