Pyat is thoroughly modern

Yesterday, while visiting my parents, my father presented me with a World War I U.S. Army entrenching tool. The canvas cover was marked with the date of issue, 1917. He’d found it among my Uncle Frank’s things. Uncle Frank died last year at the age of 99. I presume it’d been a piece of surplus he’d picked up, since he’d been too young for WWI and too old for WWII, and wasn’t American.

The blade has a lot of surface rust, but is actually quite solid. It’s gone to live in the trunk of my car for the time being, for digging out of snowdrifts.

**

I picked up my very first MMORPG at the game sale. It was marked down to $3.95 (from $59.95) and Rose threw in a 60 day time card for free. The game is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and apparently it was released in 2008 and met with a combination of indifference, anger, and angry indifference. In fact, the game was sent out for free with copies of a gaming magazine earlier this month. Still, I like Robert E. Howard, and most of the reviews I’d read seemed to be complaining about things I didn’t care about. So, I played it for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, and worked my way up to level 5.

Some observations:
I really liked the character appearance editor. You can adjust your facial features to a great extent, allowing users to create a very distinctive character, and not merely a generic bland pretty boy/girl. You can make a fat ugly guy, if you want. I made a bald man with a wild fringe of hair, deep-set eyes, a large nose, and a long beard. He looks a bit like José Ferre, if José Ferre had been a Mexican wrestler. He had a sort of fanatical cast to his features, so I decided he should be a priest.

The opening scenario, which establishes you as a slave washed up on the shores of an unknown jungle island, was fairly effective. It explains why you know nothing about the world, and why you’re wandering about dressed only in a loin cloth.

I was expecting a lot more freedom. The first five levels involve a series of minor quests required to get into a pirate city. The jungle looks dark, deep, and mysterious, but there’s only one path through it. You can’t sneak around things, or get lost. You just keep walking. It may be that the game opens up after the introductory levels.

There seemed to be a small knot of people every ten yards. Just, you know, loitering out in the jungle. And they all hated me and wanted to kill me.

The bad guys (Jungle Picts, Scroungers, Poachers, etc.) are depicted as attacking you with swords or spears or bows. They have on cloaks and bits of armour. Yet, when you kill them and search their bodies, you only find things like “a dirty bandana” and “boots discarded by a hobo.” I thought perhaps this reflected a really quick and dirty search of portable property, until I pried out a couple of gold teeth. Consequently, I spent the first two hours of the game dressed in various kinds of unflattering rags and carrying a broken bottle. I have no idea where I was carrying all those gold teeth.

Later, I battled a camp full of poachers and other murderous sorts, and acquired a piece of wood with a hook on it. It looks rather brutal, I admit, but, really, is there anything more hardcore than killing ten men with a broken bottle? While dressed in a diaper and a filthy bandana?

I arrived at the city and found my old slave master at the gates. I killed him with the hook-thing, and an enormous treasure chest appeared. It had a sword in it. “Hooray,” I thought. But I have to be level 50 to use the sword. I can carry it, sure, but apparently murderous proficiency with broken bottles and hooked-sticks doesn’t translate to the capacity to swing a sword.

I didn’t meet any other players. I suspect you don’t enter the larger shared world until you get into the city. I couldn’t get into the city, because a demon had stolen the key. I could see people walking around, but none of them seemed interested in me. I killed the demon and got the key…

I stopped playing because the game crashed before I could walk back to the city, and I didn’t feel any urge to restart it. The crash was likely because I have a cheap graphics card and just barely met the hardware requirements.

Summary:
It was okay. I’ve played worse games. I didn’t get as far as the actual “MMO” part of the “MMORPG,” but I’ll try again when I have a free hour. I don't know that the MMO part will interest me much, judging by the inane chatter on the open chat line. Most of the solo games I've played were much more immediately gripping, certainly.

"Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!"

Day two of the Conan MMORPG. I played for about 90 min, after the girls were in bed.

I had to fight my way past a herd of murderous gorillas before I actually got to the city gate. Every single one of them was carrying a bunch of bananas.

Now I, Pyatt, Priest of Aquilonia, carry many bananas.

I arrived at the gate and was informed that I cannot enter, since I am marked as a slave by my manacles. A kindly guard suggested that a blacksmith outside of town could help me. I found the blacksmith with a line up of escaped slaves waiting to get their manacles knocked off. He was quite happy to knock off my manacles, provided I went the quarry and brought him three bricks.

I got to the quarry and found bunch of other players fetching bricks. This marked my first in game interaction with an actual flesh and blood player.

"Huzzah, bricks!" I said.
"lol" said a thinly clad sorceress.

At that point a giant demonic bat appeared and tried to kill me for stealing his bricks. I killed the bat, returned triumphantly with the bricks, had the manacles bashed off, and returned to the city gates...

Tortage! City of Pirates and Mystery and Adventure! What wonders await inside?


Except there was a level 80 Jackass with a horse parked sideways across the gate, effectively blocking access for all the new players. In this screen shot, Pyatt, Proud Priest of Aquilonia, is lost amongst a bunch of skinless monsters who seem to follow around some of the evil wizard types. They're harmless, but they can clutter up the screen a bit. You can't see my character at all, but he's the one saying "Swell."

The Jackass on the Horse seems to have been bisected by the gate.

"lol just courch" said the Jackass. I think he meant "Crouch." And indeed, some more experienced players were able to crawl under the belly of his horse while the newbies milled about aimlessly, cursing.

Pyatt, Priest of Aquilonia, does not crawl.

No, really, he doesn't. Cause, like, I don't know how.

I wandered away from the gate and looked up the in-game manual, the control settings, and so on, and none of them told he how to crouch. I went back to the gate to, like... kvetch... or something. The Jackass had left in the meantime, happily.

Now, the adventure begins in earnest! Tortage! City of Delights! City where I can perhaps sell off all this crap I picked up in the jungle! And buy some trousers! It took me ages to find someone who sold clothes, and I had zero interactions with other players. They just seem to run from place to place, and did not reply to my Bronze Age halloos and "Hail Fellow'ing".


I sold my "Flaking Crocodile Skin Loincloth" and "Slippers Retrieved From a Pile of Elephant Dung," pawned the bag of gold teeth, and bought a frayed robe, frayed belt, a wooden buckler. Now I look more priestly. Or sissy.

I kept the bananas.

At this point, I quit the game. Thus far, the game most closely resembles that scene in the Conan the Barbarian film where he's chained to a mill wheel and doesn't talk to anyone for ten years.