By Crom! or Let’s Play Catch Up!

Okay! That’s it! I’m doing it! I’ve been putting off working on this blog for months. Trying my best to convince myself I don’t have much to say just isn’t working. The more I surround myself with bloggers, the more annoying the itch is to seriously try it out.

Over the next few days I’m going to try and catch up on what has been going on, and what my current foray into gaming has been.

First things first, I’ve gone back to Age of Conan. I actually subscribed to the game again very soon after patch 1.0.5. I was one of the unlucky that started paying for the game right before the free 2 week evaluation period. The improvements they’ve made have pushed the game are to be admired.

The main issue I had at launch was a nasty memory leak that would force me to restart the client every 45 minutes, or be smacked over the head with a crash to desktop. This was foreshadowed by a blanking of both the world and mini map. Extremely frustrating and completely killed the flow of an instance run. It’s no fun when your group has to clear out an area just so you have a safe spot to restart the game.
The more I think about why I left, the more I realize that it wasn’t from and inherent flaw with the mechanics of the game. Out of game it was easy to rail on class imbalance, client performance, and Funcom’s treatment with patching. When I got into the game though, I couldn’t help but have fun. With this patch,it  is the way that it should have been at launch.

I joke around in-game with statements like, I’m loving this game now that it’s finally out of beta, but in truth I’m really glad that Funcom had it’s chance to clean the game up. I think it has to do with the fact that, underneath the grime of a icky launch, there is a genuinely good game here. Experiencing the  closure of games like Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London first hand, it’s clear that it’s a rare thing for a developer to have the backing to bring a game back from the abyss.

Once I realized that Age of Conan is “Strong Like Bull!” I decided to try and salvage my old guild on the Set Server. the guild was created at launch, and thanks to the rush of initial players, saw a nice growth in membership. Sadly, the lack of content once you hit around level 60 killed the guild pretty quick. I stuck around and used up all my saved capital to build our guild city as much as I could. Planning never to come back, I took one more ride on my speckled white horse and unsubscribed from Age of Conan.

Coming back to an MMO is always tough, because I end up completely disconnected from the progression of my character. To avoid this I decided to start over. A simple decision that paid off in the long run. I never played the early levels enough to want to hurry through them. The quests, while familiar, are still vague enough, in memory, that I pour over them as if reading them for the first time.

To continue the positive vibes, I’m playing a brand new game.