I'm no retro gamer, and have left the horrible ages of the past behind me for better or worse. That said, the worst game I've ever played that I can actually remember is Age of Conan. Honestly, the game tries so hard to mimick World of Warcraft that you would think the first expansion pack will introduce night elves for the sole sake of stealing the other 580 million people having their souls sucked out by Blizzard every day. Everything is exactly the same other than the graphics, the lore, and the fact that it sucks a bucket of horse manure. It has bugs stuffed up its' nether regions, a particularly uncomfortable place for bugs, I might add. Every time FailCom tries to fix something they either break something else or they simply make what was already broken worse.
The attempts at immersion are terribly inept, especially since the game begins with every character being voiced over, and subsequently having their mute buttons pressed the instant you hit level 20 and jump into the world of magic and pixie dust that is Hyboria. The player base is in desperate need of smacktard poisoning, as you can't possibly run into another player alone in the wilderness without them instantly either running up and chopping your bollocks off or running away assuming you'll do the same to them.
The pvp, an allegedly major part of the game, is quite bluntly broken. Battlegrounds take entire days to gain access to, sometimes more. FFA pvp is a bloody failure as although being able to run up to anyone, anywhere and kill them sounds like a ton of fun in theory, but when you have everyone running around thinking they're the Chosen One or some other stupid self-justification story getting a knife rammed into your gut every time you try to make conversation with your fellow Hyborians tends to get rather tiresome. Guild cities are pointless because they are broken and have no real reason for being beside bragging rights, keep sieges are also horribly broken.
The worst part, however, is the promise of sex-pixels being broken. I'm not going to lie, the main reason I bought the game in the first place was that it was meant to be over-the-top explicit. I wanted to see people's heads getting chopped off and rolling down the road, their necks gushing with blood. I wanted to walk into a tavern and be served by a topless waitress before promptly getting into a bar fight with one of several of the other patrons. All I really expected was for FailCom to deliver on the one thing that set the game apart, which was its explicit content. Even this was denied, almost immediately after release. Within the first 2-3 patches, FailCom had completely removed all nudity from the game, and although that wouldn't be a problem if it was never promised in the first place, the box clearly states that the game is not meant to be played by anyone who isn't either psychotic, horny, or an actual adult. They even had the audacity to go beyond removing the breasts from the game, and reduce the amount of gore. I don't believe it's necessary for me to say this, but the people who bought a game based on the Conan universe wanted a gritty, dark world with bloody, vicious combat. Taking the gore out of Age of Conan is about as ethical as giving several million homeless men hard-working, but well paid jobs, and then denying them their pay checks at the end of the week.
./endrant
Feel free to kill me for wasting all this holy forum space with my satanic rhetoric.
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"What do you have to say for yourself?"
They were delicious.
"...this is a murder trial."
Well, they were.
16 Oct 2008, 8:46 am
The 64 version makes the original PC game look like Thief 2.
