My Honest Review to AoC

[Shibumi]

THIS IS A LONG READ. IF YOU'RE LAZY OR SIMPLY DON'T CARE ABOUT A FULL REVIEW OF WHAT'S GOING ON SO FAR THEN MOVE ON. I'M TELLING YOU RIGHT FROM THE START, TLDR MOVE ON IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ IT


Just thought I'd take the time to post up what I love about this game so far, but be realistic about it and point out what I know is messed up, but I have faith will get worked on.

Since I've started playing AoC since EA, I've logged into wow one time... to tell my guildies how much I loved AoC. I simply have had no desire to play any other game at the moment, except the occasional CoD4 because I can't live without shooting people on a regular basis

Why? Some might say just because its a new game and we all get excited for a short period of time over something, the next thing, etc. but I honestly think that even after the 'omg its finally here' mindset is gone and I'm level 80, I'll still be enjoying this game.


Graphics 8/10

Pro - This game honestly looks amazing to me when the settings are at full. Even at low with a decent resolution this game looks better than most out there. The best part about the graphics, it looks this awesome AND its an mmo. Not usually a very plausible thing these days considering how much strain that is on not only the client, but the server as well. My system might not be 100% up to snuff to play this game until I build my new one (My PC is about 5 years old), but I got a chance to play my account on a RL buddy's comp the other day. And hot damn did it make me want to just roam around and check **** out. Bottom line here, great job on making this game look good.

Con - Not optimized... i've been pulling my hair out this last week tweaking, and messing with my system, my graphics card, overclocking, drivers, etc. etc. etc. The list goes on and I can barely get my performance to budge anything over a 5 FPS difference. I finally find out in a support forum thread that GPU usage of this game even on high full settings is maxing out at 65% on a lot of cards. Whether that's a driver issue, or poor game code not using the most of the system its on, I'm not sure. But I honestly think there will be a patch to greatly improve how much this game uses the graphics card its in. I have faith performance will get a lot better down the line.


Quests 10/10

Pro - I have to say I freaking love all the quests in this game far and above any of the dumb quests I did in wow. Let me tell you, after I leveled up for the first 10 levels there, I was very very very sick of...

"Hey I live here and there's some not so nice people living there, can you go kill 10 of them?" You go kill 10 of them, which seems ridiculous because they're completely harmless and then you get your reward.

AoC is like, "Those *****sons raped and killed my wife, but I'm too old to fight back, how about you go and rip out 140 of their teeth so I can make necklaces of them and bring me the leader's head back on a pike." So you go over there, find these savages with townsfolk on pikes, and chained up tortured to death and you're just disgusted, you decapitate some of them, tear them all a new one and guess freaking what? EVERY TIME YOU KILL ONE YOU GET TEETH. There's not a 10% drop chance for me to get a tooth from each person I kill. There's no way for me to get stuck doing a drop quest that's RIDICULOUS. I can't count the number of times I'd have to go into the wilderness on WoW and have to kill 250 tigers to get 10 tiger pelts. No no no, in AoC when I have to go get 40 crocodile skins... every time I kill a croc I get his skin. Makes sense eh?

And to add to that, the marker system on the map is pretty nice I must admit. Even if I mad click through the quests and don't listen to what they have to say. I can always see where I'm going and what I'm doing if I just take a quick look at my minimap. Makes doing multiple quests a breeze. I'll touch more on this in my UI section.

Grinding is fairly plausible so far as well, I get a pretty good amount of xp from the mobs I'm killing, so far i've noticed it averages out to about 100 kills = my level in xp. That's not to bad for a straight up grind, especially because when I play my GF's HoX I can run into a group and kill 3-4 people at the same time.

Grouping is... well yeah. At first the system turned me off majorly due to the instancing. But when I got used to the idea of it, I got totally cool with it. Now when I'm in a zone and gonna do a hard quest, I just say LF people in OOC chat, get a group and we just pick an instance and click on it. Bam we're in the instance and we go quest. After I got used to the idea of it, I liked it.

Con - Back to grouping... the interface SUCKS. But that kind of goes more along the lines of what I have to say about the UI in general. I'm pretty tired of not being able to find any of my group members on my map even when they're actually on it because the damn dot is so small I can't see it.

Quests... I dont' really have a con here. Uh... Funcom wasted time on voice acting? I know about 95% of out there who listened to our first 5 quests have been mass clicking 1 on every dialogue there-after. Sorry guys, its a great touch to make it more immersive, but the majority of the gaming public is far too impatient. Although occasionally I find myself feeling like slowing down and actually picking my answers... I've come up with some really funny responses. Some of these quests are hilarious sometimes.

I really like how quickly I level, so no con there.



Combat 9/10

Pro - Holy crap I love the combat system. I've been battling for quite a while and I have all my combos memorized finally and I must say that especially when I get into a pvp fight, I'm STILL not doing everything I could possibly doing, I'm always missing something. I absolutely love that there's so much that you can do in a combat situation that you can't possibly be doing it all exactly until you've REALLY mastered combat.

For instance, in an NPC fight I might be like... ok I have super high damage combo on the UL, so I'm going to white dmg fire at the UR and try to coax the npc into putting his shields there. Then as soon as UL is open, WAM unleash hell and fury into him. That's cool, I like that every battle is dynamic in that respect.

I mean, you can make it robot if you really want to, and do... ok, pull with this. Open with this, next do this, if you want to. But I don't. My combo sequence changes all the time depending on the shielding of the NPC, and their location. Meanwhile while you're doing that, you have to pay attention to 10 other things. A, the placement of the mobs so you're most effective. Make sure they're in your cone if you have that ability, you have to drag them around to avoid aggroing other mobs, you can move your own shielding around to avoid damage on one side, or you hit x while you buy yourself some time for your buddy to get there, or use x in a counterattack method.

One of my favorite dynamic situations... You do a combo to a group of 3 guys. Then you go to a large high damage combo, but by the second key press you realize the combo will be wasted on your target because he has like 10% hp left. So you tab to the guy next to him, face him and finish the combo with one swing and BAM huge damage to the guy you just targeted and he dies, and then minor damage to the guy with 10% and he dies too. I love that. Melee combat is a blast. I really can't speak for spell caster combat, I havn't played any of those classes yet. The closest I come to that is a HoX, but that's all melee\spells, not a true spell caster.

Oh and fatalities... they are AWESOME. They still crack me up everytime I see them on the HoX... The ranger ones are pretty boring by now, but still amuse me when they happen unexpectedly . But my melee ones on the ranger are still badass.

Con - Uh... not a whole lot here, just some minor things. Ranged combat 1st person mode is fairly useless in the way it operates at the current moment. Its not a huge con to me, because I don't mind soft targeting my attacks, but it would be nice to have 1st person mode as a plausible option. I wouldn't mind using it occasionally if it wasn't so clunky and had a bigger benefit.

Weird ranges\cones. The only issue I have with melee combat on the cone\range thing is that sometimes when on HoX, I can pull a group of 3 and then slide back to try to get them all close together and in my cone. But for some reason, one of them can stand behind the other guy, and hit me from where he stands, but I can't hit him. I find that very irritating that sometimes his one hander can reach further than my 2 hand edge? That's pretty dumb. Its easily fixed by just moving my character around more to that side so I touch them all, but the npc shouldn't be able to hit me with a shorter weapon and I can't hit him with a bigass weapon.

That's about my only combat gripes. Some of you I know gripe about animations slowing you down and such, and combos being hard to pull off on a moving target, but its kind of glitchy actually. If you complete the combo when the person is in range and in front of you, once you start the animation the damage has been done. Try it sometime. Do a combo to sum1, then right as animation starts, have them sprint away. I garauntee that they get slammed as they're running away.

Again, I have no cons on spell casting, because I haven't played that class yet.

[Shibumi]

User Interface 4/10

Pro - I really don't have a whole lot in the way of pros here. Lets face it, the UI sucks balls... hard. Its clunky, its vague in the fact it doesn't tell you much, and there's so much functionality missing from it, its hard to say what's good about it.

The quest tracking on the UI map rocks my socks. Some of you don't know this (because the game doesn't tell you, more on that later too) but if you double click any of the gray shading or the arrows of your other quests, your quest tracker will hotswap to that one and begin tracking it. So for instance, if you're running along to do quest A, and you pass by a gray shaded area for quest C, you can double click it and find out what you're supposed to do there and it'll highlight and begin tracking it instead. Very very very handy implementation of that. I love that idea.

Some peope think the guild menu is really bad, but once you know how to use it, its pretty good I think. Not any different from WoW actually. Open up your friends list (Shift + F) and then if you click the little horizontal arrow, it'll expand to tell you anyting you want to know about your guildies\friends. Their name, class, level, region (this also doubles as last time they logged in if they're offline), etc. You can click the categories at the top to sort them if you'd like. The game doesn't tell you about this feature, again something I'll comment on later.

I like the fact that in when you have the maps open you can hover over anywhere and it gives you the coords right in the same screen. Don't need mods or any of that junk. This makes it very easy to ask people where stuff is in OOC chat, because they can easily give you exact coords and you can go find it easily.

Con - Holy crap where do I start here? Grouping is rough because its hard to find each other. The game doesn't inherintly tell you what instance you're currently in. You can only see what instance your group leader is in, and if you're the group leader you have no clue what instance you're in, you just have to tell people to join the one with a star.

I can't move around pretty much anything. I would love to move around my Self Frame and my Target Frame so I can put the extra hotbars closer to my main hotbar.

I would love it if there was a spot around the minimap that told me my actual local time, its annoying that from where I sit in my room the only clock in it, has major glare during the daytime and its a pain in the ass to tell what time it is when I'm playing the game.

I wouldn't be offended by letting the quest tracker hold more than one quest in it at a time, but not a big deal because I can hot swap to any other quest at any other time.

On the maps, I would very much like it if I could see a dotted line for EVERY zone that I could travel to and from. I'm having a hard time finding zones I want to go to that I've never been just guessing where I could find transportation to it. Additionally, a new NPC icon on the regional maps that are specific transportation NPCS would really help me out because then I could see where the spots where in the zone that I could port out from.

I would really like it if included in the details about people I could see their class. Knowing their name and level is nice, but having a class icon, or actually having the word in there would help majorly. Its so hard to tell the classes apart, especially the melee at lower levels. They all look pretty much the same. Especially if a ranger is running around dual wielding instead of with the bow.

I'm sure there's other annoyances with the UI, but I can't think of them yet.

I hold good hopes for the UI considering its on their list of main concerns at the moment, and I'll hold my final judgement on the UI until after they implement the UI patch and it still sucks, or they fix it. We'll see, but I hold faith that they're going to revamp this thing by a lot.



Classes 9/10

Pro - I really like all the different classes and playstyles in the game so far. I've only played with a handful and I've seen the others in action and I must say that, there's a playstyle for every kind of person in this game across all the classes. You can tank, you can dps, you can melee, ranged, spell cast, have pets, hybrid, etc. etc. Its a lot of variety, and that sure is good. They're not all balanced yet, but I really wouldn't be concerned about that whatsoever until a majority of the player base was at top level yet. Then we might have balance issues and see the dire need for a class balance patch.

I think their fresh new take on healing is AWESOME. I used to play a couple healers classes and wow and holy crap I HATED IT. It all eventually just turned into Whack-A-Mole with health bars by the end of it: "Oh that ones low! GET IT! - Wait there's another! Get that one! oh no that one's almost empty hit it! Get that one! Aw man, someone hit it first!" 15 minutes later, the boss is down and you saw none of the action because you were staring at green health bars the whole fight. You roll on your loot and move on to the next 20 minute Whack-A-Mole session.

The whole idea of FORCING the healers to be fighting constantly and contributing to the group is amazing. It keeps them enganged, literally, and makes healing never boring and always dynamic because you're fighting AND patying attention to party member's health. Not to mention you dont' have to soft target your party members and fill them up, you can heal in cones, and areas of effect instead. Or have your healing procced by your damage. They did a great job with this.

Melee people are a lot of fun so far, and I like all those classes. Ranger is cool, but I think something needs done about 1st person view being viable. And like I said before, I don't have any real experience on the caster classes yet.

Con - Uh... I don't really have any yet. I'm sure I will by the time I'm 80 for a while. I think maybe the Conq needs a bit more definition. There's some confusion of him being main dps or main tank, and him not being able to do either properly, so I'm kind of worried about that class getting too watered down like hybrids have in other games.



Dungeons N/A

Pro - I haven't spent enough time doing any of these to give a full on review of this part of the game. I've spent a lot of my time solo questing or grouping up with guild mates. I've done a couple of these but none at max level and I can't give a definitive judgment here. I'll update this review after I hit 80 I think to add to this part.

So far I like the dungeon system, its really nice to be able to go to any zone and change it to epic so that you can make any zone even lower level ones a much greater challenge if you want to go harder and go with a party of friends. The increase in loot on epic is great as well. And its nice that most of the "hard areas" have a treasure chest at the end when done this way.

Con - So far most of the fights I've seen are ALL tank and spank and I haven't seen a ton of strategy needed to take down anything. So far no real challenges to any group with half a brain. But I must stress that I haven't played any raid dungeons at max level and for all I know the AI could be insane in an level 80 Raid dungeon.



Additional Comments

Pro - I really honestly love this game. Its a ton of fun. It has its bugs and glitches and I'm willing to give this game time to fix itself. If there's still some of the major problems down the road, say in a couple months. Then I might go back to my other games. But if they keep on track and fix what needs fixed, the only time I'll ever see WotLK is on someone else's machine.

Con - Honestly I hate to say it... but I would have totally supported this game staying in beta for another 1-2 months to get some of these issues resolved. At least in another 1-2 months they could have put in a revamped UI, and worked a little more on making it better optimized to use the GPUs out there to the fullest.

Oh, and one last con that doesn't fit in a category. This game is VAGUE. Vague vague vague... I can't stress this enough. Maybe I'm just to used to games that tell me the numbers, and I love to number crunch my character, but the abilities, stat points, and the feat tree are REALLY PISSING ME OFF. I want numbers people, I want to know what every rank of my feat actually does for me. Right now, I'm putting points into stuff then looking at the buff it gives me in the actual damage it supplies, then writing it down. The combos also don't usually tell me how much damage they do. Only a small handful actually tell you the damage numbers. Or how they arrive at those damage numbers... ie. 150% weapon damage, or weapon damage + 100, or something like that. The vagueness of the little in game help menu dealy is really irritating too. There's a lot of open ended sentences in there that leave you without a real clue as to what you're supposed to be doing.

All I'm asking for is a rewrite of all those tooltips to actually tell me what the hell they do with the real numbers they supply. I know they're there because when I spec into a feat and then I get its buff I can see the numbers in the buff. Just add it to the tool tip so I can quit doing this Guess Test Revise BS.

Closing 8/10 If they fix Graphics and UI I'd give it 10.

I love the game, it has problems. I have faith it will be fixed, in the mean time I probably won't log into wow for a very long time. You guys better fix these problems within the time frame of WAR release, and WoW's xpac or you're going to lose a LARGE chunk of unhappy players. Your time crunch is those 2 releases I think, so you better make people happy by then.

Thanks for reading,

Shibumi