Zero Punctuation: Age of Conan

[Muphin_Mann]

Since when is slavery a sin? I think at some point int he old testimate it states that you can sell one of your daughters into slavery. I think it had to be the eldest or something.

Urination isnt an interesting addition unless your character can do it.

Homosexuality? Thats par for the course.

 

[Bob_F_It]

You know, there were other classes, which had more things put into them.The ranged attacks were pretty innovative, the fighting system was a little more interactive than most MMORPGers, but it is true that every MMORPG is trying to be World of Warcraft.

From what I have read, the interactive part of melee involved attacking on the right, left, or down the middle, and the opponant could do the same defending. More emphasis on "little"...

 

[j_meister]

Hey Jerkwad!

Review Eve! I know it's one of the Escapist's sponsors, but it's criminal that you compare all mmorpgs to the poor piss-stain of a game that is World of Warcraft.
I'd be fist-shakingly mad if you gave it a bad review, but are you going to let that stop you?
Most likely not! Be a man! Review the damned game!

Yours, in respectful admiration,
J.S.

 

[devilishlydo]

Hey Jerkwad!

Review Eve! I know it's one of the Escapist's sponsors, but it's criminal that you compare all mmorpgs to the poor piss-stain of a game that is World of Warcraft.
I'd be fist-shakingly mad if you gave it a bad review, but are you going to let that stop you?
Most likely not! Be a man! Review the damned game!

Yours, in respectful admiration,
J.S.

Yeah, that'd be great. Spend a few DAYS playing a game with a learning curve made of lost souls and a gap between "noob" and "leet" that is wider than the gap between "Earth" and "The Fucking Sun". I'm sure it would be a very well-informed review.

However, I must say that Yahtzee figured out what AoC was all about a lot faster than I did ... much to my chagrin. I really wanted to like it, too ... but it took me 70some levels to realize that I didn't.

 

[danaird]

I don't wet myself laughing over these much anymore. It seems as the episodes have passed the sound of Yahtzee's voice has become more and more obnoxious... and the intro music is so ridiculously out of context for this type of video that it makes me want to climb the nearest clock tower with an RPD.

 

[The9mm]

I don't wet myself laughing over these much anymore. It seems as the episodes have passed the sound of Yahtzee's voice has become more and more obnoxious... and the intro music is so ridiculously out of context for this type of video that it makes me want to climb the nearest clock tower with an RPD.

whats an rpd?

 

[Giftmacher]

You know, there were other classes, which had more things put into them.The ranged attacks were pretty innovative, the fighting system was a little more interactive than most MMORPGers, but it is true that every MMORPG is trying to be World of Warcraft.

From what I have read, the interactive part of melee involved attacking on the right, left, or down the middle, and the opponant could do the same defending. More emphasis on "little"...

It is more complex than hit right/centre/left, special attacks require sequential key presses to fire off. Plus as you level you have to attack in more than three directions to fire combos. As I said above it's still button mashing but it is more involving than fire and forget spells/moves.

Gift.

 

[GothmogII]

I have to be honest here. I do NOT agree with this review. I'm usually pretty in sync with the opinions given by Yahtzee, typically agree with a lot. But one point here annoys me.

You complain about the lack of "RPG" in MMORPG, but when a MMORPG actually attempts to make the world back into an "RPG", you complain about it. The dialog is part of the immersion. Its part of what "Role Playing" is all about. You play the role, you interact as that role, you don't click accept to agree with some random NPC's request to go hump an X number of monsters. WOW is not an MMORPG. It's an MMO, people seem to have forgotten what the "RPG" part actually is, because WOW lacks it in barrel full's.

In other points, I do agree that an MMORPG should be a team based thing. Purhaps a story based around a war, where you are training to be part of the force that answers this problem. Instead of one hero, why not a force of them. The story is probably wrong and I agree with this very much.

As far as AOC goes, you can't compare it to WOW at this point. WOW has had more then a fair amount of time to fix its issues with patchs. AOC just got started. Give it some time to fix up, and it'll be on the same track. WOW was once a buggy piece of garbage to, or perhaps people have forgotten what falling into mountains and off the world was like.

Possiably should have waited a little longer to review this game and gone with something else.

In relation to the RP in MMO's...I was always under the impression that this came from your interactions with the other players themselves. i.e. Actually doing the work yourself? Like taking the time to actually looking up what backstory of the setting can be found and applying it in such a way that isn't going to look massively implausable such as being a mighty gnomish conquerer and leader of the known world, with no IC way of actually backing this up. Unless you're deliberately RP'ing a mental patient. The game world is just the setting, how much interaction and immersion you want in the game is entirely up to -you-. Although, maybe a little more support for the RP servers in WoW and other mmmos wouldn't be a bad thing. As it stands, many consist of little more than a few guilds worth of genuine RP'ers with a lot of others who come for the more 'mature' environment without any interest in RP themselves, this is mostly prevalent on the RP/PvP style servers it seems.

Having played AoC for a bit, I got the distinct impression from all the dialogue trees and just the general effort that went into the city of Tortage and surroundings, that, if they had wanted to, they could have made a damn good -single player- RPG, rather than the resulting MMO.

So far I have counted the following "sins" in Age of Conan.

- Foul language.
- Gore. Bloodspatter is everywhere.
- More gore. Fataliaties are meticulously modeled variations on how to end someone's life hard, brutally, and - in some cases - extremely messilly.
- Unrination. Yes, NPC's can be seen taking a piss.
- Prostitution, and plenty of it.
- Slavery.
- Alcohol.
- Drug use/drug addiction.
- Human sacrifice.
- Homosexuality, male and female.

Nice!!! Are there any fully naked ladies (and no, I do not consider them naked unless you can see any body part you want with no clothing infront of their sexual areas, they're not nude if they're in a bikini. )

Full frontal, except the genital areas on both males and females which are covered with a kind of loincloth thing. If they had 1000% nudity, I'm sure the game would have gotten an AO rather than the 18+ it get's most places.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Full frontal, except the genital areas on both males and females which are covered with a kind of loincloth thing.

So, topless then. The sort of thing you see in most national newspapers.

 

[GothmogII]

Full frontal, except the genital areas on both males and females which are covered with a kind of loincloth thing.

So, topless then. The sort of thing you see in most national newspapers.

Pretty much, yup.

 

[BlueInkAlchemist]

@Gothmogll:

Fully agreed on RP in MMOs. The onus is on the players. It's been a long time since I spent any time in WoW as part of an organization that didn't involve forums, story posting and character development that required spending time outside of the game engine. And having only played the beta of AoC I didn't get to see the topless ladies. I guess they were saving that for production or something.

@Everyone who doesn't like the opening:

The previous reviews, for me, now have this nostalgic amateurish feel to them, like Yahtzee hadn't quite landed in the arena of Internet fame and credible notoriety. Now his reviews are bookended with professional dressings that put him in a ring with Adam Sessler and that yapping wench Morgan Webb, whose arse our hero would most decidedly kick, especially in WoW. Horde all the way.

 

[aikoyamamato]

first off: dont make your rethorical questions look like real ones
you are putting words in my mouth
i dont say you would have to play every class but develop at least a notion of the needs and strengths and weaknesses of other classes

Don't get your panties in a twist, I didn't mean it literally. My point was just that you're asking a little much in a casual review.

also i think you should have played a level 70 character in wow just to get feel of the endgame
you should have participated in a raid
and you should have done arena
otherwise you dont have a clue about wow

I disagree. Endgame (arena included) is another part of the game entirely and, again, takes a considerable amount of time to get to. Reviewing the earlier stages of an MMORPG serves to provide a person with information on how they'll be spending that time, which is important information to know. If you don't like how grinding to 70 works, you're not going to spend all that time grinding a character to 70 just for endgame. I agree that before reviewing World of Warcraft one should do raiding first, since it's a core part of gameplay and can be done early on, but this isn't a World of Warcraft review. It's an Age of Conan review. I haven't played much of the game myself, but as far as I understand it there's not really an equivalent of raiding in it.

and if you dont have the time to play all levels in aoc, go ahead and borrow a friends character, that should give you an impression
that is all

Yes, because we all have friends with high level AoC characters.

 

[commonperson]

Don't necisarily agree with your opinion but kudos and you are certainly entitled to it. In your review you mentioned not really having anything to do with the mythos before hand and showed reading comics etc. you may want to try reading the short stories. They are actually quite good and an interesting example of pulp fiction from that period. That being said I will adimitedly state I play the game and enjoy it but I completly see where you are coming from on this one. Until they get the PvP system in place people are going to keep acting like absolute jerks and ganking people. Any how, good work and even though I didn't agree with all the points good job as usual.

 

[Reaces]

I whole-heartedly agree with the issues you pointed out, but there are some things I'd like to add.
Having played the game myself up untill currently level 60 (going at a snails pace of a few hours per week) I can tell you that the reason you most likely got ganked so often is because necromancers are, at the moment, a tad broken at the lower levels. The minions make it insanely easy to level compared to the rogue and soldier classes that spend their time dying while trying to get past the quests, while on the other hand the necromancer himself is an easy target for other players... not to mention a naked one.

The reason I'm playing aoc right now, is not because of what it currently IS, but what it could be if the same effort is put into it as blizzard put into wow (allthough this is very doubtfull). I for one would love to play seige battels over destroyable cities, and have large-scale pvp in a less cartoony outfit.

Either way, my point would be that reviewing a game under development is usually not a complete review, reviewing an mmorpg is really hard and usually a lot more negative seeing as how they aim for higher level content. And aoc seems to be both, a very unfinished mmorpg, which is at the same time the reason why negative reviews should be kept in the context of the time when they were written aswell as being the reason why this game might turn out to be nothing more than a major waste of time for all parties involed.

 

[Sid Meier]

for Yahtzee to review EVE objectively he would have to play for roughly 6 months and play roughly 2-4 different accounts to fully immerse himself in the primary "paths" you could take.

Alot can be done in EVE, its a very nifty sandbox but to get to the "sweet spot" of the game AND be able to do stuff the right way would take quite some time alot of work, and patience.

I do not think EVE is a good game for Yahtzee to play, he might like it for the sake of griefing newbs, but unless my impression of him is fundamentally wrong based on his reviews I would say he is a much more action oriented/first person shooter kind of gamer, EVE is almost as much a business simulation in an anarchist society as it is a game.

I do not think Yahtzee would like EVE, it would be interesting if he did review it but he shouldn't waste his time on it, its a game you should only play if you know you will be playing it long enough to make a name for yourself. I play it, I like it, and I'm almsot able to fly a carrier and operate in Nullsec but this isn't a game for the faint of heart or the impatient.

 

[Luthorcrow]

On a side note, anyone that hasn't seen it should rent a film about Robert E. Howard called "The Whole Wide World." Great film for anyone that views Howard as just another pulp writer might find a new found respect for him or at least see the man in a different light.

 

[fablewho]

Right, well, since I never say anything on this site I figured I may as well throw in some cake. Well, not cake, but something funny. Is it funny? Nevermind, I'll just say it anyway.

If anyone remembers that old game "The Bards Tale" then they might know of the remake of it that came out back when the X Box and PS2 were still revered as gods or some such. In that game there were these kids who looks almost identical to each other, and all of them said they were "The Chosen One". This review of Conan reminded me of it.

I guess some of them were chosen in a way... Each of the dead ones got a song whenever you passed by their bodies. Others were chosen to be thrown in jail for their own good. I suppose you have to play the game to understand, but youtube or some site should have a few songs up.

 

[ElToRo15]

Nice review as always yathzee. I never thought paying for a game every month was a good idea so i just played one of those free Korean MMORPG's, Silk Road online to be specific. Argh! When are you gonna review rock band?

 

[Obeliskos]

Haha, "Thinderella".

I was kind of looking forward to you review Age of Conan. And does any else laugh every time he says "m-morpgrs"? (the pronunciation of MMORPGs out loud typed doesn't look too good..)

 

[EmperorDude]

I was kinda worried for while if I would continue watching ZP (the Lego Indianna review just wasn't funny for me and last weeks was only chuckle worthy) but I liked this one much more.