SNAFU: “Situation Normal All F^%*ed Up”, originally a military term now used to denote when something has gone horribly wrong.
Age of Conan, the latest offering from developer Funcom, finally graced us with its presence after 5 long years of development. The game promised a lot, including mature content, unique combat, player owned city building and sieges, all beautifully rendered in the latest DirectX 10 graphics. If all you played was the first 20 levels of the game you would be led to believe that all the promises were fulfilled. However, one didn't need to make it all the way to level of 80 (maximum level) to realize Funcom released a woefully unfinished product.
Content, what content!?
As early as around level 45 players very quickly realized that they had ran out of quests. Quests in the game are the primary means of level progression, and without them all that you have left to progress your character is mindless NPC grinding. Quest availability returned around level 50, but didn't last for more than a few levels before one was forced to go back to the grind. From there onward to level 80, quests were few and far in-between. Anyone wanting to reach 80 had to grind ridiculous amounts of NPCs to complete the journey. Somehow Funcom forgot the Fun part of their name. Those that suffered through to the end levels, hoping to experience the wonderful and much promised endgame, instead got something so severely broke and incomplete that one has to wonder what goof at Funcom thought releasing the game in such shape was a good idea.
We got doors of steel, balls come later
The endgame was broken down (figuratively and literarily) into two parts, tiered raiding ala World of Warcraft through ever more difficult dungeons and special encounters, and keep sieges. Keeps were essentially clones of guild built cities that would become vulnerable every few days and could be attacked by opposing guilds, atleast on paper. What the player base didn't realize is that one player standing naked on the walls mooning the enemy would be more than sufficient to repel attacks of any possible size. You see, Funcom couldn't figure out how the attackers would break down the front door. The doors were nearly invincible to all forms of attacks except from the rhino mount charge attacks. And even with those attacks, the doors would only go down to 50% before becoming totally invulnerable. All the organization, planning and coordination of attacks would lead to this, one giant kick in the groin.
Where's that dragon going...
The other endgame, raiding dungeons, was just as badly broke and incomplete. One of the first tiered battles was a dragon inside a cave. You killed a few NPCs prior to the dragon, get your troops into position, and then charge the beast. Anyone who has played World of Warcraft would undergo a severe case of dejavu. If it was only an issue of Funcom's creativity, or the lack of, one could forgive and move on. However the encounter was so glitched and broke as to be nearly undoable. The dragon would spasm, warp around, and randomly reset back to full health and return to default position. After enduring so much suffering to get your character to 80 and then experiencing all this, if your groin didn't already hurt from a few keep attacks, it sure would now.
Ohhh the colors
For some though, the journey was far more important than the destination. Funcom tried to offer several things to greatly distinguish itself from previous games: a unique combat system, the latest DirectX 10 graphics engine and a mature environment. The combat system for melee characters involved combos, which would only activate if attacks were initiated in a certain order. The problem is each combo (or combo level for you nitpickers) had an attack order that was exactly the same each time you used that combo. It didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that all you had to do is get a keyboard with programmable keys, and program a key to initiate attacks in the correct order to trigger the combo. Tada, the combo system reduced to a single button press. How original. For casters, this combo system didn't exist at all. Instead mages used a plain jane seen in all games attack system that was supposed to be supplanted by a Spellweaving system. The thing with Spellweaving was, your character could not move while weaving, and suffered damage the longer you cast. Essentially, a sitting duck that kills itself. Atleast visually the animations looked real good. On someone's paper somewhere this sounded like a good idea. Hopefully they will never be allowed to touch a video game design again, ever.
Ignore the box, must be a typo
In terms of graphics, here Conan outright mis-advertised. The game box clearly says DirectX 10. The game however was completely void of any DX10 support. On the todo list to be introduced some time down the road, god knows when. Who likes paying for a promise? Better yet, who likes buying something new only to find out something old was put in the box instead? It's not that the game looks ugly with DX9 graphics, far from it, but if it's on the box and not in the retail product, nothing short of stating "it just needs a few more weeks of work and will be out within the first free 30 days" will suffice.
The nudity carrot
Lastly, the mature content. By far the biggest draw of adult gamers away from games like WoW was the promise of blood, gore and nudity. The blood and gore the game has, that I won't argue or complain about. However the topic of nudity and female characters overall was a monumental screw-up. I really don't think in a mature game anyone would complain about seeing some boobs, especially if the game was promoted as having boobs. So when patch after patch was released covering up exposed female breasts in the game labeled as "accidents", "bugs" or "unintended", one has to wonder just how badly Funcom wanted to piss of and deceive its customers. If we wanted to play a PG13 game, we would play a PG13 game, like Hello Kitty Online. If the game launches with boobs, why would you undo it? Funcom went further and reduced the size of boobs, only to hear a massive outcry from the public and quickly backpedaled saying it was an unintended side effect of a recent patch. Right. And then there was the issue of female characters doing less damage to NPCs than male characters. This was proven, and became such a blunder that it received national attention. Funcom rather quickly released a statement saying they had no intent to make female characters weaker and it was a bug due to animations. See, their excuse was that because the female character attack animation was longer than the males and all damage output was in sync with the animations, the female characters did less damage. Oops. If one is lead to believe that Funcom was completely innocent in all this, then the question must be asked, how on earth did no one at Funcom notice that the animation speeds were significantly different? Congrats to Funcom for inventing the term "sexist bug".
Age of Conan didn't just derail. It derailed, pancaked, buckled, cracked, spilled, caught fire, exploded, burned and dissolved into a pile of goo, earning Funcom the moniker of Failcom by its subscribers. Totally SNAFU.
Sylvester "Annex" Rozylo
Executive Editor
