Words of Replicant Jesus

Age of Conan (AoC) is coming and strangely I am not overly excited about this game, I mean I feel some sense of excitement about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), although I am not sure how excited I am about Realm versus Realm (RvR); I enjoy PvP but I like a good PvE game as well… so hopefully they deliver on both accounts. But back to Age of Conan, I know that this game looks pretty fantastic, the game play may be novel or tedious/button smashing according to some; but I guess I am just wondering where the meat is and if this is possibly an Everquest 2 (EQ2) retread with a more PvP focus.

I mention EQ2 because both games share some glaring similarities. EQ2 at launch had a staged class system where you started as a basic archetype and then moves to a more specialized class at level 10, and then your ultimate class at level 20. What this did though is that every class sort of played very closely to its archetype all the way out till level 20. AoC had a similar system in place till a few months ago when they condensed all the classes back to a core few, meaning that classes of the same archetype share a lot of the abilities and pretty much play the same; unlike WoW where each class pretty differently from the outset of the game, and even if classes can fulfill similar roles the way they go about doing it usually different enough to be interesting.

Another similarity is the high cost of entrance, or the pretty shiny graphics. Now myself, I built a pretty strong system this year when my gaming laptop died on me, and I am not too worried about not meeting the requirements for the system, but I have to wonder if the fact that the graphics are so pretty that it will turn away many gamers interested in trying the game out. I mean LOTRO has very nice graphics with picturesque zones and detailed characters, and still plays quite well on moderate and even lower end systems. From all early accounts AoC plays on mid-range systems but only with the graphics reduced, and depending on which beta client (more on this later) the game can still chug on higher end systems. I commend Funcom on making a richly detailed game graphically, but if it excludes less powerful systems then I am not sure if the move is a smart one.

Which leads to even more controversy, the difference between the Open Beta Client and the Closed Beta Client; you would think that Funcom would release Open Beta on the most stable and shiniest software platform they have, but from all accounts online, Massively.com, Bloggers, and forum posters; the open beta is running on an old and buggy client. This is a critically terrible mistake for Funcom because the game launches this month and negative buzz has a way of filtering to the top of the Internet.

In this day and age closed and open beta is used for two things, generating data to allow the designers to fix their holes and problems and more importantly generate buzz and excitement for the game. Open Beta even more so since the game gets into the hands of the rabid fans who have been following the game since announcement who will probably buy the game anyway, but if the game is crap won’t stick with it past the first month. From all accounts the current Open Beta client is not making a good impression with game crippling bugs and crashes that are fixed in the Closed Beta client. This is the part that confuses me, why would Funcom screw up this tidbit, is this a precursor of another Anarchy Online launch? I hope not, I hope that the MMO space becomes a richer and more competitive environment with AoC and then WAR, but things are not looking good for AoC at this point.

Which leads to my final reason why EQ2 and AoC are similar, or perhaps could be similar since this part is all supposition; botched/less then spectacular launches. EQ2 is considered a solid game, but it was crushed at launch by the juggernaut that is WoW, it took several updates for the game to come into its own by that time the war was over, and it only proved the old adage, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. I hope Funcom can fix this debacle, but the writing is on the wall.