My Dragons
AoC First Impressions, Continued
Like Tobold, I am slightly peeved about how the Early Access weekend went: the servers didn't even open on Saturday until ~4 pm (I'm not precisely sure because I was having login issues), a good several hours after they were supposed to open at noon--and I don't know about you, but when someone tells me something like this starts on a given day, I tend to assume 12:01 am, not pm. And then they put scheduled server maintenance on Sunday afternoon...in the US; in Europe it was smack in the middle of evening prime time. That couldn't have waited until the middle of the night/early Monday morning? For that matter, why is it written that US and European servers have to be maintained at the same time? Schedule it so that it's in the respective middles of the night; you'll likely have to give your support staff overtime, but at least they won't be trying to work on eleventy-hundred servers at the same time.
Unlike Tobold, I've had no technical issues whatsoever except for one inexplicable moment when the game decided my screen resolution was different from what it really is; a quick visit to the video preferences fixed that. Nothing has lagged, nothing has crashed, nothing has frozen, and my video prefs are on the medium settings. (Then again, my machine is pretty new and has little on it, so it's got RAM like Dolly Parton has bosom.) My biggest complaint from a performance point of view is that the movement keys aren't very sensitive and have far too much granularity; the smallest turn I can get out of Valeria is a good 40 degrees, which is not great when you're trying to cross narrow rooftops.
Speaking of which, how did I manage to get that name? I was figuring the first three people on any given server would be Subotai, Valeria and Bêlit. But no, I am Valeria. I made her an Aquilonian, as the best fit with Sandahl Bergman's appearance (yes, yes, movie not canon, I don't care), and anyway Valeria sounds more like an Aquilonian name than Cimmerian or Stygian. She has a robe now, which is slightly less-good armor than the quest-reward tunic, but it solves the armor-and-bikini-bottom problem so I'll deal with a little less defense till I get some damn pants. I happily cope with being a sex object, but being a stupid-looking sex object is right out.
I really like the fact that Valeria looks plausibly like she could kick your ass, while still looking like a girl; she's muscular, but in the female way rather than being a male body with tits and a woman's face. For a universe with such inherent sexism--Howard was writing male power fantasy in the 30s, remember--Funcom has done a spectacular job of making the game friendly to those of us with girly bits. The "rogue trainer"--class training doesn't work much like WoW--is a woman, and so are a couple of other important NPCs. In fact, the only useless female I've encountered so far has been Cas...damn, I don't remember her name. The tied-up chick with the first few quests. She has "Oh, how can I ever repay you" dialog that made me roll my eyes, and a few unsubtle "Come to my place and I'll figure something out" bits. Sorry, honey, you're not my type, and you know, when I'm getting mobbed by Picts you could at least pick up a stick or something; even if you're as useless as Buttercup you might provide a distraction.
The game is both more and less lethal than WoW or Vanguard; I've died more often, but at the same time I've killed groups of 3 and 4 mobs of my level. Remembering to use combos is very, very important, as is keeping track of where my target's shields are. Also, archer units seem to have larger aggro radii than melee units, which has bitten me in the ass a few times.
The assassin class seems to be a little more powers-of-darkness than I'd really expected; several of my abilities so far talk about channeling unholy energy or gouging out bits of dead guys' souls. I'm also not clear I'm going to be able to use my early access item, which is a bow; if not I'll have to get one of the cool mounts instead.
More later, as things progress.