World of World of Warcraft
The Onion bring us the genius of “World of World of Warcraft.” Too funny.
While we are talking video games this is a pretty bad time of year. Age of Conan is one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history. Forget the performance, crashes, downtime, exploits; those things happen with every launch. It’s the interface and game play that makes it so bad.
It’s not an open world - you are pathed almost as badly as Guild Wars.
You never see anyone else because of the absurd use of instancing. Almost everything is instanced, except for the raids and boss fights, which of course should be instanced to prevent camping and gold farming. So they got that completely wrong.
The interface is awful and looks exactly like SWG which was launched the same year AoC began development. I guess they never paid attention to any other games in the past 5+ years.
The AI is awful. NPCs are incredibly stupid so fights are boring as hell. Yes, the combat is unique for MMOs and much more like a console game, but that gets old very quickly. We’ve seen the mad killing shots, called Fatalities, too. Yes, it’s fun to tear someon’es head off or impale them on a spear but it is not remotely enough to keep your attention.
Quests? Ugh. Poorly thought out and insanely unbalanced. You routinely get level 50 equipment for level 10 quest rewards? Umm, ok. Who thought that was a good idea?
Also, you get very little bag space. Which is fine; you should never consider that a development priority when assessing trade-offs in game play vs performance, right? No one ever complains about lack of bag space. Never.
(Note: I just threw up a little in my mouth.)
Every MMORPG is a grind - kill X monsters, collect Y items, escort Waldo to safety - they are all the same. The trick is not making you feel like it is a grind. Believe me, you feel it is a grind in AoC early and often.
In summary, Age of Conan sucks.
OK, we are done kicking that dead barbarian. So what do you play for the rest of the summer? There hasn’t been a recent release to give undivided attention so we would suggest bits and pieces of several recent winners with great replayability:
Call of Duty 4 and Team Fortress 2 are simply fantastic for short instances of PvP. Have only 20 minutes to spare for gaming? You will never find a better use of your time. Ever. It is really that good.
GTA IV. *sigh* It’s tough to say why I don’t like this game but I just can’t get into it. I still feel San Andreas is the best game I’ve ever played, so I really didn’t expect any game play changes - the previous version was absolutely perfect in every possible way. I just wanted new content with the same game mechanics. Well, that’s not what we got.
The game itself is just dark and gray. Even with the brightness cranked, I find it hard to look at. I don’t have that problem with anything else. They tweaked the movement system involved in both running and driving (why, I have no idea) and now it just feels clunky.
Again, why change game mechanics that you spent years perfecting just for the sake of change? It makes no sense at all. Though, Rockstar is hardly the gaming company to do this. The last two versions of Madden have completely gutted the older system that worked flawlessly as well for no apparent reason to the point where I won’t be spending $60/year on an updated roster with progressively worse game play. Stupid. But I digress. While I gave up on Madden, I’m not giving up GTA IV. Not just yet.
On the MMO front, I’d recommend playing WoW and LOTRO at least until we get to see what the expansions bring that are both due before the end of 2008. That’s Wrath of the Lich King and Mines of Moria, respectively, for the uninitiated. Warhammer Online sounds more and more like vaporware every day, so don’t get your hopes up for that anytime soon.
Hopefully, some combination of those games can bridge the gap until the x-mas titles start coming out that include heavyweight sequels such as Gears of War 2, Mercenaries 2 and Fallout 3 as well as the insanely sick looking The Force Unleashed.