Misplaced Priorities: The Age of Conan PVP Weekend Beta Rant Review
Posted on
Sunday, April 27, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
Last weekend was the Age of Conan PVP Beta weekend for those like myself lucky enough to get into the extra-special free preview of this upcoming MMOG. I would have reported my thoughts earlier, but I've been suffering from the chest cold from hell all last week. Said cold is still lingering in my concave chest, and though my head is fuzzy, my thoughts on AoC are clear. The game releases in May and I can safely say I will not be buying this game.
Age of Conan, for those who were unaware, is Funcom's follow up to Anarchy Online, an MMOG based in the world of Robert E. Howard's Conan character, Hyboria. It boasts of an innovative, action-packed combat system, a mature attitude containing both copious amounts of blood and nudity (except in the US!), mini-game and world-based PVP and the buzzword of all unreleased MMOG's, innovation! It also boasts a DX10 capable graphics engine that is rumored to be gorgeous. As someone whose computer was not built next year, I can't vouch for that, as what I saw was butt ugly.
The PVP weekend consisted of the first five levels of the PVE game, which can be played solo offline, and a couple of PVP minigames that bump your character's level to 20 automatically and allows the player to select different skill options and respec those options at will. The player could make multiple characters, so I dialed up both a melee character that I played into the PVP minigame and a caster that I did not.
The combat gameplay is "innovative" in that unlike other MMOG's, it doesn't have a form of auto-attack. You must actively produce every attack, every swing, every special ability and power and spell. Similar to Guild Wars and City of Heroes, this type of combat system is much more immersive than the auto-attack systems, but it means combat tends to be a lot of furious button-mashing. Where AoC differs from other games is its addition of attack zones. Each combatant has three zones it can be attacked from, left, center and right. The player can choose to both attack into one zone, as well as shift his defenses to favor one zone over others, leaving him vulnerable in another zone. Attacking a zone that is not shielded causes extra damage. In addition, special abilities can be used in conjunction with specific zone attacks to increase damage, add buffs or debuff opponents. Compared to older auto-attack systems such as say Everquest, it's a fun take on typical MMOG combat. It works particularly well for PVE content, because the player can always see where his opponent's shields are gathered, while this information is hidden in PVP. The combat wasn't so incredible that it could override my biggest complaints about this beta.
Limping Through Mud
Age of Conan was built to take advantage of DirectX 10 and the latest greatest hardware available for the PC. What that means, however, is those with less than stellar computer specs are shit out of luck. If you are one of the unlucky many who do not upgrade your computer every 12-24 months, if you do not have a video card made in the last year, you will likely not enjoy this game very much at all. I'll start by listing my meager computer specs:
AMD FX64 2800+
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 w/ 256 MB RAM
Windows XP
Yes, I fully realize the video card is decrepit, probably even out of spec for this game. However, I'm flabbergasted at just how badly the game looked when I finally got it to a playable framerate. I don't mean it was mediocre, I mean it looked like it had been rendered in crayon by a crack-addled five year old. Not only that, but any length of playtime resulted in the screen exploding in gigantic polygonal artifacts, or worse, the interface going kablooey and becoming totally unreadable. This might be acceptable if that made the game playable, but it couldn't even approach that. Framerates were dismal and the artifacting caused me to restart the game every 20 minutes or so. Again, if my card just won't render this game at an acceptable level, the game should just tell me that upfront and refuse to run. The fact that it doesn't is going to lead me to expect at least some level of playability.
And this is where the review turns into a rant. The MMOG market is becoming more crowded every day, even if one discounts the glut of cloned Korean MMOG's being foisted off on the American market. Even where it not crowded, the competition from World of Warcraft is likely insurmountable, especially considering the type of gameplay (both PVP and PVE) is targeted at those who also like World of Warcraft. From a technical perspective, someone leaving World of Warcraft for another MMOG of similar playstyle is going to expect performance that is at least comparable to their departed MMOG. AoC doesn't provide that. A very large part of World of Warcraft's raging success has to be chalked up to its tolerance for older, mediocre machines. Guild Wars success can likewise owe something to its tolerant, yet capably-degrading graphics performance. Running like a hobbled pig in slop with graphics that can be charitably described as "wouldn't fuck her with YOUR dick" ugly is suicide. It's a guarantee that the service will suffer from lower than expected subscriptions.
Now, Age of Conan is never going to get WoW numbers, even if it did degrade gracefully. But every barrier to entry thrown up for little gain is one less subscriber. In a market as crowded and competitive as subscription MMOG's are right now, there is nothing more damaging than poor performance. In a game with a significant focus on PVP, performance is going to be critical to the most vocal proponents of that gamestyle, because performance is the difference between life and death. Making players lose matches because they don't have a $500 video card in a $2000 machine is yet another barrier to entry. Competitive PVP'ers are people who turn off shadows immediately to gain 2 FPS. All the money and development time you spent on specular lighting and shading, pixel shaders for DirectX 10 and the like are going to be completely wasted on the PVP customer.
It's all a damn shame too, because I had looked forward to AoC, and from my limited playtime, I could tell there seemed to be a worthwhile game underneath all that fluff. But I fear it will be wasted on a Vanguard level of failure, simply because the developers wanted to create for only the latest and greatest without any thought to the rest of the pack. If you have a decent computer and the will to sit through what will likely be a bumpy release with multiple bugs, I'd say Age of Conan might be worth it. If not, wait for something like Warhammer, which is almost guaranteed to be more tolerant to aging hardware.
Age of Conan, for those who were unaware, is Funcom's follow up to Anarchy Online, an MMOG based in the world of Robert E. Howard's Conan character, Hyboria. It boasts of an innovative, action-packed combat system, a mature attitude containing both copious amounts of blood and nudity (except in the US!), mini-game and world-based PVP and the buzzword of all unreleased MMOG's, innovation! It also boasts a DX10 capable graphics engine that is rumored to be gorgeous. As someone whose computer was not built next year, I can't vouch for that, as what I saw was butt ugly.
The PVP weekend consisted of the first five levels of the PVE game, which can be played solo offline, and a couple of PVP minigames that bump your character's level to 20 automatically and allows the player to select different skill options and respec those options at will. The player could make multiple characters, so I dialed up both a melee character that I played into the PVP minigame and a caster that I did not.
The combat gameplay is "innovative" in that unlike other MMOG's, it doesn't have a form of auto-attack. You must actively produce every attack, every swing, every special ability and power and spell. Similar to Guild Wars and City of Heroes, this type of combat system is much more immersive than the auto-attack systems, but it means combat tends to be a lot of furious button-mashing. Where AoC differs from other games is its addition of attack zones. Each combatant has three zones it can be attacked from, left, center and right. The player can choose to both attack into one zone, as well as shift his defenses to favor one zone over others, leaving him vulnerable in another zone. Attacking a zone that is not shielded causes extra damage. In addition, special abilities can be used in conjunction with specific zone attacks to increase damage, add buffs or debuff opponents. Compared to older auto-attack systems such as say Everquest, it's a fun take on typical MMOG combat. It works particularly well for PVE content, because the player can always see where his opponent's shields are gathered, while this information is hidden in PVP. The combat wasn't so incredible that it could override my biggest complaints about this beta.
Limping Through Mud
Age of Conan was built to take advantage of DirectX 10 and the latest greatest hardware available for the PC. What that means, however, is those with less than stellar computer specs are shit out of luck. If you are one of the unlucky many who do not upgrade your computer every 12-24 months, if you do not have a video card made in the last year, you will likely not enjoy this game very much at all. I'll start by listing my meager computer specs:
AMD FX64 2800+
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 w/ 256 MB RAM
Windows XP
Yes, I fully realize the video card is decrepit, probably even out of spec for this game. However, I'm flabbergasted at just how badly the game looked when I finally got it to a playable framerate. I don't mean it was mediocre, I mean it looked like it had been rendered in crayon by a crack-addled five year old. Not only that, but any length of playtime resulted in the screen exploding in gigantic polygonal artifacts, or worse, the interface going kablooey and becoming totally unreadable. This might be acceptable if that made the game playable, but it couldn't even approach that. Framerates were dismal and the artifacting caused me to restart the game every 20 minutes or so. Again, if my card just won't render this game at an acceptable level, the game should just tell me that upfront and refuse to run. The fact that it doesn't is going to lead me to expect at least some level of playability.
And this is where the review turns into a rant. The MMOG market is becoming more crowded every day, even if one discounts the glut of cloned Korean MMOG's being foisted off on the American market. Even where it not crowded, the competition from World of Warcraft is likely insurmountable, especially considering the type of gameplay (both PVP and PVE) is targeted at those who also like World of Warcraft. From a technical perspective, someone leaving World of Warcraft for another MMOG of similar playstyle is going to expect performance that is at least comparable to their departed MMOG. AoC doesn't provide that. A very large part of World of Warcraft's raging success has to be chalked up to its tolerance for older, mediocre machines. Guild Wars success can likewise owe something to its tolerant, yet capably-degrading graphics performance. Running like a hobbled pig in slop with graphics that can be charitably described as "wouldn't fuck her with YOUR dick" ugly is suicide. It's a guarantee that the service will suffer from lower than expected subscriptions.
Now, Age of Conan is never going to get WoW numbers, even if it did degrade gracefully. But every barrier to entry thrown up for little gain is one less subscriber. In a market as crowded and competitive as subscription MMOG's are right now, there is nothing more damaging than poor performance. In a game with a significant focus on PVP, performance is going to be critical to the most vocal proponents of that gamestyle, because performance is the difference between life and death. Making players lose matches because they don't have a $500 video card in a $2000 machine is yet another barrier to entry. Competitive PVP'ers are people who turn off shadows immediately to gain 2 FPS. All the money and development time you spent on specular lighting and shading, pixel shaders for DirectX 10 and the like are going to be completely wasted on the PVP customer.
It's all a damn shame too, because I had looked forward to AoC, and from my limited playtime, I could tell there seemed to be a worthwhile game underneath all that fluff. But I fear it will be wasted on a Vanguard level of failure, simply because the developers wanted to create for only the latest and greatest without any thought to the rest of the pack. If you have a decent computer and the will to sit through what will likely be a bumpy release with multiple bugs, I'd say Age of Conan might be worth it. If not, wait for something like Warhammer, which is almost guaranteed to be more tolerant to aging hardware.
Labels: Entertainment, MMOG, Video Games
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 7:20 PM
3 Comments
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3 Comments:
I found it strange that all the hype over this game is about PvP and the PvE bit of the event was better.
Well, the PVP performance was so much worse for me than the PVE, I couldn't have enjoyed it anyway. Anymore than 2 or 3 PC's on the screen and I was in a slideshow.
Well, I have that Fileplanet beta thingy. I plan to log in tomorrow at noon when it begins and watch. I bet it's chews up my computer and spits it in my face just like AO did. Things like that amuse me. Well, until they piss me off, that is.
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