Halloween event of 2014 - just good, no cheese

The weirdest time of the year is upon us and once more I dive in the ocean of cheese that Halloween events used to be. My oh my was I pleasantly surprised with this year's Thirst of the Serpent God: the writing on it was truly excellent. One of my many complains about the events in Age of Conan was poor, sometimes cheesy writing. Matter of fact last year's anniversary even was so poor that I didn't even write a review for it (it would have been  100% grade A complains). So what is so special about Serpent God? The story simply works and is largely inspired by REH Conan books. 

What really surprised me that there wasn't a whole tons of text, the story naturally unfolded via game play and occasional cut scenes. 

I have also appreciated the event for  how well it handled ALL of my previous complains posted here. 

Lets do a small re-cap of old events (Night of the Lost Souls):

- zero replayability,

- same rewards for everyone,

- no challenge at all,

- very short,

The Serpent God event has two parts: the story mode in which you learn about the bloody festival itself and the survival mode in which you have to last 10 minutes on the streets of Khemi filled with bloodthirsty priests of Set (NPC) and other players (with PVP enabled).

While I enjoyed the story mode for what it was I am not really up for re-doing it. I have to note that the quest chain is pretty long, but it's nicely paced so I would say it's just about right.

The survival mode nicely fills in that "repeatable content" gap with something that I can do on a daily basis and get a reward out of it.. Granted the PVP part of the event is not all that well done but it was a BOLD and fresh idea and defiantly a step into a right direction. 

As for rewards Funcom decided to give us special tokens that can be traded for chests filled with random loot. I think it is a great to distribute loot, especially that you can get a unique mount if you try hard enough (or get lucky). You can check the rewards on Henryx's Blog.   

What more? The event is actually pretty hard. What pissed me off in the previous years that everything about the event was "on rails" and all the player had to do is just click the glowing item and kill the most obvious opponent. This time around not only you have to think a little (not too much) but also there is a buff/debuff mechanic that you have to manage in order to survive. I didn't have much troubles with the event, but I like that the devs made an effort to challenge the veteran players. In that regard the fact that official forums have "Halloween Quest Too Hard" thread is a good thing.

Given the story, new mechanics, rewards and cut scenes I would dear to say that we got served a quality content. The survival mode has some major flaws (like an area where once you get criminal debuff you can get farmed), but I am all for allowing the devs to experiment and learn in the process.

The fact that you can also re-do previous Halloween events along with the new one is pretty great so if you intend to do Lost Souls, By The Light of the Moon and Serpent God you are looking at pretty sizable content that will  take you a good couple of hours to tackle. 

Owned by eunuch

Mayhem on the streets of Khemi

Halloween event of 2013 - good cheese!

I think that my Halloween event review is long overdue and, looking back at previous years, I am writing it rather gladly this time. New Game Director communicated to ...uh...community that his take on yearly events is to re-do them, but always to add something new. This is "building up" philosophy and it is smart.

After years upon years of complains about "Night of the Lost Souls" this year I skipped it all together and went for new content. So the story revolves pretty much around a tribe that moves into the Conarch and ...well long story shorty  your immortality makes you a perfect candidate for a  new member of the Werewolf pack. The whole story takes place in special instance of Conarch city hub and in Fields of the Dead.

There are several things to cover here so bear with me:

I knew I would see you again, dear forest, but I would never suspect that I would be a werewolf. I am crying, but those are the tears of a werewolf..

The story

It was cheesy, but it was a good cheese. Silver Antrum still has best writing so far, but this even places as second best easily. I don't want to spoil anything so I won't be talking about the plot, but I think we all know where it is going: you won. I have to give a honorable mention to the devs and writer who had enough of forethought to foresee that SOME players will want to stay infected with Werewolf curse. Me? I choose all the dialogs that said "fuck it, I am staying cursed with Werewolf paws" just to see what would happen. To my amusement the NPCs would always come up with some half-assed explanation why I couldn't become werewolf or why I shouldn't or how even if I remained werewolf it would suck for me big time (I am not making this up, at one point I was technically a werewolf but I couldn't transform and I would lose my powers slowly *roll eyes*). Lets just say that the story wasn't really all that great. Granted, it is a Halloween event and Halloween is hardly serious stuff, but still...its a good cheese but just a  cheese.

The rewards

I think those were great and .... half-assed at the same time (imagine reaching that balance of good and bad :X). There were great because you could re-do the quests (which is GREAT on its own) and try to get different items out of loot box. There were Halloween candy (giving buffs with loads of PVP and PVE exp, good stuff) and social cloaks. Sounds good eh? Well the cloaks looked only good in your inventory because the second you putted them on you were STRUCK with poor texture quality (more or less your character was wearing plastic bag on his back) and HORRENDOUS clipping issues. To give credit where credit is due I have to mention that you can sell those clacks for 50s each which is pretty good coin for fast 2 quests. There were also some pet drops (mini werewolfs) and stuff that transformed you into werewolf for 30 m (to confuse people in minigames about which class you are :P).

The technology

I have always found werewolves in AOC goofy looking (those models are surprisingly bad) and it really killed the mood for me to participate in event based on those creatures. I like the clever re-use of Conarch as a special instance, but it think it is high time to move away from Cimmeria when in comes to events. We have had enough Cimmerian events as it is. Interestingly there was one Easter-egg quest when you need to kill creature from "Dark and Secret World". The Devs pretty much "ported" one of the monsters form Secret World to AOC to test the technology. Apparently it worked pretty well so TSW and AOC can share more resources in the future (it doesn't mean same monsters in both games, but using certain parts of already existing models etc.). I was also pretty surprised by one quest that required me to kill 30 creatures or remain werewolf for *gasp* FOREVER. I got +20% damage in werewolf form so why would I ever wanted to finish that quest? The devs planned for this and this quest updated even if you killed players and not NPCs. Nice. So Funcom can give us pvp quest, but just chooses not to.

So to sum it up I have to say that it was refreshing to see new event and I am looking forward to the Halloween additions in the future.

Five years of Age of Conan - anniversary event

Look, I don't want to oversell this event so I will be blunt: Joel Bylos is godlike and the event was best thing that happened to AOC. Oh, too soon? The event matched the player base expectations which were so low that we would be quiet about another vanity cloak. But no, Joel had to bring in the big guns and he delivered one hell of a event. This is the first thing that I want to give notice to: Mr. Bylos proved himself to be very competent which gives me A LOT hope for the future. Honestly, for a while after the restructuring I was fearful that AOC will be Funcom's bastard child and such is just not the case.

Let's get down to what the event was actually about:

It very much felt like someone read all my posts on previous events and decided to change everything I have complained about. This event had epic feeling, great rewards and replayability. Pretty much everything that, until now, sucked about the events.

Remember the first anniversary? You can check it out here. Or just watch the video below, it sums it up nicely.

Now the video from the recent event:
See the difference?

In a nutshell: everyday new boss spawned in different location of Hyboria. Furthermore the bosses from previous days would re-spawn stronger and stronger as the day went by. You had to be close to the boss to get a quest from killing it, so this way you could have brought your lvl20 alt and still get the goodies. After killing the monster you would go to the Old Tarantia where new NPC would accept your quest and reward you with a box with rewards. First major surprise was that NPC had a voice over!! Remember those? Game Director promised that those will be back (TSW voice artists are doing AOC stuff now) but no one expected for it to be so soon. Now the rewards themselves: the box could give either random crap like Halloween consumables (blood, brain juice etc.), epic mastery pots (like in HOC), unique vanity gear or..... T2 armor and weapons!!

Best thing is that you could do the bosses over and over and get a blast out of it. On the last days the bosses were spawning in different places so whole raids of people would jump from Old Tarantia to the Dragon's Spine only to be storming Khemi a couple minutes later. It did wonders for the server's population and morale because seeing so many active players in one place really gave hopes for the game's future.

If I really HAD to complain about anything it would be a lack of story. Sure there was SOME story, but pretty much it was: "thanks for killing teh dragonz0rz, here is ur epix0rz!". I think giving people small quest chain few days before the event would have been awesome. We didn't really get any explanation WHY there was a dragon and Tarantia and Kraken in Khemi and these quests would have builded up the anticipation. But it was all well designed and executed (Mitra knows we didn't have THOSE kind of updates in recent years..). 

Best thing that came out of this event? The bosses are here to stay and the GMs will spawn then randomly for the player's amusement.

Here is to another 5 years!! Cheers!

Unique vanity set

Bone Rattle

Worm

Basilisk

Kraken getting creamed!

I am more lost than these souls..

Once again we are here to find that what I hoped would be lost forever: lost souls. I know I that I have said that I probably won't report on this "event" anymore, but I am compelled to do so...Just like the lost souls are compelled to return to haunt me each year. So what is in the bag for us this year? Get this: same stuff. Yeah, it is not even "more of the same stuff", kind sir, it's rather "EXACTLY same stuff". Funcom decided to go 100% lazy and simply re-apply the content from the previous years. Re-apply? Yeah, same quests, same items, hell even the visual effect in villa is same red mist-bullshit.

Old easter egg. Your armor never wears out because the devs made decision not to introduce armor decay mechanic to the game.

So you can now get all the rewards that you have missed for 3 years straight. I find that offensive. I have been subscriber for those last years and I was there for 3 years to repeatedly "find" the lost souls and claim my rewards. That is what makes the rewards unique: those are showing that you are veteran players (big epeen). Remember that cloak we got for 4 years anniversary? Yeah, would you like to see it given away again in two years? It devalues your "old" item while providing no new rewards. It's a double slap on the cheek for the veterans. Hell. You know what? Screw it, FC can give out old rewards again if they want, but I am getting screwed on this deal as paid subscriber. Yes, we got used to your yearly "copy/paste, villa effect, lol" content in the form of "The Night of Lost Souls", but providing ZERO new items is just offensive. Last year FC recycled NPC uniform in the form of Red Hand's tunic. It would have taken next to none effort to recycle some other item too, but Funcom didn't. I am hoping that this "no new stuff policy" is due FC being busy with SDS content updates which would be understandable. 

I am crying but those are not the tears of joy. See you next year, dear forest..

In the future I would like to see major changes to those events, but I am pretty sure that we will see same thing next year. Oh well, you know that I will be here to shit all over it again. See you next year, souls..

Same old same old same old villa effect. +158 headache ratting..

Oh boy, which one to pick? One that I already own? One that is already in my possession? Or perhaps one that I have already claimed...

Night of the lost souls: the souls that got lost, but sadly they are back

Playing through the NOLS content this year I have mostly focused of coming up with bad puns that I can throw at this content later on in the post. The content is nothing to laugh at: it is the same, freaking thing as a year before and a year before. I didn't have to pay attention to the quests because...well by know I know them enough to just: you take the necklace and shut up, you gimme the helmet and die and you spirit give me the reward and go away for another year.Why is that so? Why is it so hard to come up with anything more? It is just few NPCs and quest and few quest lines. Is it so hard to come up with something new? And the rewards....oh geez, I hate that it sounds like I am shitting over this event for the sake of shitting, but this year's rewards are craaaaaaaaap. Red hand tunic? Like that is probably one of the first items Funcom created for this game and, after being refried, we can also have it. It is decent at best. Last year's skull, NOW that is some cool reward. Just look at it:

Last year's skull mask. The essence of cool.

This year's red hand tunic. Decent at best. Check out the doll *face palm*

So how it went? Well first the haunted forest. Talk to NPC, get necklaces, put it on the altar, BAM BAM the chieftain and use your port spell to jump back to Tarantia.

I am crying, but those are not the tears of joy...see you next year, dear forest..

Talk to the spirit and then rush to the villa. You know what? I lied. Funcom does indeed give us a small twist to the NOLS chain (if you can call 2 quests a chain..) and that twist is: VILLA EFFECTS! That is right, the inhabitants of the villa spend their whole year preparing the decoration so the players can enjoy something bold, new and refreshing each time. This year's we got the red fog effect which makes things hard to see and can cause head aches. 

Fun, fun, fun!!!

After downing the villa boss just rush back to the spirit, get your reward and be over with...unless you want to run group instance for another quest (no you don't). What is the deal with social pets anyway? I never see anyone with his pet out unless it is a combat pet. Anywho, here are the rewards for 2011:

 And last but not least: the ultimate proof of just how lazy the Funcom developers are. The quest text is straight from 2009 where the reward was a horned helmet . The problem is that the devs didn't bother to change the quest text. Half-ass content done in a half-ass way.

See you next year, NOLS fans! You know I am going to be there to poke fun at it (I sure hope I don't)

Winter event: the event that works

After less than desirable night of the lost souls II (almost as bad as Highlander 2) I was very sceptical about this even. "Event in Age of Conan?" I thought "then we are going to see some reused villas for sure". Using villas in events seemed at that point like a permanent law.If you are going to a strip bar (not that I do) there are bound to be some boobies in there (or so I have been told).

How, oh how I have been pleasantly surprised when I found out that the new even not only doesn't have villas in it, but also can actually pass as event: it has story.

The story might not be some dark schemes cooked up by resurrected mage of ancient, dreaded Acheron, but something that actually fits tribes of the North. Vanirs have crashed the party and the Aesirs need some help so they don't get their ass handed to them. First thing you will notice are the beautiful visuals: the zone is just done right.You can almost feel the chill cutting to your very bones and your breath freezing in the air. While Cimmeria might not be a perfect place for summer vacations, Aesirs have to endure much harsher, colder environment than their dark haired neightbors. Apparently the zone is located high in cold-ass mountains of the north. Perfect place for late night drinking.

You arrive at the event hosted by Aesirs when the Vair have already crushed their enemies and are listening to the lamentation of their women (which, of course, is best in life). You can decide if you want to get party together and crush back your enemies or disguise yourself as Vanir and go rogue on their asses. If you choose the stealthy solution you can do a lot of mischief around the camp from burning people alive in their tent, to getting them killed by enraged mammoth in heat (ok, I am making this up, but those things are pretty pissed) and finishing by good old fashion alcohol poisoning. In other words you can interact with a lot of objects in the even and see the horrid results (for the Vairs, you of course ,will laugh your ass off). This event has even cut scenes!!!111oneone While those might not pass as the masterpieces of modern in-game cinematic they are nice touch and at the very least show that the devs  have spent some time on this instead of going "copy/pase, villa, lol".

part of the cinematics

At the end of the event there is some "forced" social content when you "have" to get someone to drink virtual ale with you to complete the quest. I think people who actually RP in game or have friends (unlike me :X) will really enjoy the celebration itself. One thing was missing thou and its the merry, drinking music. Everyone was dancing, but no music was being played. Come on, give us some beer music :P

the story of my life: I get late to the party....

...and everyone is already throwing up

celebrations are done really well, minus the music which is not done at all

lootz

I have ended parties dressed like this..

Vanir captive. Less than entertaining

The rewards, as always, are visually pleasing and totally not trashing material (unlike pict on the stick, what the hell were you thinking Funcom?).

So to sum it up: if Funcom builds up more yearly events like this they will be on the right track.

...and no more damn villas, m'kay?

Night of the lost souls II: the return of the souls that got lost (during the night)

There is always a person in a movie theater that will say something funny during the movie preview/teasers. Like that time when while screening the highlander II preview one of the characters in the movie said “there can be only one” and that guy shouted “there should have been only one”. Exactly my feelings about the night of the lost souls. It was kinda fun the first time, the other time – eh, not so much.

Honestly I have forced myself to go through this content just to review it later which I don’t really want to do (hence this crappy review).

Its pretty much same stuff as last year: all quest point to the forest in Cimmeria and then to the special versions of Villas in Noble (nooble :D:D) District. You get same “fluff” items like blood to smear all over your character. I twittered that those items are for lol and then trashing and I stand by that.

If this was your first night of the lost souls then you might have enjoyed it like I did last year. I doubt that I will re-do it the third time around (most like it I will because I am a sucker for events)

There is however one change that I must praise: in one of the villas I had green recipe drop and blue recipe drop for guild city decorations. I don’t know how rare those items are, but since it was a drop I assume that it didn’t happen for everyone (at least the blue drop).

More like that please!

What would be the main problem with night of the lost souls event? I think I have covered that in previous posts about events in general, but in a nut shell:

The story is cheesy. Well its all about the Halloween vibe which is not very serious, but sometimes the great story can make up for obvious lack of content. Example? Pre ROGS event. Shitty content, JAW DROPING story.

The rewards are cheesy. Again the social head gear (nasty skull cap) is of superior quality. The problem is that not only everyone got it, but you can even buy it off trader. There goes any uniqueness to the items :[

The other stuff like brain juice and bandages *roll eyes* even if I wanted to put that into my bank I can’t, because its already full. I kept the skull for my social head wear collection (I might wear it with pvp armor once social tab hits AOC), but the rest got trashed. Seems like a waste.

On the bright side we have new seasonal event coming up. Its going to be winter themed and will revolve around Aesirs. Game Director wrote in this month’s community letter that there will be some changes to this event based on the previous feedback. I am curious and full of hope at the same time.

The Silver Atrium event - spoilers may occur

The second even in AOC history is live and let me tell you:  it beats the night of lost souls, which is no high praise, but a compliment nevertheless.

The event revolves around new expansion story line and you get a chance to:

a. lay eyes on Khitaian boobs for the first time

b. kill people from the foreign land for the first time

The story

The event uses up old content (villas) and introduces new location -the market. I am going to spoil this for you: the Silver Atrium is not an very secret organisation of assassins (oh thank you FC for that), but a very special market. In this place where people from across Hyboria come to deal...in deeds! The gold is worthless in here and your value is measured in your willingness to accept the bizarre and do the unthinkable. Just going around an talking to "traders" shows that the devs have put in the work to maintain the strange vibe of this place with each of NPCs. In other words: this event actually has a story behind it. It is a nice change from the "cheesy" story line of Night of Lost Souls, which was proper for the Halloween, but still felt very much like "Tales from the crypt" and not "Conan lore"

The rewards

As usual: silly social wearable and consumables that everyone gets, tries out, haves a short laugh and trashes. In other words: crap. I dream of events that will let you re-do the content to get truly unique stuff. Wouldn't it be cool if you had a small chance of some recipe dropping or like a unique tattoo pattern to proudly display on your back?. Just getting some silly items, like every single other person on the server, seems like a poor reward.

The rumors

Word on the streets (of Old Tarantia) is that the very day this event ends the ROGS will go live. It is because you can claim the quest letter only for 44 days and several game retailers have already put up ROGS for sale with 11-14 of may as release date. I am definitely hungry for more quality story telling as provided in the event.

To sum it up:

Pros:
- story line

Cons:
- zero replayability,
- same rewards for everyone,
- poor rewards,
- no challenge at all,

Night of the lost souls - spooky in "oh noes!" kind of way

So the first event in the history of Age of Conan is coming to an end.
How was it? Definitely a step in a right direction. There is hope that FC will add more of these seasional events to spark up some server activity. The server was booming when patch went live and you could instatly find group to explore new quests. Nowadays...not so much.
The patch itself basically broke the game in terms of FPS performance, latency and stability, but that is a whole different story. Lets get down to the nitty griddy core of halloween event:

The story

The story is cheesy at best. No one expected anything epic in terms of lore. It goes down to cursed book rutine and you uncovering some secrets. It is standard halloween stuff. I think it was fine.
The rewards

Rewards are social items...and they should be since this is purely a social event. The big big problem is that everyone doing the quest line (which is SUPER easy BTW) will get same rewards. After 2 hours the server was full of people in bandages or drunk with fermented brain juices. Quests replayablility? You guessed it: zero ! Most obvious and rational thing to do would be making the social rewards drop from the Bosses (and the quests had quite few of them). People would run the quests several times to get those rewards (hell, I would!) and some would half-kill themself infront of their computers to get demon pet reward. Instead FC decided that everyone will get same rewards and by doing this they allowed the players to burn through content (which BTW probably took weeks to put together) in an hour and made all the rewards less "valuable" because it takes zero effort to collec them all. No epeen to show off in the years to come :(

The zones

FC cleverly used old content with a hint of some new stuff like "corrupted villa". Not only we could revisit old and long forgotten places, but also see well known ones with a nice twist.
Check out the screenie featuring corrupted villa - now that is some nice work FC!

Pros:
- first event...ever!
- nice social rewards,
- new corrupted villa,
- both solo and group questes,

Cons:
- zero replayability,
- same rewards for everyone,
- no challenge at all,
- very short,
- the boss that gives the pet reward was bugged and keept restarting after going low on HP.