Age of Mundane
By RedactedProfile 1 Comments
Some friends of mine coaxed me into trying out Age of Conan for the past week.
sorry to all those who play it religiously but your in denial, what your playing is a stripped down World of Warcraft clone without all the cool and refined content. There are onyl a few reasons i can gather why you'd play AoC over WoW
1. To get away from he 11.5+million community strong and into a 100,000 strong more concentrated camp
2. You really dislike the stylish art found in WoW, and would rather go for rippling muscles, Phong shading, and stiff boobs (ie. semi-realism, if you can count a Necro summoning demons realistic)
3. you really dont want to admit that as far as MMOs go, WoW is the best, and would rather break away from the status quo.
now i know what your thinking "But DV? how can you say all these things? Your highest lvl in wow was 23, how can you even try to compare?" let me talk about First Impressions here for a second. And how goddly important they are.
For Wow, your right of passage into the game is getting your Mount, which used to be Lvl 40, now lvl 30 to help speed thigns along for those with other things to do in their life than grind. From here the game takes off into what the meant and potatoes of the game is all about, and i find the prospect exciting the whole time, wishing, wondering "Man i cant wait to ding to that level to my guildies"
For Age of Conan, im hearing shit like Lvl 70 is where it starts to kick off into the actual game. What? FUCK that.
Wow has an interesting aesthetic. Sure its simple, its designed to run on even low end computers. Its the Warcraft3 engine for god sakes. But its not about the Tech, its what they do with it. Its a surprising amount of variety in the animations, animation blending, the modeling, the smooth shading, the weather effects, and even spell visuals. Each area is DISTINCTLY different, you really do know if your stepping into Troll territory, over the Undead lands of Trisfal Glades.
All of the classes have a unique design to them giving further distinguish, and all armor classes while generic in the beginning begin to wildly make you look different form the rest later on.
Age of Conan has none of this. You choose form 3 different types of humans, male or female, adjsut a few sliders, and get covered in the same generic barbarian armor the entire time. It appears FunCom has noted that its armor looks ugly and unappealing enough to include an option in the game settings, to turn off your helmet and a couple other things. Yeah thats reassuring...
Also during my playthrough i found myself getting incredibly bored. Not that the gameplay is boring, actually that unique aspect of it is what keeps it entertaining a bit longer. But rather the visuals, while the normal mapping and high poly count work to its advantage, everything jsut looks so samey. So ho-hum, very run of the mill. So far ive traveled through planes, flat lands, grassy planes, and more flat lands. Ive ocassionally gone through the winding passageways of a semi-linear 'forrest' around a beach i think, but nothing noteworthy. None of the enemies stand out either, and this is another thing WoW has done better: unique enough enemies and abilities to distingush making them memorable. You definitly know the difference between a Duskrat and a Murloc. But in AoC, its the same savage tribal member time after time. I dont even know what theyre called, jsut bait for my pets.
What kind of bothers me though the most, is that i have played Anarchy Online, and as far as MMOs go, its probably one of the cheapest most refined experience, its deep and the community is massive. AO was designed and developed by FunCom.
So why the crap is FunCom so blatantly ripping off WoW so much?
But i digress, i can certainly see SOME appeal there, but maybe its just not for em i guess. Some hardcore AoC players i know express that if it werent for how awesome the AoC community was theyd probably be playing WoW. All i saw was the AoC community constantly talking about beating kids in basements and constantly ripping on WoW, so whatever community that is, ill take squabbling squeakers complaining how much a certain class got nerfed anyday.
-k