It’s been a good while since the MMORPG Age of Conan was released. I personally don’t know very much about the Conan universe created by Robert E. Howard as I haven’t read the books, though I think I watched a Conan film or something very many years ago. For these reasons I can’t tell if the game is a good representation of Howard’s world.

Age of Conan has been going through some hard times since its release, and what I heard about the game back then is one reason why I didn’t personally try it out until now. I’ve been interested in giving it a try, but being a casual gamer I couldn’t be bothered to try out a game that was full of bugs and probably with far too many gamers playing it that Funcom could really carry.

I did become more positive to giving it a try when I read some Norwegian news articles about the work they’re doing on the game and that many bugs have been fixed and more content is on its way. So I tested the free 7-day  trial, and my first impression was that it is quite fun to be able to create your own, very individual character, even by customizing your character’s bodytype and the details of his/her face. I could probably spend half a day entertaining myself with customizing a few characters. I was impressed enough after some hours of the free trial to check prices on buying the game. The best offer was on Amazon.co.uk for only £3.99, and since that also includes a month of free play, I was happy to get it to try it out properly.

So, moving on to the gameplay, AoC is a very interesting development for MMORPG games (I have previous experience of playing World of Warcraft and Guild Wars extensively, as well as several singleplayer RPGs). Now, at first glance my impression is that AoC has more a feel of being a singleplayer game rather than a MMO, this is mainly due to how the user interface is set up. I can’t instinctively tell where the party window/bars will show on the screen, and since I haven’t played in a party with other people yet I can’t say how well it works. The user interface is a bit cumbersome in other respects too, I find it a bit hard to figure where things are (such as talent trees and such) so I end up clicking my way through all the tabs on the top till I find the right one. To be fair, AoC isn’t the only game out there with a bad interface, so this isn’t a very big point for me, and it is also a matter of individual preference.

The graphics of the game are very good if you can run it at a high spec, if you have to run it on the lowest spec it looks rather bad. Fortunately the laptop I usually use for gaming is good enough to run it with higher than standard specs without problems, so I’m happy with that. There are a few graphic bugs in the game that I have seen (which is a bit bad, since I rarely notice that kind of bugs). The soundtrack is very good, and possibly one of the things I like best about the game.

Playing AoC can be a bit cumbersome in some respects. For one thing, every time you speak to a NPC to get a quest or whatever, it goes into a conversation window where you have to read across the whole screen and click on sentences that are your replies to what the NPC is saying. This is another reason it gives me the feel of being a singleplayer game, and to me it feels a bit out of place in a MMO, probably because I’m used to quests coming up in a small window on your screen where you can easily accept or decline without it shifting in and out of conversations.

The character classes is another point that needs some looking into. I haven’t tried all of them, of course, but of the melee classes I’ve found the Dark Templar to be pretty much useless. They simply die too easily. I only played my Dark Templar to level 13 because I really couldn’t be bothered to play a character that kept dying whenever she faced more than 2 enemies of the same level as her. I don’t want to depend on finding a group just for questing and levelling, so I had to find another class. The one I ended up with was the Conqueror, and I feel much more happier with this Class since it is powerful enough to solo most quests without too much trouble. My boyfriend tested playing a Ranger and was disappointed because shooting things in first person is a brilliant idea, but switching to and from first person is really cumbersome and doesn’t work because you can’t click on anything where the cross-hair is and either have to move the cross-hair to the side or use tabs. It’s also cumbersome when switching to melee, as you have to use the mouse to zoom in and out, which can take more time than you want to spend. The idea of first person shooting is cool, though, and he could see it working very well in parties and pvp where the ranger would always stay at a distance and not have a need to change into melee. He was also concerned about the newbie quests requiring a certain number of points spent in Hide in order to be done properly, without telling him, so he ended up having to level his character further before he could do those quests. Based on this, I would say that the classes appear a tad imbalanced from a soloing perspective, so I would choose my class carefully.

The content of the game so far (based on the newbie area Tortage) seems quite good. I am happy with the quests. They seem to be very much similar to the quests in most similar games (kill this, pick up that, talk to x, etc). There is a twist to it that I love though, which is the more adult content of including prostitutes into the game and doing quests for them. AoC is an adult game, and I like it. I haven’t come across too much childish gibberish in the chat window (yet), which is very good.

The combat system is a very interesting development where you have more detailed control over your character’s  fighting, by steering the direction your weapon hits. It takes a bit to get used to the combo system, but once I worked it out it became quite fun and easy to use (I found it easier to do combat with both hands on the keyboard rather than one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse).

All in all, I do like AoC quite well. It’s a game with a lot of promise and I will be watching its development. It seems rather unpolished yet, but that takes years to accomplish anyway and is to be expected for an MMO for a good while after release. My main criticism is that the user interface is a bit cumbersome and messy (not the most user friendly one I’ve ever seen). It is a game designed more for the experienced gamer looking for a challenge, and probably wouldn’t be good as anyone’s first MMORPG (for that I would rather recommend GW or WoW).

That’s it for this review. Please bear in mind that I’ve only played one small portion of the game yet. I might write another review later when I’ve played through more of the content.

… FairyGothMother’s website as they’ve got lots of new stuff on now. And since I saw many nice pieces, I figured I might as well take the opportunity to make a blogpost about it since I don’t really have that very much to write about these days.

The first item that caught my intention was this little gem:

Now, I really love this outfit for some reason. It’s dramatic, it’s a burlesque and it’s very cool. I can’t really think of any occasions where I, personally, would wear it, but I think I would be willing to find such an occasion just to be able to wear it. If I could afford buying it, that is..

The second item I found that I liked was:

Now, this dress is not the dramatic type of the previous one, but it’s very pretty and could be worn for all sorts of occasions where you want to wear a pretty dress that will be noticed.

This is a gorgeous bustle (plus corset and bloomers) and I adore it. It’s another piece I’m not sure where I’d wear, maybe for a masquerade or something, but I’d love just having it and would probably be happy just wearing it around the house in the evening. It’s burlesque and I might have to take up burlesque dancing just as an excuse to get this type of clothing!

I also found some nice new corsets there that I love the look of:

Pale blue and romantic. I’d probably wear this as underwear underneath a nice dress, as a little evening surprise for a certain gentleman.

Another pretty and romantic corset.

And last:

The nightgown is pretty, but the lace negligee is gorgeous. Again a bit of a dramatic piece, but I like that.

All in all, I like FairyGothMother’s new collection (there are many more outfits that I haven’t shown here, I just picked out some things that I really liked).

Settlers: Rise of an Empire is one of my favourite games, and the one I play the most after World of Warcraft. It’s a nice strategy type game, without being all about winning battles and stuff. In fact, in many scenarios there’s no need for fighting at all. I like building villages that turn into towns that turn into large cities, with a vast surrounding countryside.

Here’s a trailer for the game:

As you can see, this is a very sweet and cozy game in many ways. I haven’t played through all of the campaign part yet, but my impression of the game is very good, nonetheless.

One thing I really love about this game is the festivals where the workers go an get spouses. These ladies look so sweet the way they dance around the men and when they later stand on the streets gossiping with other spouses, or going on errands to get food, clothes or whatever else. Here are some festival screenshots (unfortunately taken on my laptop, so not the best quality!):

And a more focused cropped part:

One thing in particular that I like about the spouses is that they come in different shapes, both thin and fat, and as far as I have noticed the thinner spouses are not preferred over the fat ones. I believe they are fairly equally distributed.

Like I mentioned farther above, I really like the non-military aspects of Settlers. I have tried some earlier Settlers versions, but it is Rise of an Empire that stands as my favourite. This is because you organise villages/towns/cities, with farms and other gathering professions outside of the village. To me, it makes it look a lot like a realistic medieval(ish) world and something I can relate to (I read a lot of fantasy and historical books), so my village sort of becomes my own private pretend-world.

You can also play the game online against other people, but I haven’t done that, and don’t know if I will in the future. At the moment I’m perfectly happy playing it for myself, and I can do that for hours on end, no problem!

It’s been a fair few days since Wrath of the Lich King was released by Blizzard. After having had a good look, I must say: this game is yummy! The graphics are fabulous and there’s lots of fun stuff you can do.

My character (a currently lvl 72 Blood Elf Paladin) has learned loads of new Jewelcrafting recipes. There’s a new skill for jewelcrafters called Gem Perfection, which gives a chance to create Perfect Gems, meaning that ordinary green gems can get better at around the same level of quality as the blue ones. This is very nice, and I’ve already had some good luck with that.

Both starter areas are lovely. I especially like Howling Fjord and the Taunka, distant relatives of the Tauren. The first instances are very good, with new and interesting bosses. The first time the Guild went to the Nexus was late on the release day. We were all lvl 70 still, and fourmanned it. The team set up was one warrior tank, one ret-a-din, and two druids. The instance went very well, there were no wipes despite none of us knowing the tactics for the bosses (which was part of the fun for going there in the first place). This went very well probably because of a good team set-up, we have a very reliable tank and the healer is phenomenal. All of us have done fair few instances together by now so we know each other well. I know what to do as a dps and support character with this group. The graphics of the Nexus are really gorgeous. I don’t have any screenshots on this computer, but I will post some later.

My boyfriend and I went exploring in areas we’re too low level to go to, you know, because it’s fun. There were no other players there, since most other people were desperately trying to level (after all, it was still the second day after release), and we may have been among the first to visit some of these places, at least on our server. We went to see Icecrown, and the picture below is from a screenshot of the map to show the areas we got around to seeing:

And here is a nice view from Jotunheim in Icecrown, the character is that of my boyfriend’s druid:

In Agmar’s Hammer I’ve found an orphanage for tiny Taunka babies on the top of the Inn building:

Oh, and Dalaran is a lovely city!

More will come about this game later. It is really lovely, and full of fun. Thumbs up, for Blizzard has done a very good job on this one!