AOC - General Information

[The Bog]

That may just be the worst thing I've ever seen.

Question is, am I talking about that comic, or an hour of playing Age of Conan?

WHO KNOWS!

[Hatorade]

To actually point out a valid point Grumpy mentioned. They did this during the weekend tech test as well. Released a patch hours-mins before launch and everyone downloaded at 10-100kbs stopping lots of people from playing. Seems to be common practice. At least I am noticing a pattern.

[TwiNCannoN]

Wow that LFG comic is horrible (now that I think about it. maybe that was the point :P). Strange since they actually usually have decent stuff... for a storyline comic anyway.

Listening to the uberguilds interview now... good stuff.

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

Wow that LFG comic is horrible. Strange since they actually usually have decent stuff... for a storyline comic anyway.

Listening to the uberguilds interview now... good stuff.

Good listen so far Spell weaving. Take three spells and group them for one attack...Thats sounds painful. Also Ranger and Bear Shaman are the beasts according to them.

[Twobit Whore]

Add 2 more hours to that delay:

The start of the Open Beta is delayed by 2 hours to further test some of the changes in detail. We want to make sure everything works as intended before we open the servers to the testers.

The official start time of the IGN Age of Conan Open Beta is therefore: 22:00 GMT.
(to find out the current GMT time please refer to GMT: Greenwich Mean Time - World Time / Time in every Time Zone )

Thanks for your patience.
__________________
Oliver 'Tarib' Kunz

[Kodylan]

Mmm... NDA lifted for me, time to actually admit that I'm playing the game finally so people don't think I'm talking out of my ass or that my only experience is preview events.

I'm trying to get clarification on just how much I can say though; I'm guessing the "NDA" I had to abide by was for the recent beta invite I got primarily. EDIT: Talked with Funcom's PR rep and the NDA is for media only -- General Beta still has the NDA.

Anyway...

Rangers are still beasts in the game in terms of PvP for sure; the PvP weekend "bow bug" didn't really stop anything. With appropriate bows for their levels (ran into a level 15 ranger that nearly 2 shot me at 17) they still tear a new asshole in casters. Sound familiar? Yeah happens with WoW hunters too; not surprising.

As many who are in the beta in this thread have said, the first 20 levels are probably comparable with anything you can do in World of Warcraft in terms of quality. I never really hit a wall where I decided I was bored and not having fun. Granted I'm leveling a Demonologist primarily at the moment, so if I grow tired of leveling I can entertain myself by going and killing groups of players at a time due to how powerful their AE spells are in comparison to single target stuff. Brings back memories of the glory days of DAoC Andred when we rolled around with a bunch of lurikeen enchanters leveling guilds with PBAE.

I've mentioned this in private to a few people on the boards (and elsewhere); the graphics are stunning on max settings. I really do feel it's the best-looking MMO out there and quite possibly the best-looking MMO currently in development (that we've seen... I'm sure Bioware's title will look pretty sexy). The graphics were tweaked again shortly after I got my invite and the old "high" was at that point set to "medium." I cranked it up to the proper high settings and subsequently... I guess I should stay at least quasi-professional and not say what I was about to. Anyway, the graphics in the game are an absolute beast. Only problem I see is I can definitely see absolute-max settings wanting 3-4GB of ram to perform flawlessly rather than the recommended 2. It uses a *ton* of memory with all the stuff maxed, and if you're on Vista that will no doubt cause issues because of Vista's inherent high memory usage as well.

My major concerns at this point (as is standard for everyone, I'm sure) are: 1) Sieges/City Building and 2) Endgame PvE content -- neither of which we've seen anything resembling existence other than what I saw in January. What I saw in January was cool but it wasn't what players will actually want in the game (it was still a work in progress at that point).

It also weirded me out that the level cap in Open Beta is 13; I'd think they would want to make it 19 so people can experience the entirety of Tortage. The story is fairly solid in the Destiny quests leading out of Tortage, so it'd definitely be a good publicity hook for people. The initial content in Khemi/Khopschef Province seems fairly solidly polished as well (I'm up to 22 right now on the PvP server), so it wouldn't hurt anything to let them get out of the jungle and see their native locales too.

At any rate, I'm going to be writing something more coherent soon for Curse.com but I'm just excited that I can actually talk about the game more at this point. I've actually been in beta for a while now and I've seen the game through many iterations, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with how much it's changed. I actually disliked it quite a bit in October, but I was respectful of my NDA agreements at that point and didn't post as much -- so it's nice the game has changed enough that I actually enjoy the initial segment of it.

[Hatorade]

I bet May 2nd before Open beta is out....Nerd Rage Rising...

[spronk]

wrt to banks/mail/AH - didn't mean to be confusing before, I said you don't have access to them early on. The first time you can access it all is in Khemi, you cannot get to Khemi until you level to 19 and do the final solo player quest (killing Strom). The "bank" consists of 50 free slots, anything you want to AH or mail is put into the bank first and then processed through. Not sure if you can mail stuff to alts, since I haven't leveled a 2nd char to more than 5. AH is fine, its pretty much exactly like the WoW AH (fields to search by, you just buyout instead of bid). I doubt the AH will see much usage until most players are 80.

One thing people will find ?interesting? is the global channel. Yeah, theres a channel which is viewable by every single player in the game no matter where they are. Makes for some great fun on the FFA PVP server, since you'll see people QQing about ganking and then the gank team responds and it just starts blowing up. Of course with thousands of people online at once I really don't see how a global channel will be practical. There is already a guild on the beta PVP server that has a rep for lowbie ganking (Frenzy) and is pretty much KoS for many players.

Pay the $7 or w/e to fileplanet and get in the beta if you can, your game experience will depend heavily on your PC.

[madmaan]

So far on paper, the classes look very very fun. The one thing that keeps crossing my mind though is..

Do all classes have their cake and eat it too?

[Kodylan]

Originally Posted by madmaan

So far on paper, the classes look very very fun. The one thing that keeps crossing my mind though is..

Do all classes have their cake and eat it too?

Do you mean that feeling of every class feeling overpowered when you level them? If so then definitely not -- Bear Shaman start off quite weak in comparison to caster/pure melee classes for example. Granted I haven't dumped a whole lot of time into my Bear Shaman yet and honestly don't want to, since I'm planning to buy the game anyway, so I don't want to burn myself out with leveling too many classes hardcore in beta.

[Draegan]

On classes, each class starts out fast. You gain level 5-6 in the first 10 minutes or so. Class spells and abilities are fun to use. It really feels like your playing your character, and I have a feeling if this game is released for the Xbox, it will be awesome to play.

The control scheme is tough. You're using the 1-3 keys for attacks, and then you have to set "alt-X" buttons within reach for your abilities. You're definitely not going to be using 5-0 in PVP. That might end up being tricky. But it's definitely managable once you bend your fingers around it.

[Libra]

I'm all patched up but I'm getting the black screen where can I see the mouse cursor and hear the music, but no other graphics. I tried hitting CTRL~ and turned on VSYNC but it doesn't fix anything. I also tried putting it in windowed mode but that doesn't help. Then I tried upgrading to the very latest beta drivers from nZone but that doesn't work either. Any suggestions? Maybe roll back and try the latest release/non-beta drivers?

Oh, and is there a beta forum? I can't find one.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Libra

I'm all patched up but I'm getting the black screen where can I see the mouse cursor and hear the music, but no other graphics. I tried hitting CTRL~ and turned on VSYNC but it doesn't fix anything. I also tried putting it in windowed mode but that doesn't help. Then I tried upgrading to the very latest beta drivers from nZone but that doesn't work either. Any suggestions? Maybe roll back and try the latest release/non-beta drivers?

Turn off full screen in options and change resolution. This should fix it (might want to reboot your system). You can change back to fullscreen once you get into the game.

Age of Conan Beta Forums

[ajiatus]

It also weirded me out that the level cap in Open Beta is 13; I'd think they would want to make it 19 so people can experience the entirety of Tortage. The story is fairly solid in the Destiny quests leading out of Tortage, so it'd definitely be a good publicity hook for people. The initial content in Khemi/Khopschef Province seems fairly solidly polished as well (I'm up to 22 right now on the PvP server), so it wouldn't hurt anything to let them get out of the jungle and see their native locales too.

Question -- since we are limited to lvl 13 for this open beta, will we be able to experience any shared content, or will this be only a single player experience? I read about the day/night distinction, but it's unclear whether a low level character can be in the shared part, and how much of the world he/she will be able to explore (given also money little gold to travel with).

[Kodylan]

Originally Posted by ajiatus

Question -- since we are limited to lvl 13 for this open beta, will we be able to experience any shared content, or will this be only a single player experience? I read about the day/night distinction, but it's unclear whether a low level character can be in the shared part, and how much of the world he/she will be able to explore (given also money little gold to travel with).

There's shared content as soon as you get out of the tutorial (level 5). The main reason I'm guessing they chose 13 is that becomes the point where shared content is actually required to get to the next Destiny quest level (15). Before then you can pretty much level up on the single player content exclusively if you want to.