What!? That might be what your thinking at this very moment, but allow me to explain. When I first started playing LoTRO I knew exactly what I was getting into. A MMORPG that was basically a clone of WoW but in the Lord of the Rings universe. I expected many quests, I knew it had a very weak PvP system and that most of the game play was based on questing and raids. That was ok with me. Being a huge LoRT fan I was looking forward to meeting many of the characters from the books, exploring the lands and partaking in the LoTR lore. I was not disappointed. For the first few months I immensely enjoyed the game, up until I finished the main storyline and had to wait for future updates. At this point I started to look else where for my MMORPG fix. Which brings me to AoC.
AoC is a very different story. We were told that it was a revolutionary game, a game that would set it apart from all the other MMORPGs out there and re-invent the genre. However since the launch of Aoc I can say that this is far from true. I am currently a lev 35 Demonologist and am bored to tears as I play through the game. The revolutionary new combat system is only noticeable if you play a melee character which I am not. Then there is the endless quest grinding to lev 80. As I play through the game, it has become more like a chore or work then actual playing. I’ve been at level 35 for about a week and a half now and every time I have some time to game, I decide to play something else.
I have played about 45 hrs worth of AoC to make it to lev 35. In those 45 hrs I have done NOTHING but mindless, boring quest grinding. So much so that I can’t bring myself to continue the game. I am not quiting though. The game promises epic PvP battles which I would love to partake in, however I do not know if I will ever make it that far as the 150 hrs of game play to reach lev 80 might be too much for me.
This brings me to my next point. Why the hell do many MMORPG require you to waste 100+ hrs of your time before you get to the good parts of the game? AoC is the perfect example of this. “Hey we have an awesome game where players can build there own cities, attack other players and cities and battle for dominance. Oh, btw, none of that is possible until you have played 100+ hrs in our boring as ass retarded game.”
Here’s an idea, if you make a really fun game, don’t add an ton of bullshit before it. I’m not sure how many of you played the first Jedi Knight game, but you didn’t get a lightsaber for the first 6-7 hrs of the game. Guess what? When Jedi Knight 2 came out they decided not to be retards and gave you a lightsaber right away. You know why? The game was called Jedi FUCKIN Knight! Nobody wanted to play those first 6-7 hrs without a lightsaber. MMORPG developers need to stop being stupid and cut out the bullshit. I don’t want to waste 100+ hrs of my life before I get to anything that is remotely fun. And if that is the case then shut the hell up about how awesome your game is and say “Boring as hell for the first 100 hrs, then it gets good”. People then will not get mad when they start playing the game cause they know what to expect.
I’ll try to continue in AoC and give my review once I hit lev 40, however it probably won’t be pretty. Honestly, if there was ever a reason to buy a top level account from one of those selling sites it’s AoC.
I agree, the 100+ hrs is just a time sink. I have a few friends who have just taken up WoW and have managed to grind to 40. They are looking @ the lvl 70 Cap (soon to be 80) and are thinking that it is not really worth the effort, espically when you look at the ammount of time it will take. I keep saying come to 70 come see instances, kara etc but they only see 1000+ quests that they have to grind in order to get there.
What I get out of this is:
“WAH, WAH, WAH!! I want to be max level NOW!!”
Sounds like alot of people I know who are stuck on the WOW instant gratification, or even Guild Wars instant Max Level PVP system.
For many the so called “End Game” is not the real game, but the journey in its entirety to max level. There are other options than just questing to get there. You can grind mobs (now that is really boring) or you can craft.
Funcom already makes it way too fast to level as it is (collector ed ring that boosts xp, and a really fast normal xp rate). It should take you a long time to get to max level, for there is much to see and do in these types of games. Spending the time to properly explore the world and build those cities from the ground up should net you a great sense of accomplishment and not a “waste of f’in time” like you think of it.
Instead of ranting and raving about what they should not and will not give you, perhaps you should just admit that Conan is not the game for you and install guild wars and create a lvl 20 and jump into their pvp games.
I totally agree. I got to 44 and gave up trying to level myself it was too boring. I started to get some power levelling but it wasn’t long before all the officers in my guild decided to go play Vanguard. I cancelled my account a day before it re-activated and pretty much just play games that promise fun from the start now.
Nice point about Jedi Knight too, I remember the first thing I did in that game was minimise to look up the cheats.
100% agree.
This is why i never understood the Korean style MMO’s. They took 100’s of hours of grinding. Not the ‘fast’ leveling of WoW, etc.
Granted it was only the beta, but i played Lineage II for a couple months, and that was insane. I felt like i barely made it anywhere in the time.
While I am not crazy about the slow pace of Eve, this is one of the things they do very well. After only a couple weeks (played or logged off), you can be useful in PvP.
To me this whole thing is related to a much deeper problem with MMOs in general. I’m going to just paste a comment I made elsewhere a few days ago…
The idea of having a game play one way for the first 100 hours, and then play completely differently the moment you turn 70 (i.e., hit the level cap) is insane.
If I enjoyed having fun and meaningful things to do solo or in small parties my first 100 hours, why wouldn’t I want compelling content for that play style at hour 101? Conversely, why should players that only want to raid (or do high end PvP) be forced to suffer through a 100 hour solo/ small party grind to do it?
There are some fairly obvious ways to avoid this quandry, and surprisingly few MMOs have implemented any of them.
Haven’t played AoC because LOTRO is so good there’s no reason for me to even think about leaving.
@Meithar
You over simplified Guild Wars and their PvP. Yes you can instantly make a PvP character at max level, but you would not have the necessary skills and items ( which are acquired playing the PvE ) to even enjoy it because you would be too busy having you ass pounded by someone who put in a few hours and got what they needed.
Maybe “Mike” should spend less time gaming and more time learning about grammar and how to spell.
I don’t get people who don’t understand the “RPG” part of MMORPG. I understand *not liking* that aspect of the games, but then why play them?
There are plenty of great multiplayer games available where you don’t have to ‘level up’ a character. Why not play one of those rather than picking a genre where you do have to build a character from scratch, then whining about it.
A point has to be made on the first Jedi Knight game. It was Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, as in the sequel to Dark Forces 1. Dark Forces 1 was a shooter, so switching to lightsabers with no sort of gunplay time would make no sense to those who played DF1. A few hours of gunplay were required for the sake of the story. And they did a nice story on giving Kyle Katarn a Jedi background from seemingly nowhere. So yes, it was a Jedi Knight game, but it was also a Dark Forces sequel, and Dark Forces 1 wasn’t a lightsaber game.
I say if you want instant gratification, go play your PS3 or 360. The whole rpg part of mmorpg seems to get thrown out when actual character development and stunted imaginations collide . I mean If you want to cheat just say so. Who ever heard of striving for greatness right?
Some gamers have be so spoiled by caving devs that fold under the “I want it now” cries. And for the record I beta tested LOTR and played when it officially came out and I thought it was boring and vanilla as hell.
One other thing , you haven’t seen much at lvl 35. I have 2 characters over lvl 40 on a pvp server and I’m having lots of fun.
I’ve played AoC to level 50 and I hate to say it, but I started playing EQII out of boredom. Also, I’ve been haning out in SecondLife a bit…all of this after 3 years of WoW. I feel like a friggin addict on methadone…none of these other games quite does it. I keep waiting for WoLK like some junkie without his hit of smack. What the HELL is it about that game? I guess Blizz has just figured out something nobody else has…
The instances are really poorly designed which makes the grind even harder. With WoW you could do some interesting group instances but all the instances in AoC are annoying and frustrating. I never really liked LoTRO either so I can’t say it’s any better.
AGREED. Right after you play the first quest in this game, you’ve played them all. It’s the same formula as WoW: Go to the X on the map and kill and/or pick up some random stuff. The grinding in this game get’s ridiculous in later levels. Why should I have to pay all this money to play 100+ hours of a WoW clone before I get to any content that’s original? We’ve done the questing and grinding thing, there’s got to be at least some kind of way to make the grind interesting if not much faster, it makes perfect sense.
To RogueJedi86: Yes Jedi Knight was the sequel to Dark Forces, however that doesn’t change the fact that the game was called Jedi Knight. Everything about the game screamed Jedi. The game could have easily have had an intro that explained how Kyle Katarn became a Jedi without the gamer playing through the crappy intro levels.
It’s not a matter of wanting to be max level right away – it’s a matter of wanting to have fun right away. The leveling process and content of a game should be fun, not the punishment you have to wade through to get to the “good stuff”. I think if more games innovated at low levels, people would not care quite so much about rushing to max level – and the whole game would be fun.
I agree fully with this article. He’s not saying that he wants a max lvl charakter right away but he wants a story line that immerse you into the game and not a quest grinder to death. All of you who think RPG should be played as WoW (which is not much better then a grinder game) are sorribly mistaken because WoW isn’t a real RPG game to me. It’s only a time sucking grinding game where you do quest only to get to the max lvl to start playing in instances for 6-8 hours and when you have a real life with wife and kids that’s insane. No to speak of the lore in WoW and AoC. Tell me, why do i have to read the lore of game on the official web site, why can’t i learn the story of a game THROU the game itself like in Guild Wars PvE?
I hope many see the point in my words. And you kids don’t start flaming around how WoW is a great game please. It’s a big sh&% of a game. All of you WoW lovers haven’t played Dungeons&Dragons Pen&Paper RPG game, so most of you don’t even know what RPG realy is
Well I have to say I normaly enjoy your views on MMO`s but today I find your posting very dissapointing. The fact that your are not having fun in Aoc is ONLY your view of the game, so if you dont like it – DONT play it!
I really hate posts about how somebody is SO bored with a game but still play it – Go have fun with something else! Do you watch a sport tthat you find borring and then go onto a forum saying how borring it is , yet you are going to keep watching all the way to the championships?
The people that are enjoying it dont care that you arn`t having fun , they just want you to leave quietly, and not spoil thier fun.
I am having a BLAST playing Aoc, its the most fun I have ever had in an MMO, I have tried lots of games over the years, some of which I played for only one day – because I didn`t like them. Others I played for years because I found them to be fun
. People making posts about how they hate the game just make we want to tell them – Dont play if you arn`t having fun!
I stopped reading as soon as I saw “Lotro is better…”
Then I knew this was just one of those joke sites ..like notaddicted.com or something..
HAHA…you got me good though!
To think anyone would honestly say LOTRO is better than ANYTHING…
(Guts hurt from laughing)
I… must disagree with the titular statement, not because AoC is especially awesome, but because LotRO is the antithesis of awesome. AoC, at least, managed to hold my interest for a couple of weeks – LotRO did not manage to do it for a couple of hours, and I gave it multiple chances.
Regarding the larger point of MMOs not making the full ranger of content available for the entire game experience… that I agree with, and it’s certainly a problem with AoC, although it’s also a problem with, say, WoW, which doesn’t really even have much of a multiplayer component until you hit the level cap. At least WoW provides one with the option to craft from the start, though.
Every company says they’re game is going to revolutionise the genre. I mean no actually believed that AoC would bring all new styles of game play to the MMO genre, and it didn’t. It just like every other MMORPG, with prittier grafics and three (later five) attack buttons instead of 1
As for the whole haveing to “play through the boring parts first” idea… Well if you are spending all that time mindlessly grinding quest, despite thinking it’s boring as hell I can only conclude that you are a fucking idiot. If you don’t like it you should have stopped after one hour, not 45. It’s an MMO game so stop fucking playing it as though it were a single player game! Get some people together and start hitting some of the low level dungeons AoC has to offer instead!
Finally, to clear up your confusion regarding the acronym for Lord of the Rings: It’s LotR, with Lord of the Rings Online being LotRO.
I have played LOTRO and I have to say it is a well polished game but rather boring for the most part. It is just another MMO with the LOTRO look but not the feel. I end up having to walk for hours on end, but lucky I bought gold off a gold seller so I can truck around by horse as you have to grind your way to 35 level before you can have a mount. LOTRO is a total quest grind after quest grind like all the MMO’s.
AOC is the same too. Just combat is way more fun and the scenery is way more cool and huge. 40th level opens up some great multiplayer dungeons.
There is no point in comparing and I will drop AOC the minute Warhammer Online comes out as it will rival all the current MMOs.
About Jedi Knight:
It wasn’t 6 hours till you get to the light saber (Which I agree would have been very annoying).
It was more like the first 2 hours, and it did make you appreciate more the fact that you become a Jedi.
About the MMORPGs:
Totally agree with you. It is not that people should start on level 80, but there should be something FUN to do in the game even when you’re not high level.
When a game becomes a chore, is the exact time that it stops being a GAME :)
If it took you 45 hours to reach level 35 you are doing something terribly wrong… I hit level 80 with under 4 days played… might want to work on your grinding skills.
Am I missing something? Not one person here mentioned “story”. “Grinding” is a mind set of the desire to have all the options open at once. What is the point of having nothing left to look forward to? If you don’t think of it as a grind, then it isn’t. Quests are the essence of all heroic literature. Why play a game based on heroic literature if you don’t want to experience that atmosphere? The min-max way of playing an MMO is to gather as many quests as possible relating to an area and then go hit as many as possible. I do do that to save some walking but I actually hate having all those quests going on at one time. No hero ever has more than a couple of quests going on. How can you care about the story otherwise. If you don’t care about the story and enjoying the scenery, then you might as well play a console game or a shooter.
One thing this game could learn from City of Heroes is to instance practically EVERY quest and encourage more team play. I’m very sad at how infrequently the folks I encounter are interested in teaming up. In CoH it leads to more XP and more interesting “dungeon” raids.
MMORPGs in my opinion are basically broken. There needs to be a shift away from levels and back to skill based games. UO, Ryzom, and hopefully soon DarfFall. While still having a grind attached to them there is less of a MAX level = best game experience.
Developers have become lazy in design and have resorted to lowest common denominator for MMORPGs.
Saddest part is the sandbox games like UO and SWG have all been reduced to treadmill borefests. While i don’t intend to make this a ” I LOVE DARKFALL” reply i am very hopeful for this game. To me it will be a rebirth to MMORPGs and maybe will help lead the way for newer game releases.
As for AoC vs. LoTRO i am currently playing AoC. I got bored in the open beta of LoTRO. I require a higher amount of PvP in my MMOs and LoTRO is not designed for that and was from what i understood never a focus for Turbine. IF Turbine had made evil races as playable races and had serious faction based wars i would buy a lifetime subscription for me, my wife and my son without hesitation.
just another pissed off nerd wanting people to agree with him
/sigh
If this is how you feel about LotRO, WoW, and AoC, I really hope you give WAR a chance. All your complaints (in this post) will be addressed because all the fun doesn’t just come at the end game. The endgame is city-siege and keep RvR but you can participate in different forms of RvR all the way through the game from level 1-40.
Leave the demonologist now, dont look back. Its the gimpest least fun class of any MMO Ive played. Roll a necro or a ToS. Why people choose to judge games based upon the playing of a single class is beyond me. Can’t really offer you more advice than that. It also appears that by grinding boring quests you have played much group content. Putting grinding and boring in the same sentence is one of the cardinal tautologies people fall on.
To Dogengar: I have no problem with quests, but I do have a problem of having to do 1000+ quest that are mostly extremely simple and offer ZERO challenge. Having to walk from town A to town B to deliver a message or item is pointless. Games should have about 1/10th of the quests they do now, but they should all be challenging.
45 hours and only 35? now I’ll never say this game is good on anyway but if it has taken you that long to get to 35 you either don’t know WTF your doing or you’ve never played the game at all, and as to end game content there is none because the game in still beta no matter what people say and I’ll bet you good money that it will stay that till next year!!
Gotta agree with Daggo. Given that you can get from 1 – 20 in a relaxed day’s play, it definitely doesn’t take another 30-something hours to get from 21 – 35. That is absurd. Clearly you have NFI what you’re doing.
Grinding is boring.
Questing is boring, at least if quest design is limited to “kill 10 rats” (see point 1)
Doing things in groups is fun, at least for me.
While leveling my 3th toon in Wow i did almost only instances, it was real fun. If you take out the social part of a mmorpg it becomes what? A boring single player game?
Game designer should focus in creating entertaining experiences from level 1 to X
Wait…people, people…
Why are you answering this post…
It was all a joke. “He used the words “LOTRO” and “Better” in the same sentence.
We all know that was for laughs..
Geez…you people take things too seriously!
play a different char. demos are boring as hell till 50 and 60. played a ranger fist and it played like Thief, but i think melee chars are the most interesting ones, with the shield and combo system. in essence: you choose to play the most boring profession of the game and are now judging the whole game by it.
I hang out now in AoC, got a 80 and a 57 lvl char.
TBH, AoC lacks so much, and is still in the wake of the launch that contained bugs and instability(the way that devs seem to want to serve their MMORPGs to you nowadays and funcom havn’t learned from AO launch)
LoTRO has tons more content. I admit, I’m a Middleearth fan. The game has all the great stuff from Tolkiens books, great quests(uhm, some are the kill 10 rats) that has epic standards and a storyline that goes parallel with the books.
Well functional UI, crafting and trading system. Instances that works. And who said LoTRO lacks pvp? Play monster or your char from lvl 40(uhm best 50 and then we are back to the 100+h game). But at least as monster you can play from lvl 10 and have tons of fun.
I even belive that some even don’t play their freep(-eople), but constantly play PvMP and progress their monster.
AoC is a real eye treat, but it lacks content.
/squish
I s’pose you hate lost as well cause it won’t tell you exactly what is going on every 5 minutes?
Instant Gratification sucks, when you work for things you appreciate them more.
Also, did you ever stop to think that the journey from 1-Max Level is what teaches you about the game, your class, meet others, grouping to quest and do instances and all that?? We’ve all seen the nubs that buy a Max Level toon running around with no idea how to play their class…is that what you are advocating? you want to be a Max Level nub that everyone else laughs at??
I think LoTRO is an excellent casual MMORPG. Its one of the very few I can come and go back into without the constant raiding pressure of WoW. LoTRO is also the only MMORPG that I actually WANTED to start a new toon right after dinging 50 with my first toon. WOW took me months. I avoided AOC because of all the negative reports on how the game was an unfinished POS from a lot of my mates that were playing it. Instead, I took up Vanguard last week and am enjoying it a lot. I particularly like the way its not a game that panders to morons and is a lot more complex than the games that are built so that a 10 year old can play them successfully like WOW, LoTRO etc. I keep hearing that its a POS that is bugged and unplayable….but suprisingly I haven’t had a single CTD or found a single bugged quest and runs very well on my rig with most of the eye candy on.
Maybe the bigger question is and should be ‘What do we want from our new generation of MMOs?’. Darkfall gets a lot of mentions but is only so much vapourware at the moment. I do really like the way they are going, well what they are stating they will do, in regards to dynamic questing. That to me is next generation right there. Not 5 gimmicking buttons.
If nothing else, AoC screwed themselves with how shallow they made the leveling curve.
There were players who had characers in the 70s (out of 80) before they ever managed to complete the first monthly credid card charge.
The 2 biggest problems with a shallow level curver like AoC are:
1) it’s too easy to out level your friends to the point where you can no longer play with them (this is increased dramatically by the recent rediculous patch that allowed grey elite mobs to beat the shit out of a player)
2) The average player hits the end of the game too fast and the devs now have to produce end game content.
Both of these reasons are key reasons that I doubt I’ll be a AoC subscriber past the relase of Warhamer: Age of Reckoning.
lotro is a better game than aoc, but how long have lotro been out now?
the state lotro whas released in whas a nightmare, way worse than aoc imo, i left 2 days after i tried lotro when it whas released.. and felt it whas the biggest crap game ever made in history..
but a lot have changed, and im sure aoc will change aswell, just give the game some time..
now lotro is my main mmo.
the whole thing about boring quest grinding to the max level, one of the main reasons im looking forward to warhammer is because i believe they specifically stated, when they said level cap was 40, that they were trying not to get rid of the whole RPG experience, but they didnt want to make players spend countless hours leveling, and they wanted them to get to the highest level to get into the action as fast as possible. i think that’s a really good idea, and that way anyone will be able to hit the max level without getting to bored, since there’s loads of other stuff to do to like PQs
Hahaha… haaa,,, Yeah so I agree having played both that Lotro rocks AOC’s shit. =/
But let’s analyze the reasons why. AOC was doomed from the beginning, at the moment a good 25% of it’s players are lvl 80 and are waiting for the end game content that tghe devs will produce perhaps post release of the game.
Some classes however require a shit load of grinding for this same game while other classes require very little.
There is no main city.
Combat functionality blows
Buggy Instances, quests, graphics, I fell through the ground and fell into a big white void (In Game Tester talk we call that a boundary issue)
It took me a half an hour to figure out how to set my 22” HD Wide Screen Monitor to a setting that didn’t pancake the game.
Where is all the content they spoke of pre-release o.O?
Now the way I see it, the reason all these fatass AOC lovers are defending their game is because psychologically they feel threatened when others question the integrity of an investment that they made that has happened to peak their interests.
It is an issue of acceptance. If these gamers are hearing that someone prefers another game over theirs for (X) reasons, then they are perceiving that as an attack upon themselves. They see it as an attack on their tastes, their investments in the game, and will therefor fire back thusly.
Listen guys, it’s not a secret anymore, AOC simply…sucks….letitgooooo =o!
Hey maybe a year from now it will clean up it’s act, get better and will become the darling of the MMO-verse
~_^! But until that time I think I am going to stick with Lotro =). By the way, as interesting as Warhammer looks, I have seen those dudes that play that fucking game. Yeah….Their ass fatass dickheads who build tiny models and paint them, or buy the steal diecast metal ones from those hobby shops <_<; If those same fuckheads are playing that game then I am nowhere near interested in what it has to offer.
What you need to think about is, if a game is catering to an audience of people you personally arn’t down with, why play it?
Touching on WOW…uuuuhm… It is what it is, Blizzard seems to have the right ideas, I mean people can say whatever they want about the game… but Blizzard is making tons of money off it, etc. Now when people say Lotro is a WOW clone, and is far inferior… lets analyze that statement… Yeah I guess Lotro is inferior because it doesn’t have the In Game Chuck Norris Joke Channel o.O? I guess WOW’s cartoony graphics are totally uber over Lotro’s very well designed environment? I guess uuuhm, that the lack of a decent story line and a big grinding quest game is better then an epic tale written 80+ years ago by one of the premier story tellers/authors of the 19th century?
Cmon now guys, WOW is cool but the bottom line is is that the game is based off of a strategy game the originated in the late 90’s man xD! How in depth could it be, seriously xD! I mean hey I am just as “down” for Arthas and his Frostmor, as, the next guy?? But the Lotro epic is simply much more interesting a storyline for me, personally.
If anyone wants to respond negatively to my rather long post, uuuhm, well, might want to consider going out for a brisk jog, you know, lose some weight, try doing something constructive with your life, oooh, a shower, thats a good idea! Go take a shower =o!
– Peace ~_^ :Omalley: (Former GM/Tester)
First of all i just want to say that you obviously do not understand the “rpg” part of the title as someone else on here stated. If these games gave you everything at first login, then what is there to work towards? Answer = nothing.
You have to bare in mind that not everybody has the same attitude of “oh lets race through this game, hit the level cap, and then go and play another game”. I for one have been playing LOtRO for a few months now, and although it may be “f2p” i decided to continue paying my subscription fee as a sign of respect as to how much i appreciate what these guys bring us for such a low monthly price.
If you think you can do better, then by all means start up your own MMORPG and then lets see how you feel when everyone and their dog slates you for it.
Bottom line is this .. if you don’t like the game, MOVE ON, i did the same with WoW but you don’t see me posting topics on how much i disliked it and why? because i respect Blizzard as much as i respect Turbine, it just so happens that WoW just was not for me although i can see it’s appeal.
So stop whining like a child and spitting your dummy out because you can’t have all the top content as soon as you login and go somewhere else. Don’t let the LOtRO door hit you on the way out either :P.