Now that AoC is out.. Necro/Demo Section?

[Tannenbernie]

Hmm, so as i am also bored with WoW and WAR will prolly take another 1-2 years to be available i also took a look at the game.

Different from the other posters i have only negative impressions so far.

Graphic is better than WoW, as can be expected for a 3 year newer game, but its not really astonishing. Wow has chosen the path of doing it "Comic-like", so the fact that you can see your Avatar being only a computer-animation is ok. But in Aoc the Avatars are created to look realistic....which they of course do not do, so this is having bad impact on the atmosphere for me.

Also extremely negative is the way you start and are lead around. you are basically in a single-player-game and have only one valid way to go. The big big advantage of other MMOs where you can just roam freely in the world like you like is taken away from you. There is one quest you have to start on and thats it, no matter if you like it or not. If you move then you always move in these fixed pathes. You can not decide to go left or right, you can only follow that one tunnel which then leads you into the town, just as it usually is the case in single-player games where you simply follow the programmed storyline. I personally completely dislike it, freedom to go where and how i want was one of the most amazing things to me in MMOs.

Another thing which i dont like is that they did not really spend time on the quests and your interaction with the NPCs. I mean, you land on this island and see this naked woman being bound to a tree. You have several options of talking to her, but no matter what you say, the result is always the same. She asked me to free her and i have choosen a inpolite answer, basically saying that i have no interest in her. The result was the same as when you choose the polite answer and promise to help her - she just says 'thank you sooo much" and the game expects you to free her. Well, i am a roleplayer...for more than 20 years now....so i do not like this. I like the option to do a quest or not, and if i am given a dialogue with several options then there should be different things coming out of it.

Dunno, maybe some of these things change after the first levels of the game, but i just had one long evening with a friend where we played together for 6-7 hours or so on one account. We had at least two dozen crashes, gameservers were going up and down like jumpin frogs and in general we were so unimpressed that we most probably do not repeat such an evening.

[hoho]

Note: I haven't played or even seen the game myself so far but I've read quite a bit about in forums.

Originally Posted by Tannenbernie

you are basically in a single-player-game and have only one valid way to go.

I think the first 20 or so levels were supposed to be pretty much singleplayer game. After that it'll be like most others where you meet others and do whatever you want.

Originally Posted by Tannenbernie

Dunno, maybe some of these things change after the first levels of the game, but i just had one long evening with a friend where we played together for 6-7 hours or so on one account. We had at least two dozen crashes, gameservers were going up and down like jumpin frogs and in general we were so unimpressed that we most probably do not repeat such an evening.

There are problems. Lots of them. In fact there are so many of them it is impossible to count them and it seems that every new patch only makes things worse. E.g latest patch removed socets from some of the gear together with the expensive gems in it.

The people that have played it from the beta have said that there have been very few actual bugfixes done since they started playing the game and most of the promised stuff is still missing.


Was WoW similar in the first couple of months?

[Tannenbernie]

Originally Posted by hoho

Was WoW similar in the first couple of months?

No, one of the reasons for the big success story of WoW is the incredible stability and working functionality of the whole game from the beginning on. I played about one dozen MMOs ever since 2000 and all of them had been a pain in the ***. Game clients being uninstallable, game servers being down for weeks, a weekly patch resulting in a week downtime....that was the state of most early MMOs. WoW was one of the first that was stable and really working from beginning on which is probably one of the main reasons for its successes.

Now thinking about it there was one other MMO which also was very stable from beginning on, City of Heroes. It is smaller and less complicated, still having Zones and such....but it was always stable, even on patch days.

But then AoC is made by Funcom which has a horrible reputation on being the most terrible company on patches and game stability. Their bugs in AO became legend in the online community

Anyways, i would accept an unstable game for a while if i would have fun playing it. But as you say, the 1st 20 lvls are just like a single-player game. Why in hell would anyone in the world want to do stupid repititive mob-farming in a single-player game? They take away everything that is great about a MMO and leave in the annoying farm-stuff, strange strategy.

Well at least for those players who like seeing naked females all the time, they have to see a lot in the game. Funcom also started advertizing their game as the "most sexy MMO in the world", so lots of naked flesh is strategy here. But at least for me that can not make up for a boring game