Continuing the discussion from PC Update - Age of War Chapter 4 (4.2.2024):
What
Seriously
What
Dragonpowder needs to be like 100 times harder to make to put any kind of balance into pvp…
2 Likes
is it true that in the challenges that the Kill Giant Creatures and Kill World bosses must be solo?
do we have to solo these challenges? or can it be co-op
Something isn’t clear to me…
Can we no longer complete challenges with spawned creatures?
Nevermind, I just tested.
What a **move Funcom.
My impressions so far:
The week before the update
The week before the update, I was playing Isle of Women and Isle of Men. Enjoyed my time there. New areas to explore, new bases to build, new things to kill. I was excited about the updates to both maps.
The update and mods
I use mods. Conan Exiles without mods wouldn’t be interesting to me. Hence, mod support is crucial for me.
After the update, the game crashed on start. That was due to a mod (not naming which) that was updated in time, but still crashed the game. It took several hours to find out which mod this was, as removing mods and restarting the game takes quite some time - and as luck would have it, it was the last mod I tested.
Even after the fix, a lot of armors lost their transmutation. May be related to mods, may not be.
Is this Funcom’s fault? No, probably not. But still… if they wouldn’t have done the update at all, no mod would have been broken.
Is the update, overall, a net negative due to that? We’ll see below.
New thrall and follower controls
The removal of the “stop” command is very annoying. There are a lot of areas where you absolutely cannot bring thralls without risking their untimely, bug-induced death, especially everything with multiple levels. The AI is too stupid to deal with some areas, and the only way to ensure thrall survival was the “stop” command.
The “hold” command might be an adequate replacement… if it wouldn’t constantly teleport your thralls next to you. That takes away the main use of the “stop” command - keeping your thralls away from certain areas.
The simplified menu to change their settings probably is a win for non-modded games. For “pc master race” gamers, Xevyr’s excellent mods already did that, and they did it better, to be frank.
Horses now seem to run towards the enemy if you command your thralls to attack, only to stand around helplessly at the enemy.
Due to their high health (to be nerfed, now that is was mentioned), they still survive many boss if ights. Arena Champion, Judge, …? I doubt it.
But they do block the area and impair your vision. Am I hitting the horse? Am I being hit? Who knows with a big fat horse arse in your face.
So, for me, this is a net negative.
Inventory
The inventory change is horrible. Everything is super tiny on my screen, and the removal of category sorting requires us to scroll through two pages of super tiny icons to find whatever we’re looking for. Yes, the items are still highlighted, but… why the scrolling? Why that change at all?
Net negative. In fact, using the inventory is so annoying that I just stopped playing and invested the time write this angry review. It’s that bad.
Combat
Mouse facing was restored. Yay! A seriously f’ed up decision was reversed. Else, no improvements. Some pvp-related changes to stamina regeneration - I don’t care about that.
The fix wouldn’t have been necessary without messing it up before. Also, again, Xevyr fixed that with a mod for pc players.
So… net neutral for me.
Jhebbal Sag Event
The event… looks okayish by itself. I ran through it to get the werebear pet, will now never do a single step again. Maybe 30 minutes of gametime from a brand-new event which looks as if some effort was put into it. The design looks well-done, but the ratio of effort required to play time added seems a bit lacking.
I admin-spawned the final lure, as I will not have that game running just to see a 24 h countdown tick down. What the f…!?
I also spoiled the rest of the event by admin-spawning all the fangs required to buy all recipes.
Why?
Grinding fangs by teleporting all across the map and fighing pretty boring animal bosses is just stupid. The boss fights are boring; the fight against the mammoth is as annoying as all fights with elephant-type anemies are. Weird hit box, lots of crowd control, pushes thralls into the landscape.
If fangs would have been added to all enemies… or all bosses… or if were-hyenas spawned all over the map… or if all bosses had a change to replaced by event bosses and drop massive amounts of fangs… maybe. But running across the whole map to farm three lame bosses all over again for hundreds of times? No, thank you.
Purge
I fail to grasp the lack of imagination behind the changes to the purge:
- Before the update, people complained that the rewards for the highest level purges were too poor.
- People learned how to use the geometry of bases to control the purge pretty well.
- Funcom had three new, more dangerous enemies for the purge in the pipeline. Two of them are good for destroying bases without being hindered by their geometry as much as the ram-guys.
Looking at these three facts, it seems obvious what to do: Add new, higher level purges with better rewards and new, more dangerous enemy types: “Want better rewards? Then deal with our new and improved, base-wrecking purge waves 11 to 15.”
But… no, they tacked them on to the existing purge waves. Same reward, higher difficulty. That’s… uhm… an incentive to never do them again?
What… why… How is it possible to make such a stupid decision? I dealt with cleaning up other people’s fvckvps professionally for some years, and I’d say I have seen some stupid shit in this world.
I wouldn’t say that Funcom beats the most stupid, half-assed jobs I’ve seen over that time, and this is much less serious stuff. But oh boy, on the “fail to think” scale, they’d be high up in the ranking with this one.
Overall
The update is a net negative for me, even game-breaking. A week ago, I was happily building by new base on the Isle of Women. Now, I’m watching on the recently released and older games I haven’t finished so far.
Funcom, seriously, pull yourself together. Or just revert the game back to Age of Sorcery, chapter 3, and leave it be.
4 Likes
You can, just via different tools.
the same thing, until you throw off the thing, you can’t pick it up from the chest. Especially regarding armor, the biggest problem with them
I also think that the update broke the game. Previously, my wife and I would run around and be upset after being killed, but today you just explode with rage when you run into a volcano, die there on a mat, run to pick up the body, but CAN’T dress it! And you die from the heat, for example, if there is no ice.
Now that we have to dye armor from the dyers bench, can we get a special dye chest that is linked to the dyers bench? that way it will pull from that chest to dye armor?
1 Like
With a max of 8000 exp a day yes, its crap
I guess I’ve got higher tolerance for it (much as I hate Battlepasses in general) - this still doesn’t seem that bad to me - easy enough in a week or two. I’ve got another BP to deal with (on a game I have a distinct love/hate relationship with) - 1,000 xp per level, 80-90 levels in 3 months (depending on exact release schedule) - max of just over 1,000 xp per day (plus a weekly option that nets another 3,750). Now that one is punishing, lol.
2 Likes
Hardly, it’s way easier and time consuming.
You can simply spawn several benches and afk farm BP xp instead of spawning specific mobs, teleporying to a specific locations, killing specific mobs via poison, doing encounters etc.
Just set up craft stations, log in and afk.
Low key wish they did EA style BP you can’t complete without additional purchases, just to see the reaction.
There’s many problems in this chapter and bp is not one of them.
I don’t know the point you are trying to make…
It takes longer and more days to complete even with the cheating that is still allowed compared to before.
- You have a limit of 8k exp each day (before this you could do unlimited missions)
- You only get 3 weekly rewards (giving around 9 levels doing all missions compared to the 20 boosted missions each week giving around 15-20 levels)
When you did 20 boosted missions each week you could finish the BP in 3-4 days, 1 day a week.
I hate it when Battle Passes take too long, I paid for it… I want my stuff as fast as possible or in a fun way.
Don’t tell me its better, easier or less time consuming cause its not.
The purpose of the battle pass is to put butts in seats. if it was to make money it wouldn’t be self perpetuating. the issue was in it’s old state, people would get the battle pass and burn through it in a couple days, and serial refresh for 2 and a half months.That means a low player count on steam.
Now at least you have to be on long enough to get your 3 new challenges done, so get counted.
But hey, at least you aren’t serial refreshing, you’re doing your weeklies.
I know this one hasn’t been discussed, I pointed it out on the testlive thread, but funcom has added new grass and plants that can not be turn off in setting or by foundations.
Now i need to mow my floors
Not helping my fps.
2 Likes
An opportunity for a new Bazaar item: “Aquilonia Lawn Care Set” Only 2000 crom coins, (marked down from 3000)!
1 Like
Sometimes I swear I’m playing a completely different game that most of you. The inventory system is something I actual like now. I’m getting real accustomated to the quick stack, split stacking methods and it is going significantly faster for me.
The event is actually a bit grindy in that you keep going out in repetitive motion to get a net 50ish fangs each run and the using the playtime timer vs server timer on the lures…that’s silly and I may actually get ONE werebear out of the whole age if that continues.
2 Likes
So it was taking 3-4 weeks to finish previous BP via XP boosts and playing the game was a bad decision because you could accidentally do some challenge and lock yourself from rerolling unless you spend 2 XP boosts from the total amount.
On top of that it was taking much more time if you were unlucky with the challenge roll be it lower XP cost or something attached to the event system.
I’ll get my lvl 60 tomorrow, with a minimum time requirement from me. Just by playing the game and doing in-game activities.
Almost a week after the initial update.
You were doing something different, that’s for sure. For most of us it’s far, far worse. Maybe you were actually doing something wrong before, unaware of certain functions like the fact a 50% split was already in the game for example…
Quick stack is probably the only really good function they added in the update, that’s definitely a useful tool. One of the few things I think they should retain from this update, almost everything else including the new UI can go in the bin.