Item Stats and Age of Conan

Age of Conan has made an impressive splash in initial subscriptions numbers, but sometimes I just can't help but get the feeling that it's developers are kind of slow on the uptake. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh or just a sign I'm developing the same kind of love-hate relationship I had with SOE for so many years. In any case, there are just so many flaws in their interface that I can't help but think they designed it to be obtuse on purpose. Things get even worse when you combine it with poorly explained stats and bad itemization. It's like they were trying to design a DIKU based MMO, but didn't feel the need to use any numbers.

The one decision that really puzzles me is that Funcom thought it would be a good idea to dynamically display item stats based on the owner. So if my conqueror is in berzerker stance then any weapon I link to another person shows a huge base damage increase. It's fun to make it seem like I have a god-like 2 hander, but its annoying when I'm trying to see if a drop is an improvement for any of my friends. The entire system basically requires you to have an item in your inventory before you know if its an upgrade for your character. Thank goodness armor is mostly immune from this affect, but it really screws around with weapon shopping.

Age of Conan is still keeping me entertained despite the abundant amount of flaws. I recently started running an arena questline with a friend where we fight increasingly difficult challengers while a NPC crowd cheers on in the background. I can only do this with one friend at the moment since the quest is currently broken and the rest of my small guild can't even get in. They are supposedly fixing it in this week's patch, but most of my friends have probably out leveled the rewards. Actually, I can't really tell if they've out leveled the rewards since we can't really judge the quality of the weapon rewards.

It's not like this is the only problem with item stats either. As I mentioned before itemization is still messed up a bit though Funcom seems to be fixing the issue piecemeal during each patch. I'm still finding green quality weapons from quests which are better then higher level blues. Most of the drops off mobs have been fixed, but it's obvious they still need to go through all the quest rewards. Funcom has a really good game underneath all of the bad interface design and they seem to realize it. The problem of course is that most people expect a better designed game after World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings launched so smoothly. That's not to say WoW didn't have bugs or LOTR didn't have huge content gaps. However, both games had a much better interface and itemization that made sense from the start.

I sometimes think Funcom depended too much on outdated design specs from Anarchy Online when coming up with their interface. It's like they got off the MMO design train circa 2001 and haven't hopped back on until recently. At least they acknowledge they have a problem and seem to be in the middle of a major UI overhaul. Unfortunately, they have already lost a decent amount of subscribers. It's not as bad as Tabula Rasa since even if they lost half their subscribers after the first month they still would have 350,000 players. Still if Funcom doesn't want to lose everyone to Warhammer later in the year they need to get things updated to modern design standards. No more giant black bars that cover the screen when you loot.