Although I never played Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC) I recognize that the game was rather successful in it’s time and although still kicking and going is in decline as newer products come to the fore.  I recognize that Mark Jacobs played a large part in that initial vision for DAoC and should be respected at least for bringing an influential product to the MMO scene.  The game was successful and although not World of Warcraft numbers at the time it was an MMO blockbuster as far as subscriptions go and impact on products that followed.

Having beta-tested WAR I was not too surprised that it’s success, relative to World of Warcraft, was not what EA thought it would be.  The game never really hooked me and seemed to emulate much of what Blizzard had done without understanding the why it was done.  I do think the game has plenty of legs though and I think it brought some really good ideas to the table that I am sure we will see in future products.  I hope that the success of WAR did not affect this departure but I suspect it may have played a role.

I wish him the best of luck and I hope this merge brings good things to us in the future.

Link: http://kotaku.com/5302069/ea-combines-mythic-and-bioware-into-a-giant-rpg-robot

SOURCE

I am not saying that I am not going to play this game but these changes are pretty serious changes that really do impact what I wanted to do in the game.  It’s like waking up and finding out that Blizzard couldn’t get the Deathknight to work right, or they decided to elminate tanking from the Paladin.  I am not saying this is a critical detah knell of the game but it does not bode well for many fans.  Though diehard fans will create excuses on how this will be good for the game and how it will be better then ever.

The only thing that I think is positive is that they were up front about the issues.

But my gut tells me that this isn’t good news any way they try and slice it.  Being a Blackguard was not critical to my play expeirence but it was the class I was most interested in trying upon release.  Overall we lost about 66% of the Endgame content; of course maybe we gained 66% Endgame content because they intend to make this game fantastic.

I have never been much for dwarves though my first paladin in World of Warcraft was a dwarf since everyone else was a human.  Warhammer dwarves have much character though and I like the stunties, but th Empire Knight of the Blazing Sun and the Swordmaster have my most attention.  Most likely I would choose Swordmaster though because I would like to continue Vanifae’s illustrious career.

Not that it is over any time soon… Wrath of the Lich King comes.

With that said after a full week or so of gaming for Age of Conan I can say that Funcom has an interesting and formidable entry into the MMO  scene.  I still have not fully decided on what i want to play long term but currently the Conqueror seems pretty solid though I really like the merits of the Guardian as well.  But as it stands right now Age of Conan will most likely just be a passing dalliance as I await Wrath of the Lich King.  Not to say the game isn’t fun, it is, but I have quite the investment in my paladin and I still have much to do in World of Warcraft before the expansion.

Speaking of Wrath of the Lich King the amount or should I say lack of information on paladin changes irks me, only because I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge for all things paladin, or more correctly all things tanking paladin.  But I wait impatiently for more leaks to satiate my growing lust for this much needed expansion to take over and rule my life.  I hate you Blizzard, but somewhere deep in my soul I know I cannot live without you.

As if that isn’t enough, next week 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons goes on sail, and from my cursory perusal of Keep on the Shadowfell is any indication it seems that Wizards of the Coast have learned a thing or two from MMO design, and in turn MMO Design could learn a thing or two from 4th Edition D & D.  That sounds like a good quality post for the future I will have to come back to that after I had a chance to read over the new edition.

That is the good news as best as I can tell it.  Back to the salt mine for me.

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.