As others have put it, Blizzard has never made a truly original game. Rather, they are masters of bringing other ideas together to make something that is well designed and well polished.

However, it is like the Kleenex of facial tissue. The vernacular has adopted the phrase "WoW-clone" because WoW has become the public definition of 3rd-Person action MMOGs, and I tend to speak in the vernacular most of the time.

psychobaka

ArmyofJuan

HappyWulf

@ArmyofJuan: Huh, I thought that credit went more to Tolkien, or the general mythology all fantasy is based off of.

iwanttobeasleep

PVP minigames reminds me of this comic:

[www.darklegacycomics.com]

Tei

Crashes every 30 minutes, no balance at all, stupid PvP gameplay where everyone just use white damage since you can run out of combos etc.

I think Il wait for some other MMO to fill my PvP needs.

The_Phiphler

Dopeski

i do thank you

and the world of conan is far from dull and boring. but im just assuming you would have to be a fan of the conan/conan universe to be anywhere near excited for this game

I think what people are failing to realise when saying this is too much like Warcraft and to high fantasy etc, is that Conan pretty much brought all of that to us in the first place. Conan is one of the originators of the epic fantasy genre we all know and love today

ArmyofJuan

bhess13

I'll give it a shot.

Lord Orion's jacket is hypnotizing me into it as well.

Patient

i was looking forward to this game as i love MMO's and have for many years now, however i am worried about several posts on this thread like desterions ;/

EmeraldCockroach

darvos

islandknight

xIvSlowDeath420

Don't get me wrong, I like WoW but give credit where credit is due and don't use the phrase 'wow-clone' because WoW is a clone itself.

Alith

Yes that's exactly what most people would think of, another unoriginal Mario idea.

YourAnthony

psychobaka

ohhello

CTF is just one of the minor mini battlegrounds available. The thing you do on the side. The main PvP is in city building and siege battles around battlekeeps.

NorthernAvengeR

If they don't... meh. I'm not about to swap MMOs now, and abandon hundreds of days /played, i'll just cancel my account.

Lov3

But yeah... say "mummorpuhga" around me and you'll get smacked... :)

Reverend_MoJo

R.I.P. World of Warcraft PVP: November 23rd 2004 - June 7th 2005

Athest

(NASA and NAFTA are well known. The next two are Internet bureaus, and the third is a well-known character encoding.)

GUI is usually pronounced "goo-ee". In general, it is more correct to use the pronounced form of an acronym whenever it is reasonably pronounceable and that is the common usage.

As a programmer who has done tons of GUI work, I can say without hesitation that "goo-ey" is the accepted pronunciation.

Now, there is a difference between acronyms like GUI and NASA and initialisms. When you tell someone your initials, that's what you're giving. They take periods in their appropriate rendering, although these are now often omitted, which is blurring the line between initialisms and acronyms in our language.

Example: My initials are K.L.M.

The United States of America is not the USA ("ooh-suh"), but rather the U.S.A. (spelled out).

Technically, "USA" is not correct. So I hope you do remember this:

It's NASA, not N.A.S.A.
It's IANA, not I.A.N.A.
It's GUI, not G.U.I.

But it's U.S.A., not USA.

-- Katie Lin M., 4th Order Grammar Nazi

P.S. It's not "PS".

P.P.S. This game looks pretty good, and I actually love this style of trailer, where the concepts of the game (which are completely invisible or easily missed in a plain trailer) are described in detail.

It's quite nice to see a developer actually take the time to show a presentation like this to prospective players. It's the kind of thing that looks like intra-company footage that normally doesn't get revealed to the general public (which is a shame, really).

Still, I definitely agree with Moonshadow101's sentiment that these universes with well-established characters tend to make poor MMO settings. I mean, look at LOTRO. That game is a pile of junk specifically because the fact that you're in Middle Earth seems completely ancillary to who your character is and what they're doing. This is one of few things that I think WoW definitely excels at.

Regarding deathbunny's comments, I too long to see the tools for making a game come together come together themselves. The current way of doing things is, in a word, wrong. The tools available for connecting the dots on asset management are mediocre at best, and tend to be extremely overpriced.

I'd be interested in rolling the Blender toolset into a cohesive open-source asset management pipeline. That would be an exciting project. Painting textures directly onto surfaces is only the snow atop the iceberg. The opportunity to entirely discard the headache of UV mapping is most interesting. Aside from that, the ability to give the UV mapping decisions over to the computer could enable huge rendering optimizations and improve texture fidelity (by reducing mapping overlap in areas of dense geometry (like the ends of spheres and cones).

UV mapping headaches will only get worse as triangle counts soar concurrent with the real-time raytracing field...

Anyway, this game looks quite good visually. What I wonder is whether the gameplay measures up. So far the only person in the PVP beta who commented was very positive, so I think it's logical to reserve judgement for now.

P.P.P.S. Wow, that was one long P.P.S.

-- Katie the Long-Winded

fennecfanatic

I'll prolly preorder AoC just because my WoW guild is so obsessed with it, whether we stick with it or return to WoTLK remains to be seen.

hamandcheeseUK

Yeah there are some bugs but overall it was pretty polished and definitely not as bad as the people who say it is horrendous.

Some of the people having problems were the ones trying to run it on a PC that didn't meet the minimum system requirements and were trying to force it to work.

NullsRevenge

avern

Siege pvp is supposed to be the only PvP with any significant reward (battlekeeps, which grant resources which are needed for certain crafting). The minigames are supposed to be there for when you're bored, much like the drunken brawling.

Koztah

Fyren

Kusakup

PokeSmot

I digress.

For me, AoC has been a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to hype. There are times when I'm really not interested in it because as ambitious as it is, it still won't topple WoW. Then they release some new information that gets me interested again. Take this video for instance, I can see myself getting invested in all those game modes. And the amount of guild involvement in the world has always intrigued me. Building homes and towns/cities sounds like a lot of fun.
In the end, I'm not sure what to think of this game. It looks and sounds like a lot of fun, but so did Hellgate: London, and that game is horrible. I think I'll have to see what kind of following this garners before getting into it.

Bluecell

desterion

Sir_Crocidile

This game is beautiful.

:'((

Shocky

wtb edit button. =(

GrassJelly

GrassJelly

I think my next hope is this APB by the Crackdown devs...

Communist_Gamer

The beta feels so much like Guild Wars it's not even funny.

AndrewDB

Innovation is not the province of MMOs. At this point, I would settle for a radical deevolution of the form to a pre-RPG state, when an actual game was the underlying mechanism for playing--like Subspace's asteroids-like gameplay.

AoC's innovation is to make it less of a pointless wank by involving you a little more in the decisions of combat. If it doesn't do that, then it will certainly be the same old shit, but I hold out hope that it will be interesting enough to keep playing for a while.

What I know *won't* ever be interesting for me ever again is a setup for combat and magic so simple that it could (and should) be automated, yet the council of satanic underlings responsible for the 'game design' (in quotes to indicate that it is a farce to use the term this way) focus on ways to keep the system clunky and obtuse, so that people cannot subvert their idiocy with interface improvements (like click healing)

Battlegrounds aren't what make this old and tired. If CS players can still be playing de-dust until the wee hours, then no amount of repetition of simple, abstract goals will *ever* matter one way or another for innovation. CTF, team-based conflict, and hopping around impatiently while you wait for match-making to complete are staples of gaming in general--they're the game design equivalent of a survival instinct, or flippers. The equipment it takes to get conflict started and structured is a technique--like using 3d models or FX. It's not an area for significant innovation. Any innovation is simply a variation on the theme. Is the flag a briefcase instead of a flag? Does only one team have a flag? Does one team have capture points and the other team have flags? Is one team on offense and the other on defense? These are largely meaningless in comparison to the actual game you're playing.

When I was playing capture the flag with light vs dark jedi in Jedi Outcast, I wasn't angry that there wasn't an innovation of some kind to set up the basic conflict--because that game, with its acrobatics and various powers, was as fun as playing santa claus at a stip club.

AoC, even if it turns out to be the ideal implementation of the combos and aiming for ranged shots--will still be lightyears away from the various great arcade beat em ups that we've seen on consoles recently.

The innovation I crave, and that I think *you* crave, is something along the lines of a Call of Duty 4--where our beloved games, with tight presentation and a sense of being 'complete' and triple-A--with replay value that resides solely in the greatness of their core experience, make the next step and build worlds somewhere in between what we consider an MMO, and what we consider a normal online multiplayer game.

This is really, in the end, a matter of resources. No triple-A team yet devised can produce the volume and quality of game assets demanded by a typical MMO *and* spend the time checking those assets for design and their behavior in the world. In a way, the MMO came too early for the tools of the industry.

What's really holding gaming back right now is tools for artists. If Pipelines can be developed that bring together FX, animations, and the configuration elements that objects and characters in a game require *with* the 3d tools, and unwrapping/texturing can be done directly on a 3d object, without need to switch between disparate and mutually hostile programs (in terms of memory usage), then the ability to tweak assets will become more viable, and ultimately, teams will be able to make these kinds of experiences--with the appropriate amount of iterated crap and *still* produce a good game to play underneath it all--without providing a publisher with prohibitive risk.

In any case, this game has nipples.

deathbunny

FP mind in rewind

Agreed, but the subscription fee is mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

lifeinthefridge

Seems like all the cool stuff is in the nuances, rather than in your face. That may hurt it a lot.

Ishmae1

JorgieX

Unstop

Detre

Reverend_MoJo

zombieistired

But all in all it does look good I just wish the races where more diverse I mean human vs human vs human doesn't tickle my pickle

taftsearlobe33

NorthernAvengeR

Yeah, you have to aim your bow. And you can double-tap dodge left/right/back, and double-tap lunge forward to have a %chance at a stun attack. You also have to direct your swings in accordance with the other person's defence if you don't want to hit for 4, and time your combos.

The PvP beta was a blast.

Koztah

necrotoxin

*Crosses fingers and contemplates trying it out*

ungivenglory

bzr_wzr

Until he becomes king of Aquilonia, Conan himself is pretty much exactly what the player characters in an MMO are.

Koztah

taftsearlobe33

All I can really say about the pvp is that it looks somewhere between WoW and GW except that you have to aim your bow.

sohpi

Wingsoverglory

I'm sick of the middle earth mythical fantasy RPG/MMORPG. We've seen these "Adventure" titles for decades and little has changed. Same swords and shields environment that looks like the next RPG.

Plus all those mini games are pretty much the WoW battlegrounds I got sick of last year. How about some innovation.

huginn

JonRemedy

Too bad AoC, I had really considered you - this footage looks amazing.

Candlejack

SapphireC

bzr_wzr

Project Thanatos

Derigor

Besides, what's the appeal of it if you can't actually be the main character? One of the things that makes WoW work is that the rank and file troops are actually kinda cool. In settings like this, that are so firmly rooted in the specific personalities of certain heroes, who wants to be a nameless redshirt?

Moonshadow101

Aeralindor

iameleveneight

logicaldefense

AndrewG009

Not as bad as saying "El oh El" or "Oh Em Gee" out loud, though.

Bluecell

vincentprice