Zero Punctuation AoC
Thanks to Donna for pointing this out to me. For a review made for comedic effect, it's fairly thorough. Some of it is bang-on:
I laughed, I cried, I reposted it here. =)
Oh and I admit, I do secretly dream of living inside a Boris Vallejo painting.
(Note: their video server seems a bit slow to get started, but if you're an Age of Conan player, wait for it. It's worth it, trust me).
Plus you can set things ON FIRE!!
Good old Lum the Mad has written the quintessential Age of Conan review, where he hits the nail on the head with the subject line "It's the Fun, Stupid" and then brings it home with this little ditty:
Sure, there’s hundreds of bugs, including some really head scratching did they REALLY do that ones, and class balance is kind of a sick joke and content gives out eventually… but fire! You SET THINGS ON FIRE! Age of Conan clearly has staked out a niche: people who like burning things. My suspicion is that this may be a fairly large niche.
Read the whole thing, it's worthwhile.
I'll note that my most recent AoC article was about putting undead zombies to rest. =)
The raw fun factor is what also drew me to City of Heroes a few years back. The rest of the features will be the deciding factor over how long I stay. For me the most important of those are the immersion and world setting appeal, where I also find Hyboria a win-win.
Blogs and press will focus on competitive Endgame and certainly the more aggressive players will continue to do so as well, but dammit I'm just having too much fun to worry about whether Sieges or Crafting are all that they were supposed to be.
Funcom will have to fix things up sooner or later though, some of these other MMOs might wizen up to this concept of fun.
