What went wrong?

[Abelian75]

I heard that phrase about Conan.

The Next Big Thing will never casue the flight of the Isrealites, kids...

'Cept for WoW, of course.

[tmp]

Hey. I hate WoW, but come on.
Actions are delayed. You press a button... and some time after that something happens. How fast is that?

I hear comments like these from people and i don't really remember WoW combat well (was in beta then) so that got me interested enough to ask... LotRO combat has the auto-attacks thrown in at regular intervals (based on averaged weapon speed), and all skills have their associated animations that take while to play, so the queue is there to let you enter next attack before the current one is fully finished animating. This does indeed frequently cause visible delay between your button press and actual execution of move.

But thing is, iirc WoW also has both the cooldown based on weapon speed that's there to stop players from stringing their abilites into 'too fast' chains, as well as global cooldown on the combat skills ... and the skills themselves also have animations that take a while to play. So how exactly does WoW handle these while managing to avoid the same visible delay between key press and the action, due to either previous skill being animated, or the global cooldown preventing the ability from being used too soon..? I'll accept they do something different otherwise people would either not complain about LotRO system or complain about WoW system just the same... i'm just curious what that something is.

[Abelian75]

I hear comments like these from people and i don't really remember WoW combat well (was in beta then) so that got me interested enough to ask... LotRO combat has the auto-attacks thrown in at regular intervals (based on averaged weapon speed), and all skills have their associated animations that take while to play, so the queue is there to let you enter next attack before the current one is fully finished animating. This does indeed frequently cause visible delay between your button press and actual execution of move.

But thing is, iirc WoW also has both the cooldown based on weapon speed that's there to stop players from stringing their abilites into 'too fast' chains, as well as global cooldown on the combat skills ... and the skills themselves also have animations that take a while to play. So how exactly does WoW handle these while managing to avoid the same visible delay between key press and the action, due to either previous skill being animated, or the global cooldown preventing the ability from being used too soon..? I'll accept they do something different otherwise people would either not complain about LotRO system or complain about WoW system just the same... i'm just curious what that something is.

WoW just plays the animation of the ability you just used and stops any previous animation.  If you press mortal strike or whatever, it plays the mortal strike animation even if it means interrupting an already-playing animation.

(Actually, technically I think it plays the particle effect and a "wind-up" animation for the ability on your hands instantly, and then once the server responds that you successfully used the ability, plays the animation, which ideally is about .3 seconds later-ish.)

Personally I think that's a much better solution.  Going for crazy animation fidelity in an auto-attack combat system is odd.

Oh, and no, there's no cooldown related to auto-attacks in WoW.  There's nothing that stops you from using an ability and an auto-attack and exactly the same time.

[tmp]

Oh, and no, there's no cooldown related to auto-attacks in WoW.  There's nothing that stops you from using an ability and an auto-attack and exactly the same time.

Ahh no i meant a cooldown that prevents using abilities one after another in too quick succession. It's apparently 1.5 sec according to article on WoW homepage ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/combat.html )

Also, how does it handle the slow swing weapons (according to the same article the weapon swing time also acts as cooldown of sorts on the abilities) ... i mean, seeing how the swing time on something like 2-hand sword is 3.5 sec or even more, doesn't that create couple seconds of delay between click and actual attack if you use abilities very fast one after another? Say you activate one ability and then a second later hit another, but there's still considerable gap before it's allowed to execute... or is that just for auto-attacks and the abilities are only limited by the 1.5 sec global cd thing?

[Abelian75]

Ahh no i meant a cooldown that prevents using abilities one after another in too quick succession. It's apparently 1.5 sec according to article on WoW homepage ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/combat.html )

Also, how does it handle the slow swing weapons (according to the same article the weapon swing time also acts as cooldown of sorts on the abilities) ... i mean, seeing how the swing time on something like 2-hand sword is 3.5 sec or even more, doesn't that create couple seconds of delay between click and actual attack if you use abilities very fast one after another? Say you activate one ability and then a second later hit another, but there's still considerable gap before it's allowed to execute... or is that just for auto-attacks and the abilities are only limited by the 1.5 sec global cd thing?

Yeah, weapon speed only affects auto-attacks.  Abilities are always on the same 1.5 second global cooldown (with the exception of abilities that aren't affected by the global cooldown, although those are almost always not attack abilities).

There are some abilities that occur "on next hit" though, so you'd hit that and then it takes effect on the next auto-attack.  There aren't too many of these though, but they are definitely the most unresponsive aspect to combat, imho.

Also there's no queuing system, so if you hit an ability and it can't execute, it doesn't wait and then execute later.  It either does something immediately or not at all.

[cevik]

Also, how does it handle the slow swing weapons (according to the same article the weapon swing time also acts as cooldown of sorts on the abilities) ... i mean, seeing how the swing time on something like 2-hand sword is 3.5 sec or even more, doesn't that create couple seconds of delay between click and actual attack if you use abilities very fast one after another? Say you activate one ability and then a second later hit another, but there's still considerable gap before it's allowed to execute... or is that just for auto-attacks and the abilities are only limited by the 1.5 sec global cd thing?

A good deal of your abilities (I'd go so far as to say a vast majority) either happen instantly or begin the "cast time" instantly, so that there is immediate feedback.  Some occur "on next swing" but it's very few and usually only to add damage.

This makes a huge difference for something like interrupting a spell cast, where, when you see the caster casting you can immediately interrupt and you don't have to wait for the next swing (potentionally 3.5s away!), which, imho makes combat require more "skill" and less luck, i.e. no having to worry about having just swung and needing to wait 3.5 seconds where you can do nothing at all before you can hit the interrupt on that guy casting a 2.5s spell.

[Tannhauser]

Here's my cancel mini-rant I sent as feedback.

"Ok your combat is great and your world terrain is amazing.  A couple dungeons are very good.

BUT the UI is terrible, terrible!  The fonts are even annoying, the skill buttons are too large and the quickbar layouts were bad.

Some of my skills didn't work, like Fire Pots and Tracking only half the time. 

Items-This is just horrible.  Magic items with a .02% increase to a stat?  Why bother?  It's just as effective to run around naked as it is to wear any of this silly gear.  I realize that you are constrained to make items look gritty for this IP BUT give us a reason to wear them!  Use a snazzy font (see WoW and WAR) and give them meaningful stats.  I have NO interest in playing because I know I will not find any good items. 

Crafting was too hard to do, everyone camped the few spots out in the world.  I see you have added nodes to the radar, but it's too late for me, my interest has already faded.

Money-I am lvl 44 with 65sp.  I still can't afford a mount (down to 75sp from 2gp!).  A single health potion at Dinoq in EM costs 65sp!  Your prices are sky-high, can't buy anything.  Frustrating.

World-There is none.  There are zones but no sense of a savage world to explore.  Just a few quest hubs.  Only one real city, a village and an ALLEY.  Yes, the mighty Stygian kingdom is reduced to an alley. 

This game has little polish and was published in a beta state and I am tired of paying to play a beta.  I did have some fun while I lasted and there is a lot of potential in this IP and this game but for right now I am going to move on.  I will keep an eye out for when or if you fix the above issues and if so I will be back."

The game has slowly sucked the will to play it out of me.

[eldaec]

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

[Threash]

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

What we were playing back then WAS awesome, just because we got to the yet undiscovered shitty part doesn't mean we suddenly changed our minds.

[Slayerik]

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

I swear, I was tricked!

[Phildo]

I want my money back!  Two dollars!  TWO DOLLARS!

[Lakov_Sanite]

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

I swear, I was tricked!

Can I say I told you so yet? 

More seriously though AOC blew me AWAY for the first couple weeks and I think the only difference is those who had danced this dance before saw all the warning signs, they saw things coming. I don't think some of us here are snooty mmo snobs like has been said but out bullshit detector is just a bit more honed.

In fact I would say the MMO audience in general is becoming more honed to notice what is good/bad/etc to see when and where things should work and don't or when they feel content is lacking or mechanics horribly flawed. This is a direct result not of wow specifically but of the genre as a whole growing.

This is change we can believe in.

[Khaldun]

So I'm coming late to this party, partly because my comp finally got upgraded earlier this month.

I see a lot of "yeah, that's it" in this thread, stuff I agree with. Part of it comes down to something simple: Funcom doesn't know what it's doing at the basic design level. It's the same thing I felt about the Pirates of the Burning Sea devs, except Funcom has a higher level of graphical and design mastery at the purely technical level.

This is the thing that depresses me, really. I'm sorry, but guys: there has been a lot of ink spilled at this point about virtual world design and MMOGs, and a lot of the shit that Funcom screws up in Conan isn't about bugs or anything simple like that. It's about having a clear picture of what this form is, what is wrong with it, and what even at a simple level, barring magic tech, could be doing to make it more engaging and fun.

So when I'm running around in Tortage, right off the bat here's several things that just annoy the fuck out of me:

1. Spam droppage of useless shit, with me having one bag and only one bag. What's the point, really? They did it because DikuMUD designs have it. No one thought about it, asked, "Why are we having 20,000 fucking useless tunics and shit drop?" They just said, "Oh, that's what you do, right? Every mob drops crap. because it's supposed to."

2. First 20 levels, here's your chance to impress people. So, ok, they put some effort into the destiny quests. The non-destiny quests? Totally un-Conanesque. I'm a fucking necro walking around with six flayed corpses behind me, and people say, "Hey, could you go get my thimbles for me, I'm a lazy fatass". Ok, fine, the actual Conan stories HAVE FED EX quests in them. Really. Only Conan does them because he's got no choice, the people asking are vicious cynics, and they usually end up killed by Conan or by some demon or thing or at the absolute best, flung into a pit of shit. But here I am, walking around a town with DEAD FUCKING MEAT BAGS trailing behind me, nobody says boo, and they ask me to go grab them some lemonade from some cellar without any fear that I'll rip their faces off. I don't even get a cynical, "I don't know who I am, I have no choice, but someday I'll rape your soul and send you shrieking into the netherworld for this" response in the non-destiny quests.

It's not that I'm a lore freak, but it's that the game has this weird, slavish dependence on MMOG conventions that doesn't serve it well in any way at all. It doesn't make it more fun, or more immersive, or work better. All it screams to me is, "We're a bunch of dumb fuck designers who don't know what we're really doing, don't care much about the lessons we should have learned the first time around, and really just want to get paid off by reskinning WoW, because that's about all we can handle intellectually."

[Slayerik]

I like how it now only takes us 28 days to go from awesome for real to this thread. Anyone would think we've been through this before or something...

I swear, I was tricked!

Can I say I told you so yet? 

More seriously though AOC blew me AWAY for the first couple weeks and I think the only difference is those who had danced this dance before saw all the warning signs, they saw things coming. I don't think some of us here are snooty mmo snobs like has been said but out bullshit detector is just a bit more honed.

In fact I would say the MMO audience in general is becoming more honed to notice what is good/bad/etc to see when and where things should work and don't or when they feel content is lacking or mechanics horribly flawed. This is a direct result not of wow specifically but of the genre as a whole growing.

This is change we can believe in.

Sure, say it all you want.

A change I can believe in is make a PVP game with ....here comes the shocker...PVP in mind!!! If I felt I had any reason to get through the grind, any light at the end of the tunnel, I mighta trudged through some shit. But the game is just fundamentally broke in the endgame. Well, the mid game too but who's counting :)

[Sir T]

A change I can believe in is make a PVP game with ....here comes the shocker...PVP in mind!!!

Its called Battlefield. Your welcome.

[Slayerik]

A change I can believe in is make a PVP game with ....here comes the shocker...PVP in mind!!!

Its called Battlefield. Your welcome.

  ?

You are hilarious man!

[pxib]

I'm a fucking necro walking around with six flayed corpses behind me, and people say, "Hey, could you go get my thimbles for me, I'm a lazy fatass".

This, more than anything else, is why I stop reading quest text in games. It doesn't matter how interesting the story it tells is, it isn't my story... it doesn't even parallel my story. It actively DAMAGES my story.

"I have an idea," said my Orc Warrior, "I think I'll go kill a bunch of animals to impress some random dwarf I met in the jungle."

No.

"I have an idea," says me, "I think I want some grinding that's not quite so grindy and has rewards at the end."

The sooner those quest screens disappear the sooner I can get back to leveling. Raph says we see through the narrative to the mechanics underneath... but part of that is because we want to tell our own stories, not hear somebody else's, and the mechanic isn't quite up to the task yet.

[Khaldun]

Yes, but I think the mechanic could be up to the task, in several ways. The hard way would be a more agent-based approach to NPCs and enemies coupled with longer, more immersive designs for combat so that some of my levelling would happen not because I'd been told to go get 45 boar spleens, but because I needed to make my way through a jungle where a few dangerous creatures and people abided, in which those creatures and people had their own agent-based goals and behaviors. Give me the same result in terms of progression from a two-hour traverse of that jungle that I'd get from doing 10 mechanical FedEx quests, maybe with four or five longer, more involved, more dramatically intense battles during that time. Maybe I've even met one NPC agent who I could negotiate or trade with rather than kill during that time, if its goals are compatible with my needs.

That's the fantasy. The reality is that even in the narrow, utterly conventional design that Funcom is trying (often failing) to implement in AoC, they could create a better sense of immersion, and that's one of only two conceivable selling points for their game. Either it feels different as a fiction or "skin" over a WoW design, or it has sub-mechanics that are different enough from WoW that they create a new kind of fun. AoC's combat is trying to do the latter, and it gets close--it's more fun when it works. On the former, though, it's mostly a pile of fail. I just got to the main city of Stygia with my necro and holy shit, that's embarassing. This is one of the major cities in the game, that's supposed to get me involved, draw me in? That's all?

[pxib]

But Khaldun... nobody's doing that agent-based thing in SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. It looks good on paper, but nobody has seriously attempted it because it's an absolute bear to design in the first place and, in the few toy projects that have even brushed against it, pretty embarrassingly inept anyway. Add that to the challenges inherent in a MMOG? That's not even a fantasy, that's a Wish.

What simple things could AoC have done? Let's see some concrete examples.

[Khaldun]

But Khaldun... nobody's doing that agent-based thing in SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. It looks good on paper, but nobody has seriously attempted it because it's an absolute bear to design in the first place and, in the few toy projects that have even brushed against it, pretty embarrassingly inept anyway. Add that to the challenges inherent in a MMOG? That's not even a fantasy, that's a Wish.

What simple things could AoC have done? Let's see some concrete examples.

Sure.

Let's start from this basic insight. If you're going to build a Diku-type MMOG and borrow the standardized conventions that Blizzard has established (exclamation points over quest mobs, etc.), even if you're better programmers and better resourced than Funcom, you're still going to have technical issues and less content than World of Warcraft at launch. So what conceivable hooks can you have to keep people playing until you fix the technical issues and add some content?

Only two things: the mood, storyline, visual look and so on have to be markedly different than WoW (and coherently so), and some aspect of the repeated, extended game mechanics have to be markedly different than WoW (and equally or more fun: different and annoying doesn't help you at all).

Let's concentrate on the first one: mood, storyline, visual look, with a slight nod to game mechanics. We're talking now as if none of that matters, that quests are pure game-mechanical contrivances that everyone skips past, and the "skin" of the world is something that players barely notice or take in. I think that position is wrong in general, and specifically wrong about World of Warcraft. It may be *now* that the players of WoW treat quests as purely game-mechanical, but I think we're forgetting about everyone's first 1-60 experience, where content, visuality, and character did matter for a lot of players. It was the "hook" that kept them around while more content was added and technical problems ironed out, and more importantly, while social bonds in the game became more "sticky". Moreover, WoW's visual presentation was extremely consistent, aesthetically coherent, and worked very well with the text and character elements to create a sense of a single world or experience. (Unlike EQ2, let's say, which went for a mishmash of photorealism, off-the-shelf fantasy, etc.--no sense of aesthetic coherence).

So, Age of Conan. Funcom's designers read the stories, and they sort of understood the mood or feeling of the source material, because the destiny quests get at it somewhat. What makes the Conan material distinctive isn't titty or decapitation, though. It's a pervasive cynicism, a feeling of corruption. It's actually very well-suited for standard quest design, in many ways--read a lot of the REH stories, and you'll see a pacing and structure that could easily be represented as a standard character-progressing questline. But here's the problem even with the 1-20 destiny quests: some modest branching would do a tremendous amount to help the game both establish the Conan mood AND be a game-mechanical innovation. This is vastly more the case with the non-destiny quests in Tortage, which often don't even seem to recognize the baseline narrative that the destiny quests establish for all players, or they miss payoffs that are in plain sight. A simple example: there's that bitch Red Hand guard, Delia. The quests with her are actually very well written, and classically Conanesque: you have to do completely amoral things to please her because you don't really have any choice: you're an amnesiac being manipulated by forces beyond your control. So in the final destiny quest, there she is. In a classic Conan story, this is where Conan feeds some asshole his own intenstines (or where the asshole in question gets caught in a trap of his own making and suffers gruesomely). In this case? You kill her peremptorily and move on to the silent-movie silliness of all the friendlies and hostiles running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

I don't think it's that hard to write many standard quests with two branching dialogue trees that allow for the expression of different personalities or attitudes, and in some cases, slightly divergent outcomes which have some game-mechanical reality (such as faction gains or losses). World of Warcraft has a view; Conan could use a lot more. There *are* a few standard 'noble' fantasy types in Conan's mythology, but only a very few, and they tend to look like idiots. Most of my dialogue options, quest actions, and game-mechanical activities should be cynical, dark, self-interested. I shouldn't be fetching thimbles--I should be sending a reanimated corpse to rip open a nobleman's throat in a dark alley at night, and take his purse for myself.

Funcom used a lot of utterly standard quest-templates with matching utterly-standard noble fantasy trope dialogue because they don't really understand what they're doing and how to carve out a marketplace niche, not because those are hard to make. Also because they stupidly thought they could slow players down with standard-issue collecting and fed ex'ing. Wrong. All of this gets vastly worse, imho, when you get out of Tortage--Tortage at least has some quests that feel right or are slightly original in their structure.

---

As far as other kinds of game-mechanical originality? The combat in AoC has at least some different ideas in it, but often badly implemented, or crippled by bugs and inconsistent class design implementation. I guess if they ever got the endgame PvP working, that might be different, but Warhammer and WotLK look to have some of that covered. So mostly this just seems to be a clueless, floundering design. Funcom didn't understand how to make it *feel* or *experience* differently, and they didn't really have a solid vision of game-mechanical innovations or twists. Not to mention that they're technically screwed-up and that they have about the worst attitude towards community management of any MMOG designer I've seen.

[Lantyssa]

Funcom used a lot of utterly standard quest-templates with matching utterly-standard noble fantasy trope dialogue because they don't really understand what they're doing and how to carve out a marketplace niche, not because those are hard to make. Also because they stupidly thought they could slow players down with standard-issue collecting and fed ex'ing. Wrong. All of this gets vastly worse, imho, when you get out of Tortage--Tortage at least has some quests that feel right or are slightly original in their structure.

They also hide the good quests behind unpleasant chains no one gets around to doing.

The most glaring example to me is Tarisha, the ghostly woman in the final Tortage mission who rises from a circle of flame.  How many people even know about Tarisha's story?  It requires doing the Xantia's Wrath arc which involves running back and forth the drunkard Genzio in the Acheronian ruins.  It takes more back and forth to get to the meat of his quest than killing the bat god which explicitly ties to the destiny quest.  Then you've got to do it several more times for Tarisha's arc, if you even find out about her quest line.  To top it off, you can't choose to do anything but watch an idiot grasp at straws instead of taking action to change how things turn out.  (Imagine being able to affect the final story quest by choices in previous quests!)

[Threash]

Funcom used a lot of utterly standard quest-templates with matching utterly-standard noble fantasy trope dialogue because they don't really understand what they're doing and how to carve out a marketplace niche, not because those are hard to make. Also because they stupidly thought they could slow players down with standard-issue collecting and fed ex'ing. Wrong. All of this gets vastly worse, imho, when you get out of Tortage--Tortage at least has some quests that feel right or are slightly original in their structure.

They also hide the good quests behind unpleasant chains no one gets around to doing.

The most glaring example to me is Tarisha, the ghostly woman in the final Tortage mission who rises from a circle of flame.  How many people even know about Tarisha's story?  It requires doing the Xantia's Wrath arc which involves running back and forth the drunkard Genzio in the Acheronian ruins.  It takes more back and forth to get to the meat of his quest than killing the bat god which explicitly ties to the destiny quest.  Then you've got to do it several more times for Tarisha's arc, if you even find out about her quest line.  To top it off, you can't choose to do anything but watch an idiot grasp at straws instead of taking action to change how things turn out.  (Imagine being able to affect the final story quest by choices in previous quests!)

I did the grenzio part of the quest were she jumps in the fire, i still didnt understand why she came back though.  Was there more to it i missed? i THOUGHT i did every single tortage quest the last time around, took me to lvl 23, but that still confused me.

[squirrel]

Funcom certainly has a litany of errors in AoC but slamming them for FedEX quests (due to lore reasons or whatever) is silly. It's a problem that's endemic to the genre, not a specific title, and at least they did move the bar a little bit with the Destiny quests. If you think upcoming titles will remove this kind of kill 10 rats questing and be lore-true I think you're in for disappointment.

Certainly post-Tortage has issues content-wise, but I get the feeling some people here are OUTRAGED! OUTRAGED I TELL YOU! because a Conan IP game has fetch quests.

Honestly - it's the least of the games problems.

EDIT: And it's not a re-skinned wow to make money hats mechanic. It's a core mechanic to every MMORPG ever released. Hence the issue. I never expected Funcom to be able to resolve this problem, hell I don't think Blizzard or Mythic can. So, you know, let's get stuff like attack animations and loot that matters fixed and I'll let repetitive fedex'ing slide...

[Lantyssa]

I did the grenzio part of the quest were she jumps in the fire, i still didnt understand why she came back though.  Was there more to it i missed? i THOUGHT i did every single tortage quest the last time around, took me to lvl 23, but that still confused me.

No, that was it.  Why she came back wasn't entirely clear.

She does appear at the spot Valerius stands during the day, and with all the talk of souls and Set it could tie into that.  Or Mithrelle manipulating things, or the sorceress Valerius hired.

Most people don't even know that much though.  They never meet her until she rises out of the fire, so it makes no sense at all.

[Khaldun]

As I said, Fed Ex quests are even lore-appropriate to Conan. Some of REH's best Conan stories are basically elaborate Fed Ex quests of some kind or another. The point is, though, Conan doesn't do them because he just wants to help the old guy out with his thimbles, or get some fish for some fucker who is hungry. He does them because he's got no choice, because he's stuck in a bad situation, because he's greedy. And mostly that's how everyone in Conan's world operates: out of self-interest, cynically, playing games of power and fate.

You can disguise a lot of the quest templates for MMOG in various ways that make them at least momentarily interesting. The bombing dailies in World of Warcraft are just "kill 10 foozles", but at least the first time you do them, you say, "Hey, that's fun". You can surround fetch quests and collection quests with an interesting story that fits the setting or mood of your game. You can introduce some element of competition against other player or a race against the clock to add urgency to them. You can make them visually interesting. You can use them as short fillers in between more intricate or involved questlines.

AoC doesn't do much of that EVEN in the fairly carefully designed Tortuge non-destiny quests. And yeah, a few of the better designed ones probably go overlooked simply because there's so many robotically, mechanically designed ones.

[pxib]

As easy as branching quests seem to design, they too are rarely done even in single-player games. It's not a matter of technical difficulty so much as ease of experience. When players are given branches they tend to assume one is "right" (most beneficial, the least hassle later, the best rewards) and will be frustrated if they make the "wrong" choice... or be suspicious that they already have. If, on the other hand, it turns out the choices are illusory don't have consequences... players can  be even more disappointed. Best case scenario: options cost excess effort that anybody going through only once will never see.

Until somebody figure out how to get this functional in anything other than sandbox RPGs like Fallout, it's not going to appear in MMOGs.

The point is, though, Conan doesn't do them because he just wants to help the old guy out with his thimbles, or get some fish for some fucker who is hungry. He does them because he's got no choice, because he's stuck in a bad situation, because he's greedy. [...] You can surround fetch quests and collection quests with an interesting story that fits the setting or mood of your game.

Now we're talking! This is something designers have no excuse for failing to address. They ought to do the same thing with quests that they're supposed to do with graphics: Use them to establish a consistent theme. The buildings should match the trees should match the animals, so the quests should match the dialog should match the backstory. Creating a generalized framework...  not only of what the various NPCs want, but also what sort of characters players will want to portray based on their understanding of the game world.

The players don't get to play exactly the story they want to, but at least their story fits the world they've come to understand.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. There's certainly some Conanesque NPCs in Tortuge, but there's plenty who wandered in from generic heroic fantasy land, asking for generic fantasy heroic favors to be done for them.

[Roentgen]

It's a solid game but...

It's all been done before.  I loved it for 2 months straight.  Then it's like I hit a fuckin' brick wall where I didn't even want to log in.  Just hit me one day.  Went from "this game is a 10!" to "ugh" overnight.

[photek]

It's a solid game but...

It's all been done before.  I loved it for 2 months straight.  Then it's like I hit a fuckin' brick wall where I didn't even want to log in.  Just hit me one day.  Went from "this game is a 10!" to "ugh" overnight.

Same here. I think both the PvP imbalance, the bugs, memory leaks and lack of content at certain levels hit me at the same time and it was no more to do after that.

[Roentgen]

So I've been back in Eve the last day or two.  One reason I like it so much at the moment is because it's just so different.

The thought of running my little fantasy character around and pew pewing with a bow (I've always played archers in MMORPGS except UO and WOW where archery is lame) for the 100,000 time in the last 8 years is simply not entertaining anymore.  AoC account is active until the 19th and I probably won't log in.

Cruising around in a ship in 360 degrees and blowing shit up may be fun only because it's new and different for me (yet to be determined), but it is currently fun whereas the idea of a fantasy MMORPG makes me want to puke.

[Roentgen]

whoops, double post

[grunk]

To much solo grinding. Sorry but this bores me to death. Group grinding is fun when you actually have real class dependacy, that forces classes to work together, the system has to force you to do this… period.

Every day I logon, I take bets which of my characters will be fucken useless… guess what? They are all nerfed to fucken hell… and no the grunksta aint rollin no bs healer… it sucks, my barb use to be fun… my necro was good (for one week lol)… just cant deal with this shit for much more and it kills me. I actually like this fucken game and FC has simply become one with the fail

[Threash]

Barbs are currently the most powerful class in the game and should still be getting a few more nerfs to get them in line, what the fucken are you talking about.

[lamaros]

Can you not read his title?

[tazelbain]

To much solo grinding. Sorry but this bores me to death. Group grinding is fun when you actually have real class dependacy, that forces classes to work together, the system has to force you to do this… period.

Every day I logon, I take bets which of my characters will be fucken useless… guess what? They are all nerfed to fucken hell… and no the grunksta aint rollin no bs healer… it sucks, my barb use to be fun… my necro was good (for one week lol)… just cant deal with this shit for much more and it kills me. I actually like this fucken game and FC has simply become one with the fail

My God, It's Full of Stars !