The darkness of Hyboria

It was bound to happen. I am not really a big fan of fantasy, but some settings do have an appeal for various reasons. Guild Wars is beautiful, has some great stories and some really great game mechanics. Chronicles of Spellborn has this mystical and fascinating story and environment and is different in a number of ways. Runes of Magic on the other hand does not really fascinate and does not have a compelling story to drive the game like the two others. But it works for casual short session dabbling.

And neither of them have any elves. This is a big plus. I hope neither game will ever introduce elves. A view of elves that I liked is from an author who wrote this:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

Say fellows, any relationship with the creature from the Black Lagoon?

Age of Conan is another of those games. It has no elves and a setting that has good potential for interesting stories and adventures. And it has a few game mechanics that I like. So I decided to give it a 3rd time to see how the game worked out. The first time was just when the game launched, with a number of issues. The second time was late last year and the game was better to play then, but rather empty and perhaps not quite fulfilling its potential for epic adventure.

This time the emptiness does not seem to be an issue and it is quite noticeable that there is more life in the game now after the server merges. There is plenty of talk in the chat channels, more people running around in the areas etc. The chat is not of the Barrens chat type and seesm generally to be kept at a nice level.

I decided to play a bit with one of my lowbies first; Ghorash, a Dark templar who was level 8 when I last left the game. This meant going through Tortage again, which I did have some reservations against before. But the experience turned out better than I had expected.

The story followed a different path than I had played before, which meant there were some new elements. But it was also interesting to see that they had done some changes in the game that did contribute to a better overall experience. There was less trash loot filling up and more of stackable stuff. There were also vendors outside Tortage itself, like in White Sands Isles. Various small changes like that, which removes some earlier annoyance factors.

Hey, it is a foul to attack a player without the ball!

While I was still longing to get out of Tortage to get out in the real world, it was still a rather nice experience and I quite liked the Dark Templar. I also had a go with my fiery missionary (the Herald of Xotli), getting back into the Evangelism by Fire game play. Also taking a peek at the crafting side in Purple Lotus Swamp, I found it a nice change to actually see other people there – did not happen the previous time I played. The bug which causes play to start at midnight in the game became noticeable outside Tortage. It was generally dark when I played, except for the multi-player part in Tortage.

It has only been a brief re-visit so far, but I hope it can work out better this time. The activity in chat channels and in various areas was more encouraging this time. I do hope the story elements of the game can play out better and keep it interesting, It already has the advantage of no elves compared to LOTRO for example, and also nicer combat mechanics.

Splitting the Halloween fight

Lately the somewhat limited game time I have had has been split between all three MMOs I currently play – City of Villains/Heroes, Guild Wars and Age of Conan.

Fighting Nightmares (elite bosses) and other zombies in Grandville

Since it is Halloween season most games has some Halloween events. In City of Villains/Heroes it is the usual trick and treat knock-on-door from last season, with all the disguises as various villains. The added part for this year was the Zombie invasion, which is pretty much like the RIkti invasions, only that there are zombies pouring out of the ground instead of Rikti dropping down from ships.

It is pretty much the same kind of frenzy fun that the Rikti invasions can be – pretty much some intense fighting everything that pops up for a number of minutes. Had one good session with that in Grandville with one of my dominators (Flamebrain) disguised as a Knife of Artemis member. Not that that made any difference The fire imps had a great time, my psychic screams hopefully made some impact, but most mobs died too quickly to think that the holds and stuns had a significant impact. Pretty fun in any case.

The sands of blood and fire

Smashing the Mantis

My fiery missionaire has continued her exploration of Khopshef Province, quite frequently leaving a trail of dead and burned corpses after her. Adhering to slightly different ethics than my Cimmerian Bear Shaman, she has no trouble with helping the local militia to hunt down and defeat a slave rebellion, punching some undead fellows or just just rampaging anything in the vicinity – reward or no reward, she just seem to enjoy that.

The local Mantis population did experience this in particular while exploring their part of the province. I guess the bigger they and the bigger thumps they make adds to this…

This is one thing I think Age of Conan managed to do better than most other fantasy MMORPGs out there – fun combat. I have quite enjoyed melee fighting in this fantasy setting, which is something I have almost never done in other fantasy MMORPGs (Brigand in EQ2 is an exception).

Burn Mantis burn

While trying to put up some compelling and burning arguments about the bliss of being a servant of Xotli is a nice activity, Tatiana also did some exploration of the parts of the province that she had not been to.

This included a big interesting building in the southern part fo the region, which she learned was called the Black Castle. A bit uncertain if there were any possible converts there, she left without investigating further. After all, a Black castle sounds a bit burned, so maybe the bliss of Xotli had already been told to its inhabitants.

Later though when helping with some espionage on a local citizen she learned that there might be some transformed human that need the to hear the message anyway! A nearby parked caravan also expressed their displeasure with the inhabitants of the Black Castle, although there were some more commercial motivations behind their less positive attitude.

 

Black Castle

 

But the explorer mind was also pointing towards the big pyramid in the area, which the locals referred to as the Pyramid of the Ancients. While the surroundings around the pyramid was nice to explore, there has not too many in the area to provide the message of Xotli to except for a few lions. So Tatiana decided to leave this part as well for the moment. An assignment she had picked up was a about killing a chicken handler and one of his chicken. The thought of some fried chicken for lunch was quite appealing, so she headed off to find the chicken handler.

Finding him was quite easy, but it turned out to be difficult to convince him to end the existance in favor of Xotli or prepare some fried chicken. In fact he beat Tatiana completly with only receiving a few scratches himself.

Pyramid of the Ancients

Maybe fried chicken is not the best food right now. Around this point it seemed that Tatiana hit level 30 and an old Destiny quest suddently became plausible. So she headed to Khemi to find out more about this and this is the point she is at right now.

Back to nature, one strike at a time

When playing various characters in MMORPGs I often prefer those whose abilites make them a bit fuzzy in terms of role. This is one reason I prefer City of Villains to City of Heroes; the archetypes do not quite fit in traditional roles to the extent that they might do on hero side.

While I have not tried all classes in Age of Conan there were some of them that appealed to me directly from their descriptions; in particular Herald of Xotli and Bear Shaman. The combination of some magic/mystical powers with nitty-gritty big weapon swinging does have its appeal.

While my HoX has ventured into the Stygian country side, my Bear Shaman Wolfsbane was stuck in Tortage. This was due to that he had a bit of a tough time for a bit there in the early double digit levels. But after he got some more healing and smashiong powers under his belt it started to become more manageable. At 19, he defeated Strom and headed back to his good old home land of Cimmeria.

Home sweet home

All was not well though and Wolfsbane soon found hints that he should head off to Clan Moragh’s settlement and provide them som help with the threat from the Vanirs.

 

On the way he did encounter both a poor boy who had lost his belongings to some local wolfs. With his name, how could he refuse to help? He did feel a bit guilty about hitting some of the cubs near the wolf pack leader though, which turned out to have the boy’s belongings.

Continuing his path further down to Clan Moragh he encountered an old warrior who wanted some help with delivering some of his belongings to his family in the settlement. Since that was on the way Wolfsbane accepted the task.

Death is present at Clan Moragh

After arriving to the Clan Moragh settlement it soon became clear that this was a place of sorrow and destruction. Being a shaman and a man of restoration as well as destruction (from his trusty club), Wolfsbane offered to help out. He started out with collecting some herbs to make medicine; but the Vanir were lurking nearby and the effort did not go without bloodshed.

One of the wounded suggested that it might be smart to strike at the Vanir camp where they kept their wounded and kill them while they were weak. However, Wolfsbane refused this – if they die that should be in a fair fight. There is no honour in killing the weak.

Some intelligence from another warrior indicated that the river might be poisoned – the Vanir may have placed rotten corpses in the river to transfer it to the settlement an infecting its inhabitants.

Fighting the Vanir

Performing some persuasive “talk” with some Vanir and investigating the river a bit into Vanir territory showed that the suspicion was true; there were corpses in the river! The discovered corpses were cleared from the river (not particularly nice work…). Further incursions into Vanir territory was discussed to stop future activities to infect the river water again.

With lots of “persuation by club” being performed, Wolfsbane ended up with a few more trinkets than he needs, plus a bit more cash. So he decided to support the local traders and craftsmen, which they seemed happy for – you do not really say no to some new customers in times like this.

 

Oh my, that is a mighty fine shield you have there...

I was happy to be able to get out of Tortage and into the “real” world for a bit. And the Conarch Valley is quite beautiful. I like the down-and-dirty approach for the Bear Shaman here and it is fun to play, even though he does not match my Herald of Xotli in terms destructive persuation. 

Unfortunately my gaming session did not go trouble free. After playing for a while I got a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death), which is something I had hoped would not appear.  Remains to be seen if this will be a recurring event or just something that happened now; it was the first time I got that with this computer set-up though.

But despite that, I quite enjoyed my Conarch venture so far.

Back to Hyboria

I have just got into a mood of dusting off and trying some previosuly played or looked at games again and see what they are like now. So first I decided to dust off my Age of Conan DVDs and reinstall the game.

When I originally started to play Age of Conan I never continued past the initial month. Not because the game was buggy (although it had its share of problems), but I did not really feel any urge to get in and play the game – too many frustrating bits and pieces, plus that I also had Issue 12 for City of Heroes/Villains, whose content for me was much more enjoyable at that point.

So now a few months later I have decided to play a bit of Age of Conan. Not particularly much probably, but a little bit every now and then.

The first step in the game was to start play what was my favourite character when I played, my Herald of Xotli – Tatiana.

Tatiana in Khemi

At level 22, she had barely left Tortage and had just started to look arond a bit in the near surroundings when I stopped playing her.

Exploring Khopshef province

One thing I decided when starting to play now was to not go the quest-or-die route and try to optimize the questing. I.e. not collecting all quests found from quest givers and try to complete all near each other in some area. Instead my character will mostly ignore all the quest givers, do a bit of exploration of the world on her own and pick up quests once in a while only, if they seem to have a reasonable challenge or story.

But first I decided to work on the quests I already had picked up during my previous ventures to Hyboria, some in Khemi and some in the nearby Khopshef province mainly. And do some exploration of the area at the same time. It is a nice region with a desert, Nile area theme. It relly needs graphics settings on high to look good though IMHO. Fortunately that was not a problem.

Running around abit on random led to a few encounters and enemies which were a bit of out of my league initially, in particular when they walked around in groups. Death is always near I did encounter a friendly Mantis though, but he did not provide much info about himself and his kind other than that they have some kind of hive society.

Chatting with a Mantis

While I explored I also of course started to re-learn the bits and pieces that I picked up the previous time. After a while the combat started to flow reasonably well. The stats on the items are still not clear what the effect is, but since most drops or what I found at vendor was pretty similar or worse to what I already had, I did not have to bother so much with item stats, which I think is good.

The game still has lots of trash loot drops and not much inventory space. However I did notice in Khemi that additional bags were cheaper/larger than what I remembered them. Back then I could not really any bag I found in Tortage. But now I could buy a 12 slot bag for less than 10% of the money I had.

I still wish that there was less trash loot or some trash filter similar to that Tabula Rasa has.

While most of the quests were in Khopshef and Stygia, I was sent through follow-ups on those quests to some other parts, for example the Conarch village/valley area. I did not pick up any new quests here inline with my plan, but the area looks quite and I might put some time in my bear shaman to get out of Tortage and to Conarch.

I did not meet many players when running around. There were a few much higher level than me in the hub areas and in Khopshef I did encounter other players of similar levels, but never more than one at a time.

From a technical point of view I have not had any problems with the game so far, it has worked quite fine. They could do a better implementation of the screenshot function I think though, I do not see a reason to freeze the game for a short bit just for a screenshot.

Funcom financials

Funcom has released the financial report for the second quarter of 2008. Given that the by far most common searches that WordPress reports for my blog is related to Age of Conan population, my guess is that there might one or two that are concerned with those numbers.

Funcom earn a bit over 13 million USD in their second quarter, about 11.5 million more than previous quarter. This likely includes income from the 800000 copies sold and possibly some subscription fees. They reportedly have about 415000 customers. A customer either someone who has bought the game and is still on their 30 first days or paid the subscription fee after the first 30 days.

So about half of the buyers of the game decided they would not continue to pay for the game. But even if all of the 11.5 million USD is from sold games, that only means about 14.40 USD per game on average. That does not sound like a large share of the box price.

Still, this was about 1 million USD higher than their financial guidance, so they expected to sell slightly less. From that point of view the numbers are good.

But how much did it cost them? The operating expenses for the same period are almost 15 million USD, which is more than they earned. So even if they earned a bunch of money, they spent even more. Part of that may be the 3 MMOs they are developing (The Secret World + 2 casual MMOs). Since they do not release any details per game it may be difficult to get an idea of how much they earn from a particular game. However the operating expenses for all of 2007 was a bit more than 12 million dollars, so a fairly large chunk of those recent expenses in the last quarter only are probably tied to Age of Conan.

The projected income for the next quarter is estimated to be between 16 and 20 million USD. Not all of that is Age of Conan, although most of it. Subscription prices are different for different regions so it is not easy to translate to subscription numbers – it will mainly be guesswork.

Reducing the numbers based on Anarcy Online estimates and do some split between Us and Euro fees my guess is that they estimate to roughly keep the subscription numbers they have in the report, perhaps slightly lower. If they manage to do that then the game in terms of subscription numbers is a quite big success.

Is it a financial success though? It should be, but their high operating expenses is a reason for concern there. Judging from the info contained in their financial report presentation, it seems that they think that the future for good profit may be in the casual games space and perhaps not as much in large scale traditional MMOs.

That seems to be were they want to go and I think that is the right way for them.

Population density and Age of Conan

Through Tobold’s open Sunday thread blog entry, I found some links to Classy Gamer’s investigation of population density for Age of Conan of the European side and some update on posting this being censored on the AoC forum.

I think Classy Gamer did a good job there, although perhaps some investigation on the level ranges also would have made a better estimate on where there may be any issues. I am not surprised that his post was censored, even though it did likely not violate any forum rules from an outside perspective. Game companies do not have forums to promote open discussions about anything; they do that to try to strengthen their game community and get some valuable feedback.

Many of these forums are a bit of cesspools and working with these can probably cause people to loose perspective a bit. That does not make it better, just understandable.

But back to the numbers; what triggered my thoughts here was not so much that there might be a problem for Age of Conan here, but rather why certain numbers would be considered an indication of a population density problem.

I do not believe in that because a certain number X indicated a problem in game A that it would necessarily indicate a problem in game B; not without looking at the game design for a particular game.

In particular, the teaming and community aspects of the game design affects the supported density. If a realm has 500 players online at a given time then that is a problem only if only a small subset of that player base are candidates to team up with. If every single one of these 500 would be a good candidate for a team or chat or something then there would not be a problem.

However, if the game restricts who can or are likely candidates to team up with based on level, quest status, travel distance, class choice, ease of finding each other etc then it will become a problem. In Age of Conan’s case it does have some elements going for it such as the apprentice feature compared to some similar games, but that in itself is not enough.

I am not sure how much consideration goes into the game design for such things; I suspect that there is not that much effort in terms of population density considerations other than perhaps allow multiple instances of a zone.

I am quite sure that Funcom knows about all the numbers that Classy Gamer produced and probably in much more detail as well; how to address it is another matter and when it would need to be addressed in that case. Server merges may be one choice, but other design changes could be viable also – in theory.  In practice they will probably not do design changes other than maybe for the long term. Open up for server transfers would be the most likely option I think that they would start with – more neutral option and without the negative view of a server merge.

That is, if there actually is a problem. It is still just a bit over a month since it was released. Any game with a lot of hype around it is risking getting into this position though; the question then is how well the game design handles lower population densities.

Escape from Tortage

While I did not have Snake Plissken in mind when I started playing in Age of Conan’s starter area, the word escape did stick with me; the six times I press the escape key when I start the game and the story in Tortage and my characters goal to escape from there and get back to the homeland.

So far I have managed to escape twice. Two characters have saved Tortage from the clutches of Strom and Mithrelle and headed back to their home turf. Two more are still stuck in there, struggling with their Destiny.

I much enjoyed the Destiny quests story in Tortage and thought that some of the other quests in the area had at least some decent writing. But still, getting quests like “kill 50 picts”, “kill 20 scorpions and 20 snakes”, “collect 30 croc skins” etc does not quite appeal to me. Taking out some high priest, bandit leader or a group of thugs (no numbers) is ok, but too much counters running in quests is not.

Getting sent back and forth multiple times between areas also gets annoying as well as the small space of the inventory. The added bags I found was too expensive for me to consider and given the amount of “unused loot” littered around in the areas, I am probably not alone here.

Overall though the experience was enjoyable in Tortage, although I am not certain I can go though that more times in the near future. Both times I managed to complete the destiny quest aprt and get out I felt releaved – finally getting out in the real world of Hyboria!

And yet, when I start exploring and picking up quests which each of the escapees I soon got the feelign that I cannot do this anymore – not more fedex or collect/kill X of whatever for whatever reason. And I stop.

Perhaps it is the change from the nice story in Tortage with mostly solo RPG play to a mostly familiar game mechanics of fantasy MMORPGs. Or that I have no specific interest in playing fantasy in general. Compared to the most recent previous fantasy game I played (LOTRO) I think Age of Conan does for the most part a better job.

But right now the spark is not there and this has probably more to do with the way fantasy MMORPGs are in general rather than Age of Conan specifically. I am not going to reactivate my EQ2 account with the Living Legacy campaing either, nor have I any plans to revisit WoW (almost 2 1/2 years since I left). And I am not playing in any fantasy MMORPG betas.

I just end up jumping into City of Villains/Heroes and have a blast for a bit.

New and shiny updates

After being on vacation for about a week not looking at anything game-like and barely touching any computer, I found a couple of new things waiting to be explored:

• Age of Conan was released (for pre-order at least)
• Issue 12 for City of Heroes/Villains was released
• Deployment 8.x for Tabula Rasa was released

Age of Conan was expected of course, but the other 2 I had not expected to happen already. Of these 3 the Tabula Rasa update is probably the least exciting of them. Not that is is a bad one, but in comparision to a whole new game or new epic archetypes, powersets, new and revamped zones and slots galore it cannot quite compete.

I did start to play a bit in Age of Conan, created two characters and played a little bit in Tortage here. Performance-wise the game has worked quite well, but I’ve seen a few graphic glitches and I have had two crashes of the game so far – once while zoning and the other when exiting the game. Apart form that I think the game has worked well though and its been fun. Most of what I have done so far is familar from when I played in the open beta though, so not really at anything that is completely new yet.

Most of the time though has been spent in City of Villains. One epic archetype character (Widow) has been created, which I been playing a fair amount now and I enjoy it very much.

I also created another dominator, so that I again have dominators for all powersets available. The dominator has not received as much play time yet, but the earth control/electricity manipulation combination seems quite nice after the first few levels. There are many small details and improvements in the interfaces and in the game mechanics which makes the gameplay even nicer than before. Good work NCSoft!
Have not had any time yet to explore the new and revamped zones, so there is lots more to try out also.
All in all, plenty of new things to play around with for a while.

Age of Conan – a question of millions

Funcom put out an announcement with some numbers on beta and web site interest for Age of Conan – 1 million beta signups and 5 million unique visitors to the web site in 2008.

1 million signups does not mean there were that many in beta, just that 1 million applied for it. And 5 million visitors might not mean 5 million persons, only 5 million unique sources which is a bit different.

Still, the numbers do indicate that they have managed to get a lot of people intersted at some point and that they might have some good pre-order numbers in some regions at least.

I do hope it works out well for Funcom here, for three reasons:

* I do like to see more non-US developers succeed in the Western market, that should be good for diversity.
* While it is Yet Another Fantasy game, it is a different fantasy setting than most of the other MMORPGs in that area – again good for diversity and choice
* It has been fun to play, the little time I had to try it out

Remains to be seen at what state the performance and stability will be at launch and what other challenges may pop up.