Pyat is thoroughly modern
Jun. 8th, 2009 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyatYesterday, 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:40 pm (UTC)Er, more so than usual for that sort of thing. It was intended to be a WoW Killer. Things were said. People were idiots but that's standard.
But I was in the "indifference" camp for that sort of thing. The only thing I remember being amused about was that there was a Stygian race and that was the name of a good friend of mine on Warcraft at the time.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 02:54 pm (UTC)Stygia is a kingdom in the original Robert E. Howard stories, from the 1930s. They grow the best Black Lotus, you know.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 04:17 pm (UTC)And yeah it was great my hunter friend kept shooting him every time he tried to turn around, and we pulled him very carefully so that he didn't get distracted by Redridge on the way to Elwynn.
The classic pull was Stitches, but it was tricky 'cause lots of people would hang around and try to fight Stitches where he spawned.
The most insane one I ever saw was when somebody pulled one of the immortal orcs from the Blasted Lands all the way to the Stormwind Throne Room. Those are those guys who can't be killed unless you smash the rock in their cave, so even though he wasn't strong enough to defeat the Stormwind guards and Lord Whatshisface the Asskicker, they couldn't finish him off either! XD
Oh yeah and there's a video around of some guys who trained Lord Kazzak from the Blasted Lands all the way to Stormwind as well, back before he got promoted and moved to Outland.
$0.02 apropos of very little
Date: 2009-06-08 09:38 pm (UTC)*goes off to be nerdy and off-topic by herself*
Re: $0.02 apropos of very little
Date: 2009-06-08 09:55 pm (UTC)Re: $0.02 apropos of very little
Date: 2009-06-09 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:27 pm (UTC)And yeah you got to see a lot of the really bad traditions in MMORPGs. They all have those groups of people standing around waiting to die; some of them are better at it, and have some of the groups perform impromptu theatrics, but all of them have points where guys are standing around doing nothing waiting for you to come along and kill them.
Search mechanics are infamous too. In World of Warcraft for example, there's a quest where you're asked to go kill some boars and take their kidneys for a pie, but boars only occasionally have even a single kidney, let alone the two you would expect. Eventually Blizzard started changing things after players complained, so you get things like three to eight eyes from a single spider now, if you're sent to gather spider eyes for something.
I usually imagined that the things you didn't have the option of taking were simply not worthwhile. Like, their clothes were too damaged in the fight and sucked pretty hard to begin with. The gold tooth thing is new, that's pretty creepy.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 03:44 pm (UTC)That's the ONLY reasoning that can explain that Murloc head quest over in Southshore. "Why don't these Murlocs have heads?! I can SEE them on the mob!"
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 04:12 pm (UTC)... Things get their heads chopped off and unrecognizable? Murlocs don't even have heads, their face is just on their chest.
And yeah also, any monster weapons are innately inferior to your own, they're just so badass that they use weak weapons while being actually stronger than you. The weapons that they dropped were confiscated from adventurer NPCs and they don't know how to use them properly...
no subject
Date: 2009-06-08 06:54 pm (UTC)Maybe if they rebranded it as Bronze Age Hobo Fights.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-09 08:52 am (UTC)AoC was supposed to be an mmo for adults, and themed as such. I remember earlier dev talks about brothels and wenching being a core part of the game concept.
Then, bigger money got involved, and it was mellowed. Add to the change in direction a lack of end-game content, and, it became yet another costly mmo write-off.
(I'm currently playing Warhammer. There's a 14 day free trial out there, let me know if you ever want to give it a whirl and I'll kill rats and people and stuff with you.)