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Daily Column

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First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM
World of Warcraft - 52 BPM
EverQuest 2 - 18 BPM
Lord of the Rings Online - 18 BPM
Warhammer Online - 14 BPM
EVE Online - 12 BPM
Lineage 2 - 12 BPM
Guild Wars - 10 BPM
Vanguard - 9 BPM
Dungeons and Dragons Online - 7 BPM

[Contest Update: A Dream of Mirror Online giveaway is rolling along.]

Yesterday, columns were such an easy game to play (Thanks Lennon and McCartney). Ironically, I called for help (10 points if you see the segue there) on the topic of whether new titles, and specifically Age of Conan can overcome the hurdle of entering the market four years after the big dogs like World of Warcraft. The discussion rages on, two pages worth, in the Loading... forums.

Our coverage of Age of Conan has been second to none. I'm not boasting or blowing propaganda here. It's true. You can see for yourself. There are other MMOG sites out there though and a spattering of them have posted AoC previews.

Sean Molloy had preview duties at 1UP and as expected he dished it out in well-written 1UP style focusing on the single player portion of the game. Single player is a novel idea whereby the player is introduced to a storyline while wandering the earth without another living soul that will talk or interact with you. You're alone versus the PvE environment. I'm sure it's a lot like how Rosie O'Donnell feels on any given day.

"Here's how Age of Conan works: During the day, you quest with other people in the traditional style. Random NPCs offer quests to kill 30 of this or gather 5 of that. You group, you slay, you craft. But an NPC in the basement of a tavern allows you to switch day to night at will. (OK, OK, so I was exaggerating a bit back a couple paragraphs ago: Technically, you can group up with people any time you want by switching to daytime -- but the mission design certainly doesn't lead you in that direction.) During the evening hours, the architecture and landscape's the same, but there's not another human-controlled soul in sight. At night, this is your island -- or instance, in the parlance -- and essentially a separate game. It has different quests. Its NPCs move, live, and die by your hand only." - Read the rest of the preview at 1UP.

Sean gives a relatively, and by relatively I mean completely rosy opinion of the game, albeit he points out that he focused on the single player portion.

Next up, my pal Jon Wood at MMORPG delivers a "Age of Conan - Beta Preview... Preview", which is apparently a preview of a preview that he intends to write later. You're crazy like a fox Jon. All your double-talk and backtracking will keep the forum dogs off of your trail. Mr. Wood, that's a porn star name if I ever saw one, briefly looks at character creation, basic combat and the initial story. Once again, a positive preview, though admittedly he hasn't played the game very much.

"Suddenly, I'm carefully choosing which attacks I want to use and I have to do a little bit of keyboard dancing to activate the combo and perform the appropriate swing. I find that I can't just mindlessly spam 1,2,3 - 1,2,3 like I usually do until the other guy falls down. I will be very interested to see how this plays out at higher levels." - Read the rest of the preview at MMORPG.

Stephen Spiteri is the man responsible for the "official" preview at Warcry. The unofficial preview will apparently be written by somebody else. Stephen gives a broad-stroke preview of the game that is a superb read for someone who hasn't heard much about the game yet. AoC receives it's third positive preview in a row.

"Should you be excited about Age of Conan? You certainly should be! The surface has only been scratched in this WarCry preview, but with May 20 (May 17 for pre-order head-start eager beavers) only a dozen or so sleeps away, you're going to experience it all for yourself quite soon anyway. If you're still not convinced or are still unsure about the whole Age of Conan thing, then find a friend with a spare Collector's Edition buddy-key handy, and come release, give it a go and sink yourself in Funcom's Hyboria.

For Funcom, creating Age of Conan has been a labour of love, and that is devastatingly obvious in the fruits they have beared in this Crom-tastic game!" - Read the rest of the preview at Warcry.

Last up is another of my pals, Cameron Sorden. You may know him as the superman who used to deliver the daily headlines here at TenTonHammer.com. Cam was drugged, bound in chains and taken by slave barge to Massively where he must write a blog each day to receive his virtual bread and water. It's like a medieval Black Hawk Down, but we don't have time to go and get him. Hang in there Cam! Mr. Sorden has blessed us with an excellent article on the state of the game, getting now to the tasty bits like stability, load times and gameplay.

"Given all of the stories that I'd heard about Age of Conan's crash to desktop, messed-up graphics, crawling framerates, and horrendous load times, I was prepared for the worst when I finally got to fire it up for the first time. The very first time I started the game, I did have some framerate issues and stuttering in character creation. I also had to restart the client when it froze loading the newbie area for the first time. After that, however, the game was as smooth as silk for me. I took five different characters to level 9 or 10, I didn't have one single crash to desktop, and I can literally count the graphics bugs and problems I saw on one hand." - Read the rest of the preview at Massively

Four positive previews in a row. This game has to be great right?

Let me preface this brief opinion piece by saying that I like the Funcom team. If I am biased in any way it is in their favour. This is also an opinion piece starring my opinion in the lead role. Other editors at this publication do not share my opinion. In fact, I don't know of another writer in the entire TenTonHammer.com corporate structure that agrees with my opinion on a majority of topics. They're a peculiar bunch.

So here is the state of AoC in my opinion. You asked.

I'm in closed beta, not that FilePlanet Open Beta that is going on. I can level past 13. I supposedly have the stable client and not the unstable client (though I've had a few of those when I worked at an ISP).

My experience has been thus, I slogged waist-deep through quicksand for over 30 hours dragging a crate of rocks that was being held closed by an anchor to download the client. This bloody beta client is enormous. It's larger than 50 Cent's ego.

Given the sheer magnitude of the download the install was a breeze. It locked, loaded and installed as fast as any other MMOG title.

My gameplay experience has not been as bereft of issues as that of my comrades here at TenTonHammer.com or apparently as that of the writers that I so lovingly linked to earlier in this column. I'd say that my machine is an above average machine. Here are the specs.

1000 Watt Modular Silent Power Supply
Intel® CoreT2 Extreme Quad-Core QX6700

4GB PC6400C4 DDR2
(Corsair)
160 GiG Seagate SATA 7200 RPM
X2
18X DVD-RW WITH LIGHTSCRIBE
Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB DDR
Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer

Windows XP Professional

In my humble opinion that's a pretty decent machine. It's even liquid cooled, though had I known it would make so much damn noise I would never have purchased that feature. I just wanted to say "liquid cooled computer" to my wife and have her ask how much that was going to cost.

My load times are long. My client locks up regularly. I'm going to grab a NVIDIA card and see if that makes a difference. The flashy NVIDIA pre-screen on the way into the game tells me that those sneaky NVIDIAns may have something to do with this and forking over some money for a 8800 series card might ease my pains. Funcom makes no bones about the fact that isn't a game like World of Warcraft that will run on a computer you found at the pawn shop.

When I can play, I enjoy myself. The gameplay that I have experienced is superb, but this is a beta and it is difficult, even challenging to preview a game that isn't done, especially when you can't keep it upright. I'll grab a new video card today (thought that 1950 XTX is a brilliant card) and report back.

There you have it. I can't truly preview the game for you. Dozens of you mailed me and posted in the forums yesterday asking for my opinion. I can't give it to you, yet! Thanks for caring though. It makes me feel all warm inside, kind of like how I feel when Phil buys me a scotch.

Until tomorrow. Lay it on the line! The Loading Forums await you. Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

--
[A big thanks to Phil Comeau for putting together the links, headlines and taglines.]

7 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 52 in May! 1071 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

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Contests

Dream of Mirror Online Giveaway

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Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com. Thanks to Phil Comeau for doing the heavy lifting with the links, headlines and taglines!

- John "Boomjack" Hoskin and the Ten Ton Hammer Team

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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