Kelly Brook
It is interesting, somewhat satisfying, but at the same time crushingly inevitable to see the Conan backlash already beginning to creep out into forums. Recall that this is the game that has been heralded as a new virtual-world order in MMOs, typically by people quitting some other MMO and trying to both encourage back-patting sympathy and "you losers can stay here, I'll be in AoC" one-upmanship.
Now that a much broader population has had the chance to get a limited taste of the game the one-upmanship angle becomes less effective, so of course those people move on to the "meh, been there done that" stage where it becomes fashionable to be "over" the game, even before it has been released.
Oddly enough a lot of the reports from beta players (it's hard to seriously refer to them as "testers", as I've suggested previously) have been fairly positive. Some refer to the "revolutionary" combat mechanics as gimmicky, some don't see any real difference compared with existing MMO mechanics, some find it awkward, some welcome the change. I've heard it described as being somewhat like The Witcher's combat system, in being very simple but at least different to 1-2-3, or in some cases 1-1-1 button-mashing.
The graphics have had similarly mixed reviews. The problem here is that we've been seeing screenshots for years now, and sadly the quality has declined steadily over the course of development. Probably because the early media was pie-in-the-sky McQuaid-style dreaming which had to be "refined" to cope with the harsh realities of out-of-date PCs. Not to mention squeezing it onto an already out-of-date console. Still, some people have remained positive, some less so. While it can look impressive, the down side seems to be relatively small explorable regions. It might be fun to bash Vanguard but if there's one thing it got right it was scale. Scale, and the ability to explore that large landscape with relative freedom. No invisible barriers (except the ocean), no impenetrable wall of mountains in every direction. In contrast Conan looks to be firmly in the GW/LotRO school of enclosed, claustrophobic environments which is a shame.
At this point we come to one report from beta that has me particularly distressed. Apparently the time of day can adjust dynamically to suit the quests you're currently pursuing. What. The. Fuck. Say goodbye to any sense of inhabiting a unified, coherent world. It's obviously a ploy to cater to the ever-popular "casual" demographic. "Waaah, I've logged in but this quest has to be done at night and it's currently morning". I'm no hardcore MMO player as I'm sure I've established, but butchering the game world in the name of accessibility is sad and misguided. I personally considered Vanguard's day/night cycle to be entirely too short (something like 45 minutes I seem to remember, I can't be bothered to look it up), and that game had plenty of quests that required you to kill creatures that only appeared in certain time windows. Oblivion's was similarly ridiculous, but at least you could get time mods so that you didn't miss whole days while you were simply talking to NPCs.
And yes, I know my beloved The Witcher cheated the issue by letting you meditate for up to 24 hours at a time, thereby advancing the clock to whatever time you needed, but I see a difference between single-player and MMO games in that respect. I think everyone who's playing within the same game world should at least see the same time of day.
Personally I think a day/night cycle should be substantial. I understand that people probably play games at a similar real-world time each session (after school/work or whatever) and that it would be undesirable to find yourself playing in-game in the middle of the night all the time. I would suggest that the solution is in two parts.
Firstly, have a day/night cycle that's designed so that your real-world play session will occur at a different in-game time each day. Prime numbers are good for this sort of thing. I suppose ideally the cycle shouldn't be so long that you don't see any real change in virtual time during the course of, say, a 2 hour play session though, so I'd be maybe thinking of a 7 hour cycle as a sensible minimum, although I'd be thinking more along the lines of 13, or possibly 17 (as 13 is too close to half a real day).
The second part of the solution is to do with content, and designing quests so that while they might require you to complete them during a given time window, the completion of that quest isn't going to hold up your progress in the bigger picture. On the other hand you shouldn't feel like you've "left the quest behind". Not that I know how exactly you'd achieve that, but then it's not my job.
The point is, letting the player time-travel for their own convenience compromises the game world as a whole, although I'll have to see it in action for myself before I can properly judge the impact it has on the game. I suspect it's going to introduce more of a Guild Wars dynamic, where it feels more like a bunch of single-player instances joined together by glorified chat hubs.
Ultimately I don't really know why I'm reporting these opinions, since none of them are mine and therefore none of them are correct. I will be sure to deliver my definitive verdict on the game in a couple of weeks when it's properly released, including the all-important review of the limited edition packaging. Will it be a triumph of Tabula Rasa Collector's Edition proportions, or a sad joke like the Crysis limited edition box? Only time will tell.
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