|
Some Age of Conan highlights: In order to upgrade your guild city to level 3, you needed a level 2 trading post. In order to make a tier 2 trading post, you needed to have… a tier 2 trading post. It was a requirement for itself. It had jewelcrafting. It was broken though. If you actually put any gem into any slot in an item, it crashes your game. Your character could not be logged into. GMs fixed it by just deleting your item and moving on. Hope it wasn’t your weapon! It had a spell channeling system for casters. You activated it and longer you kept casting spells without moving, you would move up in stages and do more damage while also spawning some really cool effects. It was broken though. Tempest of Sett getting to stage 3 would crash the world server every single time. You could hold servers hostage. Bosses in dungeons after level 35ish gave XP and loot, but had no AI. They just stood there not moving or attacking. The best way to level (since there were practically no quests finished after 30ish) was to go solo kill bosses while they stood there. The max level dungeon bosses also had no AI but no loot tables. There were entire zones with no mobs in them. Before launch the forums were completely public. No purchase or preorder necessary to read and post. Within 24 hours of launch they made them completely private so people who hadn’t bought it couldn’t see the flood of negativity. Within 24 hours of that they started permabanning everyone who posted anything even remotely negative, even if it was mostly positive but with constructive feedback. The best though was when like 2 months after launch they somehow charged a $15 month sub for anyone who had ever subscribed. Legit, 80% or whatever of people who played at launch cancelled but then months later got charged. People who were still subscribed for double charged that month. People complaining about bad launches now have no idea.
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 05:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 15:50 |
|
|
I forgot about that spell channeling mechanic. It was supposed to cost mana and/or health after a while but I remember my demonologist bugged out and stayed at max power rooted in some town. It looked cool, like an altar or pillar raised from the ground and storm effects. There were whole zones just for gathering mats and maybe pvp? Weird design.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 05:16
|
|
|
Cardboard Fox posted:AoC launch was insane. I played the archer class and they had an ability called Salvo (I think?) that would just 1 shot players that were 10 level above you. I played one of the full PvP servers at launch and it was almost entirely casters sitting on the edge of beds of water because you could not engage in combat if you were swimming. You could just fire off spells until someone got close to you then start swimming until they gave up. also this iconic video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaexnuE7kEQ
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 05:31
|
|
|
Doom Rooster posted:Some Age of Conan highlights: I had forgotten most of this stuff. Believe it or not, I think Anarchy Online was even worse at launch in that it basically just didn’t function at all for days, or at least that’s what I remember from my roommate at the time.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 14:37
|
|
|
Ahh, the days when "was able to play at all" was considered a good launch by MMO standards.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 17:41
|
|
|
Hra Mormo posted:Ahh, the days when "was able to play at all" was considered a good launch by MMO standards. This is still the standard lol
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 19:34
|
|
|
Doom Rooster posted:Some Age of Conan highlights: Can't let an Age of Conan highlight list go without this one: Damage was tied to animations, which were not the same across gender for each class. Female assassins for example did like 70ish percent of the dps of male. I still leveled one to max, it was a struggle (combined with all the other things). I never got double charged fwiw, perhaps I had already deleted payment info at that point, I can't remember.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2022 23:08
|
|
|
Jimlit posted:I don't get the funcom hate, unless you are just stuck at conan exiles EA launch. I'm still malding that The Secret World is basically in maintenance mode since like a year after it launched and they wasted a lot of time on a sidegrade redesign that didn't help EDIT: I tried Age of Conan a bit last year and got to 40, it was fine and I'm sure it's perfectly playable at endgame at this point but it's still full of Funcom excellence
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 01:07
|
|
|
30.5 Days posted:*funcom design meeting* so yeah, it's a sci fi setting so i figure instead of the slaves we can just have intelligent robots, easy peasy, good chat everyone! I greatly appreciated your lore joke if nobody else mentioned.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 01:10
|
|
|
DaitoX posted:Can't let an Age of Conan highlight list go without this one: Damage was tied to animations, which were not the same across gender for each class. Female assassins for example did like 70ish percent of the dps of male. I still leveled one to max, it was a struggle (combined with all the other things). Yours but one step farther: Damage was tied to finishing the animation in its entirety, for all of a combo. Sounds like a weird pedantic nitpick, but it led to some horrendous pvp issues. I played a bear shaman with a ridiculously long combo for max damage and if you got stunned/disabled at the end of the animation it refunded all of their hp (could be 80% if you got the big one off) which led to most classes doing 2-3 hit combos for way less damage and the classes with great small combos leading the pack (HoX). Speaking of which, Herald of Xotli was a metal as gently caress class that I want in another game.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 07:15
|
|
|
The character I played in that recentish foray was a HoX and it loving ruled.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 16:04
|
|
|
So what’s up with Conan these days anyways? Is Conan Exiles the same game as Age of Conan?
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 16:44
|
|
|
LuckyCat posted:So what’s up with Conan these days anyways? Is Conan Exiles the same game as Age of Conan? No they are completely different games. AoC is a traditional MMO and Conan Exiles is more like ARK, RUST, 7 Days to Die, etc.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 16:56
|
|
|
Nah Conan Exiles was their version of the survival games. I think their Dune game will be the same as Conan Exiles though. Somehow Age of Conan is still going, they went free to play at some point and released on steam. I doubt it will have much players though. I find it hard to imagine it has any players, but I guess they do otherwise they would just shut it down.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 17:01
|
|
|
Not gonna lie I really want a good game set in the Conan universe, though not necessarily an MMO. I was really excited for AoC until I saw it just straight up had wizards you could play as.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 18:20
|
|
|
They should make a Highlander mmo, that way a rapid decline in userbase is intrinsically built into the narrative
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 18:54
|
|
|
Hra Mormo posted:Not gonna lie I really want a good game set in the Conan universe, though not necessarily an MMO. I was really excited for AoC until I saw it just straight up had wizards you could play as. Yeah they really hosed up the Low Fantasy thing. But I do love playing mages…
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 19:33
|
|
|
playing the witchery mod in minecraft for low fantasy mages where I just build potions and write with chalk all over things
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 19:35
|
|
|
Vinestalk posted:They should make a Highlander mmo, that way a rapid decline in userbase is intrinsically built into the narrative This was already attempted by another developer, but it was canceled.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 21:10
|
|
|
'why do people hate funcom' well none of their games are good and all of them turn into abandonware, so it's really hard to say. but it's mostly because they aren't making anarchy online 2, which is the only game they should be making. I hope this explains everything.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 22:13
|
|
|
Vinestalk posted:They should make a Highlander mmo, that way a rapid decline in userbase is intrinsically built into the narrative I think Highlander would naturally lean towards a Battle Royal game. "There can be only one" after all. an iksar marauder posted:'why do people hate funcom' I liked The Longest Journey. I played the sequel, Dreamfall, but never got around to Chapters.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2022 22:22
|
|
|
an iksar marauder posted:'why do people hate funcom' this
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 00:04
|
|
|
an iksar marauder posted:'why do people hate funcom' That's right.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 02:10
|
|
|
I think they could make a ton of money off of AO2 since a lot of the people who liked AO are older, nostalgic, and have money now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 02:25
|
|
|
Can confirm, am one of those people
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 06:54
|
|
|
Hra Mormo posted:Not gonna lie I really want a good game set in the Conan universe, though not necessarily an MMO. I was really excited for AoC until I saw it just straight up had wizards you could play as. You want Conan exiles. They just added a magic system to Conan exiles that is so low magic it's almost trolling.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 07:03
|
|
|
gimme a Way of the Samurai-style Conan game Just show up, spend a week loving poo poo up, game ends, now find one of the other 14 paths and side stories. Conan doing little poo poo and beating up nerds is great
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2022 07:49
|
|
|
30.5 Days posted:I was thinking about this a lot when watching dan olson's recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU I watched this video while playing Qud recently. Thanks for posting it. It had some interesting insights into the study of MMO culture by examining WoW and had some quotes that have stuck in my brain. Like the quote about devs creating a bunch of tables into a world and then the players turning it back into tables again when they played it. Or the idea that by modding the UI and optimizing graphics/sound, players "decomposed," a game from the art of its totality. It got me thinking about how I played EQ and what I enjoyed about it. EQ had a lot of obfuscated numbers, and I always thought the exploration of those numbers was a fun aspect of the game and something that separated it from WoW. To give an example, weapons had damage which was just damage until Shadows of Luclin released. They added elemental and bane damage with that expansion, where the weapon could have X damage and Y fire/cold/Magic/bane vs vampires/whatever. No one really knew if that meant 1 normal damage was equivalent to 1 elemental damage, or if it was added on after the fact, or how NPC resistances affected elemental damage. Just like a lot of stuff in EQ, it was dropped in without much explanation. Back when I played on the Mac server, I wanted to know what that damage meant and if lowering NPC resistances changed how much damage I did. So I was one of those people that found an NPC that I could use as a punching bag and setup overnight 8 hour data collection sessions while I slept so I could run a text log file of all my damage through a text parsing program. For that experiment alone, I ran like 12 or 15 overnight sessions. It was cool being able to look at all this data I collected, seeing a clear pattern, being able to say "I got a good idea how elemental damage works in this game," and sharing it with people. And exploring elemental damage wasn't the only thing I did experiments to learn about. I liked that part of EQ because it was like discovering things. On the Mac server, it wasn't like I could explore new zones or go places people hadn't been to before because it was stuck in the beta version of PoP and I started playing it years after PoP had launched on PC servers. But I could uncover unexplored parts of the game's physics that had been forgotten or iterated on in the time since PoP was released. And I feel like that aspect of MMO gameplay, exploration and discovery of numbers inside the world because nothing was explained, is something modern MMOs have distanced themselves from for years now. But that quote about tables into a world back into tables has teeth to it. It does feel like the context is different, because I genuinely enjoyed the world and I never treated it like it was a race to consume. It was also not rude to suck on the Mac server. All the same, it's going to be one of those quotes I think about when it comes to gaming for awhile.
|
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2022 19:05
|
|
|
Vinestalk posted:I liked that part of EQ because it was like discovering things. On the Mac server, it wasn't like I could explore new zones or go places people hadn't been to before because it was stuck in the beta version of PoP and I started playing it years after PoP had launched on PC servers. But I could uncover unexplored parts of the game's physics that had been forgotten or iterated on in the time since PoP was released. And I feel like that aspect of MMO gameplay, exploration and discovery of numbers inside the world because nothing was explained, is something modern MMOs have distanced themselves from for years now. I don't think it's accurate to say that the devs distanced themselves from this, it's that the players did. I mean if the stuff you discovered is being done by 12 or so people who put it up on a search-engine optimized site, then the only point of not putting this information in the game is to gate players behind their willingness to google something. Heck, this stuff still generally happens in wow, people still have to google their spec's stat priority and that means someone is running sims to figure out what they are, someone's maintaining the software to run the sims, there's a whole infrastructure out there and I'm sure those dozen people serving the entire wow playerbase are experiencing the joy of discovery. This is true of every form of discovery a game might have- the dozen best explorers are discovering things and everyone else is googling. Think about how excited people were when that fake nier automata easter egg was released on twitter. The idea that any secret could escape the voracious eye of internet archivists only to be discovered by a random kid was genuinely exciting. 30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Dec 21, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 21, 2022 22:52
|
|
|
Distancing imo is tooltips and stat explanations in-game, which games usually launch with. I don't know when WoW started having tooltips, but it has to pre-date the build optimization industry that exists. While I agree that the desire by devs to add tooltips is partially because "they'll just google it anyway," but I also think a large part of those decisions being made was because older games were opaque about everything and vocal players wanted to make informed decisions on things they couldn't change. But the whole point of the post was about player obsession to turn a world into excel spreadsheets. I used to think that was an under appreciated part of older games, but I'm not so sure anymore.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 16:11
|
|
|
Are there any active MMOs out there that don't play like WoW? I like the idea of a big world with a social aspect that you get in MMOs but I've never been able to sink my teeth into that kinda point-and-click hotbar gameplay besides like, occasionally hopping on City of Heroes.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 15:36
|
|
|
Project 1999 classic everquest. Now also easily playable on steam deck
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 16:20
|
|
|
arsenicCatnip posted:Are there any active MMOs out there that don't play like WoW? I like the idea of a big world with a social aspect that you get in MMOs but I've never been able to sink my teeth into that kinda point-and-click hotbar gameplay besides like, occasionally hopping on City of Heroes. Black Desert Online is a bit of an economic grognard game with a messy UI but the combat is pretty fluid. Controversial opinion: If you just want to smack stuff and talk to people then New World wasn't bad for a one time purchase game, although I'm not sure if they ever stopped turbofucking it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 16:25
|
|
|
arsenicCatnip posted:Are there any active MMOs out there that don't play like WoW? I like the idea of a big world with a social aspect that you get in MMOs but I've never been able to sink my teeth into that kinda point-and-click hotbar gameplay besides like, occasionally hopping on City of Heroes. eve online
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 16:26
|
|
|
CuddleCryptid posted:Black Desert Online is a bit of an economic grognard game with a messy UI but the combat is pretty fluid. BDO is only 1 whole euro on steam right now, if I sell a couple of trading cards I'll check it out. As for New World I think I would've enjoyed hopping on in day 1 to enjoy the shitshow rollercoaster from start to finish but joining now is the video game controversy version of sloppy seconds. Kaysette posted:eve online I do like spreadsheets...
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 16:51
|
|
|
arsenicCatnip posted:Are there any active MMOs out there that don't play like WoW? I like the idea of a big world with a social aspect that you get in MMOs but I've never been able to sink my teeth into that kinda point-and-click hotbar gameplay besides like, occasionally hopping on City of Heroes. BDO was already mention, the combat there is insane then there's guild wars 2, d&d online which both have action combat, though it's not anywhere near the level of BDO for your ragnarok online top-down/diablo style combat there's there's lost ark and tree of saviour i guess for fps combat there's only the comedy option of mortal online tho lmao IMO, BDO is very much worth the price of 1 whole euro, i had like 100-200 hours of fun before it started feeling grindy to me, but it is very much a single player MMO until you get very deep into the endgame or do pvp
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 18:20
|
|
|
Lost Ark is a fun, cool time based solely on the gameplay itself. The MMO structuring and monetization is the bad part, but that's mostly managed by the community guides. All in all it's a fairly linear path through a bunch of different, big fights with a ton of varied combat styles/classes and daily/weekly content, mostly grouped.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 18:27
|
|
|
New World is really good now. Amazon has done a ton to fix its issues, and are determined to support it. The playerbase numbers have been increasing too. Only play Eve Online if you want to stick to the free to play mode, the monthly sub is $20 now. The player numbers are tanking hard too and CCP pretty much has the game in maintenance mode at this point.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 18:28
|
|
|
Picked up BDO. I go off of the "1 euro = 1 hour of enjoyment" logic so this has a pretty low bar to clear.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 18:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 15:50 |
|
|
I said come in! posted:New World is really good now. Amazon has done a ton to fix its issues, and are determined to support it. The playerbase numbers have been increasing too. Only play Eve Online if you want to stick to the free to play mode, the monthly sub is $20 now. The player numbers are tanking hard too and CCP pretty much has the game in maintenance mode at this point. New World is not great and has had to shut the economy down multiple times in the last 30-60 days due to duping and exploits. The gameplay is ok at best, go with BDO if you want a good action combat mmo. Eve Online is receiving constant content updates and new feature expansions and is far from in maintenance mode. However yes the $20/mo. sub is kind of steep.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 18:51
|
|
