State of Play II kicks off today. Most of us will be in transit today, but we'll soon be covering events in this space -- stay tuned. Is the success of City of Heroes due to a nearly flawless launch? Maybe, but you could just as easily argue that the game's success is due to genre, to satisfying a particular market niche (simplified combat-centric MMOG), or due to the luck of good timing (launching in an open window when there was little else available to MMOG players looking for the next new thing). Would CoH have failed or underperformed if it had been horribly buggy or unstable? On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.
State of Play II kicks off today. Most of us will be in transit today, but we'll soon be covering events in this space -- stay tuned. Is the success of City of Heroes due to a nearly flawless launch? Maybe, but you could just as easily argue that the game's success is due to genre, to satisfying a particular market niche (simplified combat-centric MMOG), or due to the luck of good timing (launching in an open window when there was little else available to MMOG players looking for the next new thing). Would CoH have failed or underperformed if it had been horribly buggy or unstable? On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.
State of Play II kicks off today. Most of us will be in transit today, but we'll soon be covering events in this space -- stay tuned. Is the success of City of Heroes due to a nearly flawless launch? Maybe, but you could just as easily argue that the game's success is due to genre, to satisfying a particular market niche (simplified combat-centric MMOG), or due to the luck of good timing (launching in an open window when there was little else available to MMOG players looking for the next new thing). Would CoH have failed or underperformed if it had been horribly buggy or unstable? On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.
I've seen several different version of this flying around, Wrath of the Lich King "leaked" information from "data mining" an alpha client. But if you look at them a bit closer you will find old acquaintances like Titan's Grip, a warrior ability that allows two-handed weapons to be dual-wielded. That was a notorious part of a previous hoax "leak". So in my opinion all of this information flying around is fake, just created to make fun of the gullible. Don't believe anything you hear until there is at least an open beta. Hoaxers love to fake alpha information just because nobody has access to it, so it can't be verified. The only reliable information we have right now is that the alpha started on May 1st.
The game hasn't even started yet in Europe, and barely got out of the gate in the US, and already people report being bored. I'm not far enough to verify it myself, but apparently the content gets even weaker after level 30. Which is pretty much the state Lord of the Rings Online was in at release, so it wouldn't be all that surprising. As I said, I'm not there yet, but already I feel an urge to rather level up another class to 20 in Tortage with its fun destiny quest lines and voice overs, instead of doing random quests, randomly distributed all over Hyboria. Tortage has a lot of character, the wider world of Hyboria is lacking the world feeling for me.
There being no sense of place is not only a matter of transport, but also of quest organization. Whatever city you are in, the quests you get can lead you to adventuring zones which are nominally attached to other regions. I left Tortage at level 19 and went to Stygia, but ended up leveling to 22 mostly in Aquilonia. Pretty quickly you start thinking of zones not in terms as being north, west, south, or east, but in terms of being X jumps away from where you are. Now every region has their own zone for leveling up from 20 to 30. The advantage of being able to jump so quickly to any zone is that you end up with tons of quests for every level, more than you would need to level up. Don't like a quest? Just skip it, there are so many others around. The disadvantage is that you easily outlevel a zone before you have seen everything, and that by jumping around between zones you also jump around between the various strings of lore. You get less involved in a zone and its lore.
So my Herald of Xotl left Tortage and started questing all around Hyboria. But somehow "all around" is not really the good description. All the zones are instanced, and are accessed by talking to some NPC who teleports you there. It is simply not possible to walk into the next zone, you walk to the zone border where somebody teleports you into the next zone. Only that some teleports are all across the map, connecting the cities. You can reach a zone on the far end of the map as fast as the zone shown next to where you are on the world map. This has a horrible demotivating effect on me: I'm an explorer, and I'm missing a world to explore.
Cheetah is a shader-oriented proprietary render engine re-written from scratch by Funcom featuring a phong per pixel lighting system.
In development since 2003, Age of Conan Gold game: Hyborian Adventures is an upcoming online action role-playing game based on the Conan the Cimmerian stories written by Robert E.
Age of Conan Gold game (AoC) is a barbaric fantasy-themed MMORPG developed by Funcom. The age of conan brings Age of Conan Gold game players to experience live violent from the Hyborian Age, a fantasy setting created by Robert E.