Age of Conan
Crom demands...MMORPG Absurdity!
Here I am again, filling in another in a long line of 'I Quit' forms, this time for Age of Conan. Always a difficult thing for me. I spend a lot of time in MMOs, and reaching this point of the Cycle of Interest is always uncomfortable, no matter how many I pass through. Is it me? I feel like I'm letting the game down a bit - something about my psychology can't stay away from these games, and yet never manages to quite play them properly, to see it through, to stick with it, to complete the single...
Life continues in Everyone's Favourite MMO, and that most rare of things, a Positive Pick Up Group Experience! Like many of my MMOs of late, Age of Conan seems to be turning into a once-a-week thing for me. Quite possibly this is just the result of having far too many on the go at once, but I find a comforting kind of dependability in the weekly routine I seem to have fallen into of late. Mondays is Age of Conan, Tuesdays is, well, the Tuesday Noob Club of course, Wednesdays seems to have suddenly become City of Villains Night...
After a whirlwind world tour, and a couple of dings, it was back home to Stygia again, to find ourselves at last, ready for the big black pyramid that had been bothering me since I got out of Tortage. You can't really miss it, giant squatting monstrosity visible from clear across the zone, and so obviously a Den O Evil that it was something of a relief to actually be eligible for all the lead-in quests involved. There's actually two instances in that neck of the woods, and we decided to warm up with a go...
So I swallowed my Stygian pride and am now a world-wandering mercenary. I was hoping to get all the way through Khopshef Province without having to go elsewhere to level, but I'm an explorer at heart, so it was always going to be an inevitable thing I guess. Its an opportunity in disguise I think, and an opportunity to spread The Good News to ignorant foreign savages! Its quite interesting to learn how much the two alternative zones, The Wild Lands of Zelata and Conall's Valley, differ from the Stygian adventure zone, and its more than just the...
The spreading of the Good News continues, and after a bit of 'normal' MMO play in Age of Conan, my own personal story picks up again, at level 30, with a very sarcastic seer chap on the docks of Khemi taking it on himself to supervise my ascent to glory, fame, and hopefully no small amount of lamentation of the women! Being left to one's own devices for a whole ten levels is a bit of a jarring break, to be honest, after the rather personal attention of the first twenty levels in Tortage. Personally, I don't mind...
Its a good job I don't read the Internet really; if I did, I might get quite dispirited about Age of Conan's apparent and universal failure to make anyone happy at all! There's probably a Wordpress template some place you can download which fills in the bulk of the now commonplace 'I am quitting AoC and Here is Why' post, and even traditional contrarian that I am, I start to get bizarre mental images in which I'm a eager naive country rat, struggling with a suitcase and politely trying to fight my way up a cruise liner gangplank, against...
Onward with Age of Conan then! I'm not sure what I was expecting to be honest, and find myself in a somewhat unique position, playing an MMO that I didn't really choose myself. Oh, certainly, I picked up the box, and plonked down the credit card details, but as noted previous, I'm mostly there to keep in touch with friends. I'm finding it gives me a strangely detached view on the game itself; neither fanboy, nor hater. My expectations can't be crushed, or confirmed, simply because I didn't have any in the first place; I did no...
Demonstrating my typical innate ability to identify popular trends, and then jump completely the wrong way, (and months late at that!) just when what seems to be most of the MMO-o-Sphere is busy unsubscribing from Age of Conan in disgust, and then writing lengthy posts on how bad it is to warn others, I've signed up! Its a long story, some of which is to do with a coincidental burn-out and unsubsciption of my own, with Tabula Rasa, noted previously. Some of it is to do with my own ongoing psychosis. I think I'm close to inviting...