It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh)

After a while I moved on to other games, but found myself reactivating my account from time to time to give it a try. For a while I played my City of Villains character almost exclusively until it once again just tired and I moved on.

Well I’m back at it. They have added a lot of content and depth to the game that really is interesting. Firstly its not like your more modern / typical MMO in that there aren’t characters standing around with question marks over their head letting you know there is something to do. Lets be honest here, World of Warcraft is a good game but its seriously “dumbed down” in that it almost holds your hand while it plays itself.

City of Heroes hearkens back to the days of EverQuest 1 whereby you didn’t know if someone had a quest or something for you unless you talked to them. Accomplishments were hidden from you, and thereby meant more to you when you actually accomplished it.

Death in CoH means something too compared to modern day MMO’s. CoH has debt! Now I played Ultima Online and EverQuest 1 for years, so extremely painful death was the norm for me. In UO each time some naked PK ran up and killed you, you lost EVERYTHING! It sucked. In EQ1 though they changed that a lot in that you just had to make a corpse run and lost exp. But you didn’t lose your stuff.. When CoH came out and they made it so you just got a little bit of debt, I was stunned. They made death meaningless.

HA! Look at what modern games do. In the most recent MMO, Age of Conan, death means absolutely nothing. You just get shot back to a respawn point.

But I get side tracked — the CoH is a good game and I’m finding I really enjoy the new Rikti invasion stuff and I hope they will let us “counter invade” at some point. It’d be really cool to go to the Rikit homeworld or whatever and attack them back!! (maybe you can do this already and I just havent gotten to that content.. I dunno)

Something else they have added to the game is a pretty thorough marketplace and crafting system. I like that — thats pretty darn cool. Well, one of the tricks of old is to watch your prices on that market. I mean I dont understand why players, in game after game, will put stuff on the market below what they could sell them to the merchant for!!

I spent about 4 hours last night just running goods from the market to the local merchant to sell. People would put stuff on the market for 10INF, that they could sell to the merchants for 4500+INF. Seriously.

In 4 hours I made 2 million INF which just goes to show you, super heroes is st00pid. Or lazy. I prefer to think of them as stupid.

My main character is a ranger — and as with all games that have a ranger class, he’s broken.  Primarily when it comes to damage output. 

I understand that a range, being a subset of the rogue class, can’t tank.  I’m there.  In EQ1 rangers were made of paper.. I’m cool with that.. But the ranger should be able to put out some damage, and since they can’t tank, they should be able to put out damage at range.  If they can’t for any reason do ranged damage, what’s the point of a ranger?   

In AoC the ranger can melee, use a bow, or use a crossbow.   Melee with an AoC ranger is a joke — don’t waste your time.  Crossbow has some nice damage, but its slow damage — and the majority of the skills are for bow not crossbow.  You’re really best using a bow.

Okay fine. I’ll use a bow — which is what I wanted in the first place.  The issue is with the various attack abilities with a bow, most of them are broken.

Salvo
The number one issue, and the number one skill used by a bow ranger is “Salvo”.  Salvo pisses me off to no end.

Salvo is a 3 key combo  – Meaning you poke the “Salvo” hot key, then you have to do two directional attacks in order to get the full combo (and thus the full damage) to fire off.  The problem is that salvo, as the name implies, fires more shots than you press keys for.

The first salvo hot key fires one shot usually straight initiating the combo.  The second key fires one shot either left or lower left, to try to get them to refocus their shields. And the third key fires 3 shots straight — but it does 3 individual attacks, its not like you knock up 3 arrows and fire them all at once.

It’s this third key that is the problem in that if anything interrupts your third key and those 3 attacks, the mob gets all the health back that he lost due to the combo.   This could be over a thousand points of health he just suddenly gets back.. *pop*  Insta-heal.

Further more, if you kill him on the first shot of the salvo, he still does damage to you until the entire combo finishes.  It takes about 8 seconds for the entire combo to resolve itself and I have died many times during that 8 seconds to a mob that was DEAD but still swinging.. 

And of course if they kill you this way, they are suddenly full health and back standing there!!

If the mob dodges or you “miss” with the first shot of the salvo, ALL shots of the salvo miss. Time well spent.

Salvo needs to be fixed.. But so far they wont even acknowledge that it’s a bug.

Some shots don’t register at all
Sometimes you will go through the combo keys and nothing happens on the final key.  No “Miss” text, no “Mob is too far away” text, nothing.. just.. nothing.  You’re left standing there wondering why the hell the mob didn’t just take damage.  Time well spent.  

No Range
The ranger also has ZERO RANGE!  It kills me how short ranged the bow is.. A bow in AoC has about a 50 foot range.  (Hard to say how many “feet” it actually is, but it aint far.)  I’m not saying the bow should have a 300 yard range, but it should have a longer range than it does.  It’s down right silly how short it is, and makes a rangers life suck as you basically have to get into melee range to shoot.

Give us some room to shoot folks!

Different Range First Person to Third Person
What?!  I want to know who the smacktard was that thought it was a good idea to give the bow and crossbow a different range based on first person or third person shooting.  What bone head thought this was a good idea?

Why does my bow have a range half again as long when in first person?  Why does my bow’s combo’s have a very short range, yet I can key up an arrow to fire at any range? etc..  This is just stupid.. 

Shooting from a ledge
One of the missions early on tells you that you need to go stop the mobs from shooting their bows from a ledge high up, because it’s killing the good guys.  SO you rush up there, kill them, only to realize that .. hey, this is a good spot to snipe back at the bad guys too!

So, you target up a mob and let fly.. Only to see them constantly evade..  You have line of sight, you have range.. you are above them though and they “can’t get to you” so instead of letting you murder them fair and square, they just evade,evade,evade like a broken mob.  

This is fucked up.. The whole point of the mission was to stop them from doing this, only to find out that YOU can’t do this.   WHY?!  If I can get up on this ledge, so can they — as proven by the fact that THEY WERE UP HERE FIRST!  This is just down right stupid and breaks the game to me.  You say you want players to be clever and try new things, then break the new things we try.  What bullshit.   If mobs are getting shot from someone they can’t get to, RUN OUT OF RANGE.  It’s short enough… 

I can go on, but you get the point by now..  This game is very beautiful.. More over, the 1 to 20 game is awe inspiring, and should be a lesson to other games as to how a game should be made.  

At 21 though (or when you get off the island) the polish comes crashing down.  It’s sad really.  I know for a fact it’s driving players away.  Several of my friends have already left due to these annoying bugs.. Above are just the ones that the ranger suffers.. each class has their own set just like this.. 

I do like the new combat system, but it isn’t enough to support a game.  You need to get the rest of this crap working.. 

In six or eight months this game will likely be awesome.. but for now it’s annoying and upsets me.  Time will tell, but I dunno if I will stick it out.

Firstly let me say, funcom has done a wonderful job capturing and portraying the world of Conan.. I’m having a lot of fun.

However, I was initially worried.   I beta tested and played Anarchy Online and by all accounts it’s initial release was a nightmare. It was truly, truly bad.  Funcom, and all other game companies for that matter, learned that day that to release a broken game dooms the game forever.  I had assumed that funcom learned its lesson and would release a stable game, in fact I had visions of board meetings in which the members all chanted, “please not like AO”… So you can imagine my shock when at 12pm my time, when the doors were to open.. Nothing happened.

I refreshed the game a couple times and found out that it got pushed back to 3pm.  Fine fine.. understandable.. these things are complex..  So I played some Call of Duty 4 for a couple hours and dreamed of headchopping..   3pm came along and…   Nothing.  Plus, now the funcom forums have crashed due to a database error..

“Oh god..” I cried, “funcom is doing it again! Its Anarchy Online all over.. ”

Now before you get disappointed, at 3:30pm the servers came online and I played for 12 hours straight.. but I get ahead of myself..

At this point the forums are coming up and down and having all manner of issues.  People are yammering away about lawsuits and making immature pointless complains.. (Seriously folks.. build a bridge and get over it.. )  Constant cries about how funcom has screwed the pooch!  About how players are going to sue, and about boycotting them, how this is the worse release ever (I WAY disagree)..etc.  (it was really lame.. I hope funcom knows that the vocal and annoying minority are just a bunch of douche bags that don’t represent the rest of us.)

The game isn’t actually to be released until the 20th.. so at this point the game isn’t much more than a paid beta..  I’m not sure what people were/are complaining about.

Once the game did finally go live for those of us in the Early Access program at around 3:30 I jumped in and made 4 characters to get my commonly used names.  I then played the game as my ranger for the next 12 hours!

Seriously.. 12 hours.. straight..   I got my character to level 17, and at around 4 am I went to bed..

I had my graphics set to max and played without a hiccup or a glitch until around 6 hours in when my frame rate went into the toilet.   I relogged, and went right back at it. So they have a very minor memory leak most likely.. but hell if thats the worst of it.. YAY US!

Seriously, what a fantastic game.  Funcom has done a marvelous job here folks.  Those who are saying this release was a bad one.. A) You’re retarded — the game isn’t out yet.  That happens on the 20th in the US and the 23rd in Europe (Sucks.. sorry about that guys)..  B) this has been the cleanest deployment I’ve ever seen and I have played a lot of games of this nature.

I think funcom has done a very good job.  Now I’ll admit there is still ample time for them to screw it up between now and release, but so far so good.

Major game issues:

• In the 14 or so hours total that I have played the game at this point, I have only had one blue screen of death.  The game was running smoothly then the sound locks up, BSoD and auto-reboot.  No idea why it happened.  *shrug*  Could have been anything, so I am not even sure if it was the game.  It could have just as easily been the Microsoft auto updater which has caused me issues before and was demanding I install something upon reboot.

Minor game issues:

• After 8 hours of game play my frame rate tanked — which of course just required me to re-log and all was well.  I class this as a minor issue because there was an easy fix.  Most likely it was a memory leak issue somewhere..
• Climbing interface needs work — you just kind of pop onto a ladder and then pop off of it.  Plus if you have multiple climbable surfaces near one another the game often gets confused as to which one you actually want to climb.
• Mob AI is kinda weak — when sneaking through the keep to steal the phoenix medallion often you must dispatch some troublesome guards.  Typically I wait for one to be alone, then kill him.  Wait for the next one to path along, then kill him.  Etc..  It amuses me that often one mob will path over the body of his fallen comrade without a care in the world.  I expect this behavour out of unintelligent mobs.. but not guards..
• Grouping Colors — by default player names are turned off..  To include those in your group!  I want to be able to see my group mates easily and can’t do that in a pack of mobs.  Give us an option to show just our group mate names and make the icons for group members bigger on the mini map please.
• First Person Shooting — why does it take me from first person shooting to an over the shoulder view then back after combat?  this confuses me.. and frankly I hate it.
• Range First/Third Person difference — why does my bow have a different range depending on my view?  that’s retarded.

Requests:

• I want a way to set a view preset for each of my weapon sets.  You have two weapon sets that you can swap between, I want my view to be able to swap too!  First person for bows, third person for swords.  Should be simple.
• My bows range should be the same no matter what view I’m in.  Its really lame that they are different.  Both third person and first person should work as first person currently does.  If I miss, then I miss.  Don’t tell me I’m out of range though.. thats really dumb.

more as I think of them…