That Whisper You Hear In The Wind Is The Snickering Of Darkfall Fans

Eurogamer reviews Age of Conan’s latest expansion, pulls it 2 hours later. As noted in the title, there is a touch of schadenfreude involved for mavens of a certain “STRICTLY FOR THE HARD CORE, ONLY FOR THE ARMY STRONG” PvP MMO.

Funcom would have whined about getting a low score but they were busy with a twenty-two hour unexpected downtime when launching the expansion.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    Oh well at least they learned from the previous fiasco.

  • Mark Asher

    And so the race to have a review up on day one of a game’s release results in a shoddy review — wow, what a surprise.

  • Freakazoid

    There’s a hardcore fanbase for AoC?

  • http://n3rfed.blogs.com Cosmik

    “Oh well at least they learned from the previous fiasco.”
     
    Only in pulling a shoddy review. Not in not commissioning a shoddy review in the first place.

  • Vetarnias

    Does anyone know who wrote the original review?

  • JeremyT

    Is the redacted review out there on the interwebs somewhere?

  • http://n3rfed.blogs.com Cosmik

    Quintin Smith wrote the original review. Thus far I have not been able to find a copy of it.

  • Vetarnias

    @Cosmik
    I found the review, but it was like working with the Rosetta Stone. Thanks to those snippets quoted in the comments and on the Conan forums, I found a blog that reprinted it without attribution.
    I also put up a copy of it as a backup.

  • Vetarnias

    No edit button, eh?  The first link is this.

  • JeremyT

    Thanks, Vetarnias. I’m checking it out currently; right away, I find this particular statement a bit curious:
    …the place often feels less fantastical than you might expect from the Conan universe and more like a wild, uneducated stab at Chinese history with monsters doodled in the margins…
    I’m not a huge Conan lore-o-phile, but my understanding is that Howard’s universe is supposed to be a mishmash of pseudo-history interspersed with moderate doses of folklore and mysticism. For those more familiar with the setting, does Smith’s statement here even make any sense?

  • Goodgimp

    He harps in the review about the lack of level cap increase, but it’s semantics. The expansion added AA advancement, which you funnel your experience points towards. This unlocks new abilities and new feats.

    IMO, this is the way to go about things. Since you’re L80 the content is immediately available to you, there is still plenty of progression, but you have more control over what you get when.

    I like Quintin Smith but the review did not seem very well researched or in depth.

  • Gx1080

    Wanting a level cap and being confused with the amount of moves available is an oxymoron.
    In fact, whining because an expansion doesn’t fit your personal preferences is laaaame. I would have pulled out that too.

  • http://www.gamingtrend.com Jason

    No MMO (or expansion) can be adequately reviewed the day it releases.  Or the week it releases.  It generally takes 2-3 weeks to a month.  Why?  Because there’s simply too much crap to experience, and a beta server is not the live server with everything that can (and does) go wonky.
    GG.

  • LabRat001

    “No MMO (or expansion) can be adequately reviewed the day it releases.”

    Oh I dunno, I seem to remember Gates of Discord for EQ1 was accurately reviewed within a couple of hours of going live.

    “Broken!”

  • Drakks

    I actually like AoC.. I think it’s the most enjoyable MMO out at the moment. =\

  • Andy O.

    I disagree, The reason I dropped UO and picked up EQ was because of a Week 1 Preview or Review.
    I think you can review a MMO on release (sounded like this guy got at least 2-3 weeks to play the game before talking about it), you don’t think there are 50 websites ready to bombard the tubes with reviews of Cataclysm once the NDA goes up? Yes, this is a terrible example, but just saying you can get a feeling for what an MMO is going to be like. Most reviewers have had enough experience in lotro, EQ, AC, DnD, AoC, WoW, SRO, etc. etc. etc.  to get a feeling for when an MMO has the stuff or if it’s an epic fail.
    I got on Champions Beta and over the course of a few weeks was able to figure out the game wasn’t going to be my cup of tea, but I also had a pretty good understanding of where it might succeed.
    I guess I am trying to say if you can’t win over a (paid) reviewer in 4-8 hours, what chance do you have of winning over a new customer?

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  • Aufero

    I have an idea pulled from the mists of time for Eurogamer called “editing.” It involves reading things before you publish them to see if they need revision. (Or are any good in the first place.)  I hear there are still people who practice this dark art!
     
    Somewhere.

  • Drakks

    *I guess I am trying to say if you can’t win over a (paid) reviewer in 4-8 hours, what chance do you have of winning over a new customer?*

    If you’d read the review it’s pretty clear the guy didn’t like the game before he played it,  had no idea what he was doing in game, hadn’t played the game previously, and couldn’t offer any details of what the expansion actually brought to the table for existing players.

    His reveiw was that he didn’t like Age of Conan, without any explanation aside from what they didn’t do like WoW. It was a very poorly done review, in my opinion.

  • JeremyT

    Andy O.I guess I am trying to say if you can’t win over a (paid) reviewer in 4-8 hours, what chance do you have of winning over a new customer?

    I agree with this sentiment with respect to standalone games, where the first few hours are going to be vital in determining whether I’ll continue playing. Four hours told me everything I ever needed to know about Aion, for example.

    I think expansions present a rather different case. While some expansions (say, Cataclysm) may be aimed at providing a “brand new” experience for new players, most are designed to enhance and extend an existing product and appeal to current and former players. Such expansions require that you have some context to even begin to evaluate them, and it appears to me that Smith lacked that context.

    Smith’s viewpoint may be valid from his perspective: that is, as a guy who seemingly hasn’t been playing the original game, who was given a max level character and set loose. But that’s not the experience that any consumer will ever have, so I question whether such a review is really useful to anybody (even if it is factually correct).

  • Davide

    I’ve often wondered how you can make a game easier to level than WoW and I think Funcom came up with a way.

    you get the option of switching from ‘Points’ to ‘Time’, meaning you can click on what you want in the AA tree and it fills up slowly whether you’re logged in or not.

    Leveling while you are not even actually playing! The only thing they missed is that they should charge players for this service…

  • Brask Mumei

    Text of the review seemed quite fair to me.   The author was quite candid about where he stood on the AoC experience wagon.  I also didn’t see any cognitive disjunction between complaining about too many skills and complaining about lack of a level cap increase.  His point was rather accurate: if you already have a broad base of skills, adding more skills doesn’t really feel like a ding.  The level cap, on the other hand, is a well understood metric for advancing.
    Mind you, I disagree with him that increasing level cap is the right answer.  I think the fun of the exploration should stand on its own.
    He wasn’t even harsh in the review – from the reactions here I was hoping for some Derek Smart grade vitriol.  Instead it reads like a soft-ball review.
    I think pulling the review is a silly idea.  The review should stand.  Instead they should merely now add another review by their AoC expert to give a perspective from that vantage point next.

  • Brask Mumei

    So much for WYSIWYG!
    In the text editor everything has nice double spaces between paragraphs, but when posted it runs together.
    *sigh*

  • Vetarnias

    In all the review (I was actually too busy copy-pasting this morning to even read it thoroughly), I think the most jarring sentence is one of the captions (which the first blogger didn’t reproduce, but which I got from the Google cache): “Behold the magical, mystical land of… China! They should have rolled with it and made Age of Conan: Conan vs. Communism.” That’s just meh.  R. E. Howard died over a decade before the Communist Party won the civil war, and it should be clear that the Conan saga, as JeremyT pointed out above, takes place in the mist-covered distant past; I remember that H. P. Lovecraft famously took issue with that part of Howard’s writing: that he was playing fast and loose with etymology and ancient history to insert his fantasy world as the precursor of the real world.  Real-world inspiration for fantasy settings is so widespread as to be sickening, but Kara-Tur, another Oriental setting (for AD&D), isn’t pretending to be the ancestor of China, Japan, etc., even though it borrows all of their trappings; the entire world in which Kara-Tur is set exists parallel to our world, not as its ancestor (as Howard did).

  • Vetarnias

    I forgot to add: Captions are usually done by the editorial staff, not the writer. So, if that’s the same at Eurogamer, this line is the site’s doing, not Smith’s.
    Apart from that, I played the original Conan (two years ago), but not this expansion, and I can’t say I find anything particularly wrong with this review.

  • Iconic

    Thanks Vetarnias for the pulled review.
    The one part of it that stuck out to me as being rather pedantic was the complaint that there is no raise in the level cap, and then later on complaining about alternate advancement, and how it sucked because it didn’t represent a drastic change in play style.  I think most intelligent people understand that AA is a replacement for leveling, so it should probably be compared to leveling in terms of what options it opens up and how it feels.
    To be quite honest, I have considered giving AoC a second chance, and the only thing that’s really prevented that is a lack of faith in the technical prowess of funcom.

  • http://n3rfed.blogs.com Cosmik

    Regarding the lack of a level cap increase, the reviewer is on the outside looking in – the AoC community was asked if they wanted a level cap increase in the expansion and the vote ended up as “no”.
    That likely brings up a whole new kettle of fish as to whether people reviewing expansions should play the vanilla game in the first place.

  • joker

    I wish you’d write these little jabs up for aion, but then again, ncsoft would actually have to release a patch for that to ever happen

  • http://n3rfed.blogs.com Cosmik

    Then again, he could have been one of the few that voted “yes”, but the impression I get from reading the review is that the reviewer did not play the original game.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    Speaking as someone who is a Conan lore nerd and has tried the Rise of the Godslayer beta the Chinese feel is right for the IP.
    If the only thing you know about Conan is Arnie then you wouldn’t see it but there is something of an oriental Doctor Fu Manchu style yellow peril threat that occasionally emerges in the stories.

  • Buboe

    Call me stupid, but I just read the review, and it makes me want to play the game.

  • hitnrun

    Eurogamer is such a…not quite “niche”, but certainly a unique creature with a following readership distinct from front-running American-centric gaming sites that would slit throats for a 1 day exclusive and fire senior editors for being too harsh with advertiser’s products.
    Its odd that they feel the need to piss these reviews out as fast as possible, as if it will cost them traffic to be a couple days late while they check to see if the person they commissioned for an expansion review actually played the original game.

  • Drey

    On a semi-related note, Frank Frazetta passed away this week; he did many of the Conan illustrations.

  • Kaib

    The only problem I have with the review is how can this guy review an expansion that is mostly designed to operate at lv80, when he has not experience at that level? You can’t!.  Seriously, you don’t give a guy that played WoW to 45, WotLK, provide him with a lv 70 rogue and tell him to try out the new skills.  He won’t have a clue what to do in a fight but click buttons.  I played AoC to 54, I wouldn’t know how to review 80 abilities because I havent’ experienced what the original 80s could do, retarded to try.
    oh well, i did enjoy the game, think part of the kill for me was i got tired of roaming around solo due to guild spread out all the time, and always getting jumped for 2-5 on pvp server lol.  I was a PoM so I could handle 2 at times, but still, got bored, raiding didn’t seem good enough, etc…  i would possibly go back and play again but currently enjoying life without an MMO.
    My gaming future:
    Torchlight ($10 on steam will try it out)
    Monster Hunter Tri (Wii)
    Wow Catalysm (haven’t played since BC 2yrs ago)
    SWTOR
    Diablo3

  • wufiavelli

    I did not read the review.  But judging from the comments it sucked in the way all Eurogamer reviews suck.
    Eurogamer reviews to games are basically what the annoying smooth jazz player with the soul patch is to jazz.
    They just try to hard to be high class liberal.  They come off as the annoying Ignorant Political Correct guy at parties.
    The quotes about china basically prove this point.
     
     
     

  • Jeff

    I think you can review an MMO on day one, assuming you’ve played the beta for a while, but there should be a lot of caveats in there. It doesn’t hurt to call it “first impressions” instead of a review, or if it simply has to be a review make sure you are conveying that these are your impressions from beta and then follow it up a month later with a more thorough review.

  • http://www.gamingtrend.com Jason

    Exactly.  Beta Server != Live Server.  Also, considering /no/ MMO is ever truly ‘finished’, the first month of a game’s launch (or an expansion’s) is to give them time to work out all the bugs that being live will generate and to patch them.  IF it’s still a buggy mess after 30 days?  Then you can freely slam it in a review.