Buggy and Incomplete Games: Part 2

Age of Conan. Oh, you thought you'd gotten off easy when I didn't mention you straight away, didn't you? Well, you're in the spotlight now, for the main reason that the game was released with no high-level content included. As if that weren't enough, the voiceovers they were bragging about weren't done, the combat system that was supposed to be revolutionary is about as deep as a puddle, and the graphics run like my gaming rig is a ten-year-old word processing machine begging to be put out of its misery.

Everything about this is game feels like it's been done wrong. The character classes are pretty much your run-of-the-mill variations on the character classes from every other MMO we've played, and while that's not necessarily bad it's not exactly ground-breaking either. Just once, I'd like an MMO to break the standards and come up with something new entirely, or just let characters make up their own classes.

Oh, wait. Champions Online is doing that? Well, bravo. Maybe that one will be a grind-fest worth playing for more than two months.

Anyway, back to the shittiness. As I said, Age of Conan was released with much of its content unfinished, including - at least at the time of release - all the high-level items and gear. So when a player reached, say, level 20, they were rewarded not by a sense of accomplishment but by an utter vaccum of content in which the enemies kept getting stronger and stronger but the player wasn't getting better swag to compensate.

And then there are the voiceovers. This was something of a revolutionary idea for an MMO, which, until AoC, had at best voice acting during the opening cutscene, and at worst none whatsoever. Age of Conan endeavored to change this by giving every lazy "kill x amount of y at z"-quest-giving NPC a fully scripted and voice-acted conversation. And it did make the world more immersive and the characters more compelling - for the 10% of NPCs that it was done for. The rest were just mysteriously silent, and after having rather good voice acting for everyone you talked to that felt a lot like being punched in the kidney.

And as if that weren't enough, the combat system that was supposed to be revolutionary... wasn't. It was described as a syatem where you judged each enemies strengths and weaknesses in meele combat, and then attacked them based on which area was the least protected. For example, if an enemy is holding a shield in their left hand, you attack their right side. This sounds amazing, but instead of revolutionizing combat it just served to confuse it. Instead of the hotbar-mashing single-minded attacking of World of Warcraft (which I don't like either, so that I don't confuse anyone's simple mind), you ended up pressing one of three buttons based on which side of your enemy (left right or center) had the least lines and therefore the least defense. Then you got attacks that attacked certain areas of the enemy and could potentially become useless if the enemies you were fighting happened to be guarding that particluar area heavily. They get an A for effort, but a big stinking F for execution.

Speaking of execution, whoever optimized the graphics in this game should be dragged out into the street and shot. I played Age of Conan when it first came out, and I could barely play it. I will say that the opening cutscene's graphics were extremely promising, and looked so very pretty I considered smacking myself just for the effect. And then I got into the game itself. Let me make clear that my computer is a gaming rig that I've invested a lot of time and money in. it runs games like Crysis - the game people joked couldn't be run by NASA supercomputers - at medium/high settings. So when I tell you that trying to run Age of Conan on Medium settings brought my computer to its knees, you should know that something has gone awry. The game didn't look anywhere near pretty enough to justify sucking up a gigabyte of video memory, so why was the camera skipping around like I was playing Age of Conan: The Flipbook? Even on low settings, my computer could only churn out 14 or so FPS - and that's with a view distance such that anything beyond ten meters or so just turns gray.

So, in conclusion, Age of Conan HULK SMASH HULK SMASH HULK SMASH.

In all seriousness, Age of Conan was a promising game that lost most of its appeal due to the fact that it was most likely rushed out the door before it was done. I can accept a game like an MMO being released with some bugs, because it's just impossible to play-test every inch of such massive worlds. But when you release a game with actual content missing, you're doing it wrong.

Next post: Gamestop. RAGE.