You could say they have turned things around so to speak - but echoing from my original(and continued) thoughts on the game - the majority of things that have been 'turned around' should have not existed in the first place.
Long have we suffered through the excuses that MMOs are buggy at launch and need time to mature. It's been ten years since MMOs hit the market, and in that time developers have been ground down to some very redundant formulas and trends which have molded the 'modern,' MMO. You can see many of these variables in titles like WoW, EQII, LOTRO etc.
Yet each of them suffered poor launches. AoC, unfortunatley is a clone of these games. And you would think, by being a clone, that they could easily (for the most part) be able to not only prepare for, but bypass all the typical MMO launch woes altogether; unfortunatley they didn't.
What they gave us, was yet another a-typical level progression MMORPG:
- Main 'classes,' with 'sub-classes' all with their glorified limitations on what armor and weapons they can equip
- Limited and locked 'feat' or talent trees, that have level requirements, and ranks or prerequisities to unlock abilities. Most classes have to wait fifty levels just to finally get one ability/spell that actually makes them feel defined over another class.
- Items with magical properties or 'stats' (+fire on a cloth chest piece...ya, that's ...uh...intelligent)
- No ability to manage the skills or even progress skills manually for your character
- The need to roll 'alts' because of previously mentioned, pre-defined classes
- Heavy world zone instancing
- "Epic" mobs, which is a good example of a modern MMO development trend. It's a lazy shortcut by designers, so they don't have to make encounters or situations actually challenging. They just plop down a horde of super-strength, super-resilient monsters in order to make things 'difficult.'
- Armor and items have Bind on Equip or Bind on Acquire/Possess limitations, even on the vendor trash, that noone would bother wearing. It's been long proven that BOE/BOA does NOT stop gold selling, and does not help keep raiders from crying if non-raiders have uber 'lewtz' too.
- They still put items in the game that give gold sellers an incentive to come and farm and contort the economy into a monster.
- It's another MMO that has the typical scaling issue, that once you get within the last five or ten levels of the level cap, mobs naturally become increasingly harder, beyond the natural scaling percentage. This is another cheap shortcut to increase 'difficulty.'
- The group dependancy we see in MMOs still runs rampant, and combined with the scaling issue mentioned above, it's magnified considerably.
- The drop rates on things you actually would use is terrible.
- They've made big efforts to make certain types of armor more visually appealing, so it will silence all the social rejects who want to look cool in their virtual world, but at the same time, they've turned a blind eye to actual itemization, so that classes can get what they actually needed. Basically, it's become aesthetics > mechanics.
- Because of a-typical group dependancy gaming, groups still need a 'tank,' and a 'healer,' and in doing so, you continously run into all the jerk-off tanks/healers, who whenever asked if they'd like to do something, are only interested if the group has '5/6 players,' 'is ready to go' 'has a certain type of class/group setup' or some other equally annoying request that should read 'I'll only go if you're waiting on me, because I am the tank/healer, and you can't do it without me!'
- They merged the servers, because they assume that everyon WANTS to play with everyone else; and besides with typical group dependancies, for some, it is almost a must. Rather than just offer more solo content, and try to remold the game into less of a group-clone, they took our peace and quiet servers, and threw them together with all the high priced, guild heavy, over-run with immersion breaking jackass servers.
- The PVP is a laugh. It's basically whoever gets the first hit or two is going to be the victor, because everyone just 'burst' damages, which means they throw off all their best stuff immediatley, with a stun thrown in, and it's game over. You still get moronic cheeze players who use Line of Sight exploits, or run circles around you while you try to swing.
- The so called revolutionary combat system is not even close to being so. It's a novelty feature, which after fourty, fifty, sixty, seventy levels of tapping buttons on a timer que, makes you feel like you're playing a really slow song for old people on Guitar Hero with a gamepad. There's no active defense, only offense, it get's repetitive and choresome quite fast.
- Class 'balancing,' the bane of MMOs, has been implemented not long after the game launched and it's been applied to both PVP and PVE, rather than exclusively. So whatever nerfs or boosts they do in order to silence all the fourteen year olds looking to increase their E-peen, also affects the normal PVE players negatively.
- The game achieves better framerates in Vista, however there's massive memory allocation and leakage issue, that means after a few zonings/zone loads, a simple alt-tab, or just fourty minutes of playing, the game starts to loose smoothness and frame rates, like an old sports car loses horsepower with age. XP is overall more smooth, with lower framerates, but there's a consistent 'out of memory' error, that they've still not solved; which in turn dumps the game back to the OS shell.
- There's all kinds of goofy texture anamolies, and while the characters(especially human avatars) are modelled really well, things like shields and weapons have no straps, they simply hang in mid-air adjacent to some part of your body, and when they're in motion, there's constant clipping with your character.
- The sound consistently chops and dissapears after certain amounts of play time, most likely memory / RAM related.
I could spend all day...but the main point is that AoC is a cookie-cutter, and it's essentially taken all of the bad concepts of modern MMOs, and very little of the good, if any .... therefore, having such a consistent and solid full proof template to work with, there should have been really no issues at launch, or even after launch.
However, if the game actually offered something evolutionary, then giving them slack would be in order.
I.e. Darkfall (while unfortunatley just a hyped up first person shooter with mediaval theme and scenery) has taken MMOs in a new direction, a lot more off the beaten path than AoC, and is thus granted slack and justification, if things don't go quite as planned; they are trying something new.
It's safe to say that out of the current available MMORGPs, Age of Conan IS a viable contender, and between it's high-end visuals, low-fantasy / gruesome/gritty theme, and somewhat hands on action there's no reason not to play it if you're a veteran MMO customer. However, make no qualms about it, as it's not going to bring you anything you haven't experienced before.
For myself, despite my gripes with it, from a fun factor angle, it's the second best, behind the original EQ (before Luclin expansion). This is of course speaking in regards to PVE. I've tried the PvP, PvRP, PvMP on other titles over the years, and I always come back to the same conclusion; PVP is a joke, and requires so little skill. If you want to beat or get beat by other humans, go play a FPS, or better yet, go outside, play some sports...
I still play it; sadly enough. I am on the SET server. I cannot offer you a buddy key, as mine are all gone now, but I can show you around.
PM me if you get online.
