[...] that we’re actually using the animation itself to make the attack; promoting the swing animation from dressing to salad. By now, you are probably thinking of the infamous female DPS bug in Age of Conan. This is [...]

[...] Game grammar in action: AOC’s DPS bug July 3rd, 2008 (Visited 1181 times) Tags: age of conan, game design, game grammar [...]

What baffled me about this issue is how it didn’t come up during game play balancing. I find it hard to believe that whoever did the game balancing didn’t notice this. I can’t imagine doing any kind of game balance tweaking without a handy spreadsheet of DPS values, Dmg per Cost and other derivative values. To produce such a spreadsheet you’d need to grab the data first. At some point you should notice that there’s something really wrong.

I, and many others, reported this shortly after female avatars became available to beta testers. I found links on the beta forums mentioning it around Feb 2008, female characters weren’t available much before that. So spreadsheet or no, there’s at least 4 months gone before they announce plans for a fix. Now, I’m starting to understand why everything they do seems to take so long, that the design is such that changing or tweaking anything means redoing everything, explains why so little changed between the first announced delay last year and their final release client.

And yes, the music is mine, the graphics… everything. I pretty much do everything on those.

Think of sports, surely what you can see and how you see it affects your performance? Even the audience and their cheering or booing matters. Most computer-games are dumbed down… too much. We aren´t required to make dumb games, are we?

“Game grammars” never represent the live game when human player(s) are involved. They are abstractions. The rules are abstractions as well. Just think about fun, whether the player thinks the game is exciting or not affects how he plays the game, it belongs to the game proper IMO, hence the presentation does too.

It sounds like Funcom´s mistake was in not making enough of a distinction between female and male characters in the simulation, thus not having the proper “knobs” for balancing. Stupid mistake for a Conan title.

If anything, WAR is likely to have a harder time building up a userbase than AoC was; too many of the systems are very similar to WoW. It’s going to be much harder for WAR to stand out.

You know, I played AoC for a short time on a friend’s system, and I was struck by how similar I found it to EQ2. Sure, the combat system’s much more interactive and responsive, but the classes are… easy to draw lines between, overall.

Hard to say, in that case, if that’s helped it or hurt it, since EQ2 is hardly the competitor that WoW would be.

@Travis, You’re a bit nuts if you think D3 is coming out anytime in the next 12 months. Blizzard is notoriously slow; I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see it launch for another 2 years. Heck, SC2 isn’t even out yet, or dated even (they’re not even projecting the year!), which means there’s likely at least another 6 months to a year on that one, and that was announced what, a year ago? After being in development for what, 4 years already?

And WAR won’t kill AoC either, the games are much too dissimilar. If anything, WAR is likely to have a harder time building up a userbase than AoC was; too many of the systems are very similar to WoW. It’s going to be much harder for WAR to stand out. I really hope it does do well though, because it really looks like a pretty big improvement on several of WoW’s core gameplay systems… but we’ll have to see how that goes. I do worry for it.

And no, the AoC sub numbers aren’t dropping off horribly. AoC will die when Funcom decides to pull the plug, not before; it’s reached sufficient critical mass to be self sustating forever at this point. Hell, Anarchy Online is still around, despite one of the most godawful launches in the history of MMOGs, and AoC is doing an order of magnitude or two better than it ever has. It’s not likely going to surpass WoW though, WoW’s too entrenched.

@Raph, any word when you’ll be letting more people into Alpha or opening beta? I want metaplace to eat all my time too

I’m kind of curious what Mr.Koster thinks of the overall game.. If he’s played it..

I haven’t played it yet… Metaplace eats all my time!

Chances are the game won’t make it to 360 either at the current rate its losing subs..

Where’d you get that idea? Here? The author retracted his analysis.