Sunday 18 May 2008

A whole new world



Up until last night I had been on an endless stream of 13 hour night shifts. I'm not after sympathy here, far from it. I say this to give you an idea of how tired I was at 2am this morning when I finally logged out after my first session of Age of Conan!

I was one of the lucky ones who managed to get into the early access program and have therefore been happily running round DoT'ing things with unholy necromancer goodness!

Anyway, I figured that while my server was down for 2 hours maintenance, I could jump back in here and give you my impressions of the first 20 levels. I'm not going to go into too much detail as other websites such as Massively have done a far better job.

Overall, I'm pretty damned happy with the game.

OK, next topic.

Just kidding!

If you've read my other stuff, you'll know that quests are a bit of a gripe of mine. I always get a bit disheartened when venturing into a new game only to be confronted by some farmer who has a real issue with boars eating his fucking turnips etc.

But so far, FunCom has done a pretty good job with the interaction with quest givers. Instead of the standard accept/decline option, you have the ability to actually converse with your target much like the response options in the Knights of The Old Republic games. My particular preference at the moment is using the sarcastic options and being generally rude to the NPCs! I know they don't have feelings etc but it's nice to break from the standard format and be given a free reign.

The starter quests, up until you reach Tortage (the first multiplayer town zone), are nicely simple and introduce you to most of the common UI features. The first NPC who introduces himself to you upon your arrival on the beach also starts you down your personal storyline, a feature similar to LoTRO epic quest chapters. The main difference between these two being that, in AoC, you carry out the personal story in singleplayer mode at night time and are unable to receive help from your friends.

But by far the happiest point on this subject so far is that there have been decidedly few 'kill ten rats' quests.

/happy dance!

The combat system is fairly straightforward and doesn't take long to get to grips with. My friends seem quite happy with the melee side of things but I can only comment from a caster perspective. Each class has their mainstay spells and attacks which will all seem and look fairly similar up to about lvl 17.

Don't get me wrong here, they do look good. But I'm kinda waiting to see how spellweaving turns out, so stay tuned for more on that as I progress. You can't really expect a game to throw out their best stuff in the first five minutes of a game or you wouldn't be quite so impressed later on...or willing to journey there to find out what's waiting.

My only real grievance here so far is the UI. As well laid out as it is, there are a few tweaks or options which could have made things better imho.

Firstly, your bottom hotkey bar is quite blocky and takes up quite a bit of space. It has a similar sort of feel to the GuildWars design but you aren't limited to sticking with a set choice of spells or attacks.

Because you use the first 3 boxes for your melee attacks, you are effectively only left with 7 spaces to assign to spells/attacks. Now, even though you have other spaces you can assign to your other attacks, I always prefer to have everything close together so that I don't have to move my cursor around too much when I'm in a fight. You can see what I mean from my WoW UI below.



Regarding the melee attack buttons, although it is possible to move them, they are bound to the 1,2,3 keys which makes it really easy to use them if you are an old WASD user like myself. Hence you don't really want to bother moving them.

Second, there are 2 other rows that you can use but they aren't positioned in the most ideal place. Couple this with the fact that a misclick can make them re-align themselves horizontally (as default they are aligned vertically down the right-hand edge of the screen) and half your spells are now somewhere off screen!

But then you take a look at the distinctly non-cartoony graphics, the lush detail in the environment, the vast openness of the zones and you don't mind quite so much.

The one bit of praise I still have for Blizzard is in one of the few things I hope that FC will decide to follow and allow users to design mods for the UI. If we are eventually able to alter the UI to our own preferences then this will be a serious contender in my eyes.

Anyway, the servers are coming back shortly so I'll sign off for now. But keep checking back for updates.

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