So until I receive a plea for more Silent Hill series stuffs, consider it on indefinite hold.
That is, until Silent Hill 5. Which will be the day I buy a PS3. Maybe not, but here's to crossed fingers.
Let's see, let's see... What have I done for the past month?
LIST SUMMARY MODE ENGAGE
-Started a summer job. I'm on week five. Relief all around. Frivolous spending has ensued, a bit.
-Visited Alison a lot.
-Visited with Ron a few times.
-Participated in a wedding. Not my own.
-Finished Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
-Obsessed about playing D&D again. Even though I still have not.
-Caught up on Penny Arcade and CTRL+ALT+DEL.
-Let me know if I forgot something, Ron.
-Age of Conan.
It is the last on that list that I will discuss briefly.
Age of Conan is an MMO that just launched on May 20. I did not start playing it then, for I had doubts of its stability. Funcom designed and developed it, so if anybody remembers Anarchy Online's launch, well, let's just say that Age of Conan's launch went much, much more smoothly from what I understand. However, I did pick it up around a month after the launch, so I've had it for about a week-and-a-half. Conan marks the earliest point at which I've participated in an MMOs, edging out Vanguard by about six months. (I still have no desire to start an MMO on launch day, but I would really like to participate in a non-Korean MMO beta some day.)
First, I really, really like Age of Conan. But the purpose of this post will be to discuss the technical flaws so that in the next post, I can sing its praises. As for fun factor, I think Funcom has it nailed. Technically, though, the game is far from perfect.
For the first month of AoC's launch, Funcom has released something like five significant patches. This doesn't count the tiny ones that occasionally occur and have no patch notes to accompany them. I would have killed for Vanguard's dev team to have released a single bloody patch in a month, especially since their crash-to-desktop bug went unchecked for something like eight months (not that I know if they fixed it or not). Funcom is frequently pumping out hotfixes and scheduled two update/maintenance days during the week for the first five weeks. They also have introduced a few dozen new quests after the first three weeks of launch.
Sounds positive, yes?
While I am ecstatic to see them go to such lengths to get the game up and running in the right direction, the unfortunate truth is that the game has some fairly serious stability issues. Vanguard had the crash-to-desktop (which would cause me to drown or be killed in the wilderness, as my character would continue to run forward for 30 seconds as I crashed), inconsistent framerates, and to my knowledge, their awesome looking sentient wolf/man race still has no tails a freaking year-and-a-half post launch (and yes, for the record, they ARE supposed to have tails). Age of Conan has an infamous 10k lag spike, during which the latency goes up to some 9800 milliseconds, followed by an imminent crash, or if you were fighting an enemy, death. There's also some problems with grouping, in which players will be in a group, and then very suddenly be "dropped" from the group. They're still in the group, but they cannot see their group members' health bars and such. One more still-present issue renders a person unable to access any characters on their account except for the one they last played. It claims that they are still logged into that character, and no amount of logging in and logging out seems to fix it. That one only happened to me once, but it was during a day when three of the servers (one of them was the server my main character is on) were having severe problems.
Age of Conan is very scalable, graphically speaking. the only problem is that performance gains are ENTIRELY RANDOM. Yes, I will explain why the scalability of the graphics engine makes no sense at all. First, many people claimed to receive significant performance gains when "texture quality" is turned to high, rather than medium or low. Of course, I thought it was a crock. But I tried it, and it friggin' worked. My guess is that on the lower texture settings, the game tells the video card to flush the textures from the video memory more often, resulting in choppier gameplay and slightly more sluggish framerates. But the texture quality is but one of many settings. When I first started playing, I just assumed that I should drop my resolution just a bit, from the maximum 1440X900 to 1280X768. I played through the entire starter city on this resolution. When I was getting unusually low framerates in a wilderness zone, I upped it to 1440X900 and GAINED 8 frames per second, from 22 to 30. Everybody who has ever had to turn down the graphics a little bit to get a PC game to run better knows that this is exactly the opposite of what should happen. Especially anybody who has played Crysis. There is no logical explanation for why increasing the resolution would also increase performance, and especially to such an alarming degree.
The only graphics setting that does seem to work properly is shadows. Turning them down or off increases the framerate significantly, but this only makes sense; I'm running a single core processor. (Actually, for the record, my P4 is up to 3.8 Ghz, as opposed to its stock 3.2.)
At one point (and this may have just been for me), every wooden floor surface dropped me through it. It was an experience similar to using a "no clipping" cheat on a PC game. When I walked across a bridge, I fell into the water. When I went to walk down a wooden ramp, I found myself in the infrastructure. Better yet, I went into the starter city's main tavern, fell through it, and ended up in some weird developer's playground. Since the game has zones instead of a seamless world, Funcom has chosen to create several instances of each zone so the smaller zones don't get as crowded. It is possible that the area in which I ended up when I fell through the tavern was some sort of "instance hub." The tavern was simply floating above an ocean just offshore of a giant island mountain (which I managed to scale, despite the numerous invisible seams that made it difficult). Circumnavigating the shoreline revealed that there were several identical floating buildings, which I assumed to be taverns. The mountain was incredibly tall, for the game's incredibly long draw distance would still not draw the mountain's peak until I nearly reached it. I took about ten minutes to explore this peculiar zone, including my trek to the top of the mountain, for I was positive that upon logging off, the "no clipping on wooden surfaces" problem would be fixed. And, of course, it was.
Also, upon falling through the tavern, my character's hair (which is normally a light brown) turned white and took on the texture of a chainmail hood. Bear in mind that A) I have no chainmail hood and B) in nearly all cases, I use the "hide my headgear" feature (which hides the helmet or hood you're wearing while still giving you its defense benefits), for I don't take the time to customize my character's head for it to be covered by a piece of armor.
And for those that cry "Screenshot, or it didn't happen," I have a few.
This shows the floating tavern and my crazy chainmail hair. Freaky. And a guy in chat claims that his computer runs on the souls of orphans. Which is probably appropriate for a game as gritty and dark as Age of Conan.
Another floating building found during my travels. I had a certain occlusion setting disabled, so the most distant objects look like blue shadows until I'm within something like 500 feet of them.
A shot of the immense draw distance of the mountain's peak. And I finally figured out that Alt+Z removes the graphical user interface for the purpose of taking screenshots.
"I got a room at the top of the world tonight, and I ain't comin' down." -Tom Petty
Now, it seems that the fact that I like this game defies logic, reason, mathematics, physics, electricity, and probably other disciplines that are so firmly rooted in the real world. However, bear in mind that these bugs are actually pretty uncommon, besides the graphics options' EPIC FAIL. And I was able to explore a zone that few will ever be able to see due to one of the glitches. And besides, I've not spoken at all about the game mechanics.
And yes, I couldn't resist. I threw myself from the peak when I decided my journey through the hidden zone was complete.
I guess I'll discuss why I love the game so much in my next post.
