Jennifer Lamiraqui
Getting straight to the point, overall I'm slightly disappointed to report that it's not the enormous abomination that I was expecting. In fact it has a certain fun factor, but at the same time it really doesn't bring anything new to the genre.
One of the most important aspects of any MMO is obviously character design options. AoC features a combination of Guild Wars-style preset face textures and hair colours with various pointless sliders to control facial distortions and body proportions. The strange thing is, it's very difficult to achieve any sort of distintive style, and all characters essentially end up looking the same within a given racial group. On the plus side, at least the characters you can create look quite nice. Naturally I'm referring to female characters with nice, big boobs.
Talking of boobs, so far the promise of "adult" content has failed to materialise. There are nipples, which are sure to shock and outrage all the idiots that will no doubt read about AoC and start calling for it to be banned. Unfortunately, the most I've seen of nipples so far is when the game engine fails to construct an NPC model quickly enough when it transitions to a cutscene, and the character model is topless for a fraction of a second. In terms of gratuitous violence, there really isn't anything outrageous or even new. It seems to rely on the simple fact that the character models are more naturalistic than cartoony alternatives like WoW or LotRO for any sense of maturity or grittiness. Dead bodies hanging from trees are all very well, but they get old quite quickly. The combat is no more bloody or gratuitous than any other RPG.
Of course combat features the infamous directional attacks and shields. Well, melee combat does, it makes no difference to casters which are exactly the same as in every other MMO ever made. It's a shame they couldn't come up with something analogous for the casting classes. Not that physical combat is exactly revolutionary itself, but it is admittedly slightly more involving than other games. It's a clever way around the problem of latency, which is pretty much the reason why all MMOs feature combat designed to not require extreme time-sensitivity like "twitch" shooters. When you've got hundreds, maybe thousands of simultaneous players and pings measured in tenths of seconds rather than milliseconds you can't have systems that require rapid reactions and inputs. Guild Wars gets around the problem and allows real-time interrupts because there are only a small number of players in any given instance. "Proper" MMOs have to make do with the likes of chains and combos, and AoC is no exception.
Speaking of instances, the AoC "world" is a bit odd. It's a combination of shared instances and player-specific instances, and shared world areas are split into on-demand instances to keep population levels manageable. A bit like the outposts in Guild Wars, but actual world zones rather than just hubs. What doesn't work for me is the design of the zones and how they relate to each other. Maybe I've been spoiled by Vanguard's genuinely open world but having to talk to NPCs to get transported to neighbouring zones is horrible and really breaks the continuity of the world. There are some traditional gates and cave entrances etc, but it doesn't feel at all coherent and just heightens the feeling of disconnected instances.
Being able to climb, in addition to walking, running and swimming, is a nice touch, although the implementation is a bit lame and the use of an attribute to determine your climbing skill, simply by giving ladders a specific level, is a bit poor. Also, the UI keeps telling you "you can climb here!" even when the ladder is too advanced for you which is irritating.
The UI is shit. It's as if you took Vanguard's shitty UI and then "optimised" it for consoles. So lots of big chunky icons that don't trigger if your mouse moves even a single pixel between button-down and button-up. Really amateurish.
So far leveling appears to be quite speedy. After 6 months of Vanguard I had two level 30 characters, and a few in the teens. After just three of four sessions of AoC my big-breasted "Priest of Mitra" is already 28 (and a half). Of course the level cap is higher in AoC (80, compared with Vanguard's 50) so it probably evens out later on, but it does feel like it's designed to offer an exaggerated sense of achievement. Even in the mid-twenties I was gaining whole levels just by turning in a handful of quests.
Unlike Vanguard, AoC offers an "alternate advancement" system where you can spend points on "feats", which are arranged into trees and offer extra attributes and abilities. Fair enough, I don't have a problem with that.
Overall the game is quite pretty, but not that pretty. It suffers from the same bowl-shaped zones as every other RPG except Vanguard, with mountains surrounding almost all zones (the exceptions being the ones with coastline). A lot of the finer character details are lost because you tend to spend most of the time zoomed out. Spell effects are nothing special.
The game eventually promises the likes of mounts and player cities, but I'm a long way from any of that so I can't comment on it either way. Even though harvesting is supposed to become available at level 20, I think you don't actually get access to training until much later. I have no idea how crafting works.
In conclusion, so far I'm not finding the game to be the pile of steaming shit that I was expecting. It feels almost like a "proper" MMO version of Guild Wars, which is both good and bad. It'll be interesting to see how GW2 compares when that finally appears.
The launch seemed to go quite smoothly. Already the lower-level areas seem to be thinning out while at the same time it's not rare to see some characters running around at level 40+. Obviously there's been a rush of power-players who are sprinting to the level cap, no doubt so they can start complaining about the lack of end-game content, just like in every other MMO. The idiots.
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