Falling Damage
What do you get when you combine free-for-all PvP, collision detection so players can’t walk through one another, and mounted combat? Perhaps something like this, from Age of Conan:
Ouch.
What do you get when you combine free-for-all PvP, collision detection so players can’t walk through one another, and mounted combat? Perhaps something like this, from Age of Conan:
Ouch.
Originally I had a long post here covering my first impressions of Age of Conan, the new MMORPG that launched last week, but the I realized that I’d never finish and post it. Instead, I’m just going to comment on one aspect of the game, and if I never get around to posting the rest, oh well.
First I should insert a disclaimer: I am not a real game reviewer, I did not play in the AoC beta, I don’t have a level 80 character already, and I generally don’t like PvP. I’m mostly an explorer and socializer who tends to fill his entire character roster with alts before even one of them reaches maximum level. So if you’re looking for fairness, PvP stuff, or anything about high-end play, please look elsewhere.
The single aspect of Age of Conan I have chosen to comment on today is its class choices. There are twelve available classes, divided into three each in the archetypes of soldier, priest, rogue, and mage. The archetypes are not just a convenient descriptive tool; each archetype shares a feat tree (feats are similar to talents in World of Warcraft) as well as having a different path through the story-related “destiny” quests. (Warriors break a lot of heads, rogues sneak and spy and assassinate, and so forth.)
With so many classes, there is plenty of room for both traditional and non-traditional interpretations of the standard MMORPG roles. One of my favorites, for example, is the Herald of Xotli, one of the “mage” classes. Xotli — an alien god borrowed in concept from the Cthulhu Mythos, apparently — doesn’t go for the finger-waggling type of mage at all. His servants prefer to wade into close combat swinging a big two-handed sword, bringing with them a torrent of magical flame. Sure, they can bring down a pillar of hellfire to burn everything around them, but they do it along with a powerful melee combo instead of a spell. For short periods, they can even transform into the avatar of one of Xotli’s lesser servants to become more resilient and powerful. And yes, since Heralds of Xotli are mages, they melee in cloth armor. If you play one, you die quickly — but you also cut through swaths of enemies like butter while doing so. Fun? You bet!
Another example of an interesting hybrid class is the Bear Shaman, one of the priest classes. Priests who melee aren’t exactly new to the genre, but the Bear Shaman is the first one I can remember that actually heals by melee. A lot of his healing and buffing power comes from reactive abilities that trigger and spread while he’s fighting. The shaman has buff A on himself, which gives a chance to place debuff B on the enemy when he hits it, which causes anyone else attacking it to gain buff C, which gives extra healing to spell D. That sort of thing. Unlike the other game we all probably play, being a healing or casting hybrid in Age of Conan doesn’t mean choosing between healing and something else — sure, you can customize yourself to boost one or the other aspect of your class, but in the end you can and should do everything if you want to be playing at your best.
Let’s say you’re looking for a stealth class. In Age of Conan, every class can sneak, if they spend points in the Hide skill, and rather than basing stealth solely on your class it also factors in lighting and equipped armor. Of course, the three classes under the “rogue” archetype are the most dedicated to sneakiness, and you get to choose from the combat-focused Barbarian, the Assassin, who had best kill his enemy from stealth or die trying, and the Ranger, who actually gets to sneak attack with his bow. I’m not sure why more games don’t have a bow-using class that can actually play the stealthy sniper, so I have to give Funcom some credit for including it here.
Class customization uses a feat tree very similar to the talents in World of Warcraft, except that each class only has two trees and they are deeper than the ones in WoW. A third tree is shared between the classes in each archetype, which I think works well because it allows the main trees to be completely devoted to class-specific abilities, while “generic” talents — mana and health regeneration, defense boosts, and the like — can be factored out.
One of my big concerns with Age of Conan, however, is how well its original class designs and abilities will hold up over time, give that it has a heavy emphasis on PvP. Anyone who has followed World of Warcraft for a while knows exactly how many nerfs and buffs are the direct result of PvP imbalances, and how often those nerfs and buffs screw up something in PvE. Can Funcom avoid the same problems Blizzard has had with class balance over the years? I can only hope…
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