Sunday 21 October 2012

The First Hurdle - Age of Conan



It is with some trepidation that I install the first game in my catalogue - Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, or Age of Conan: Unchained as it's now called.

There's a lot to be worried about. This blog is the first enterprise of this type that I've done and I'm concerned I won't follow it through all the way. I have no pedigree in following through on my good ideas and what the Gods of game-naming have delivered to me to help me on my way is an MMO.


This means that death in the line of duty will be a rare occurrence, under normal circumstances, until a fairly high level.

It means that there are almost *endless* hours of playtime.

It means I'll have to play with strangers :(

But not only that, it's an MMO which I played  A LOT when it first came out. I levelled 3 or 4 classes up to about 30ish and none of them were remotely interesting to play as. It means I've done the first 40 or 50 hours to death, and have no desire to delve back into that world of drudgery and number pressing. I've played 3 MMOs now and I haven't got near the end of any of them thanks, mainly, to the idea of a subscription payment model. How can any game be 29.99 + (9 x number of months played) pounds worth of fun? It's insane.
Luckily this is the one thing that I don't have to worry about now as Conan has gone free-to-play. It seems like the best MMO buying strat these days is - buy the boxed copy, then wait a year until the devs realise that their payment model is outdated and go free to play and then get stuck in.

So what happens when I run the game for the first time?

"ConanPatcher.exe - Unable to Locate Component. This application has failed to start because d3dx9_43.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

Fate reaaaally doesn't want me to carry on with this project.

A quick google fixed the issue so now it's on to PATCHING. Hooray! The hardcore MMO player's thirst for content is insatiable, so coming back to any MMO after a protracted period (in my case a few years) will mean a lengthy patching process - another hurdle which I'll have to vault if I want to play a game I own.

It's been patching for a while now...

*quickly checks progress*

1.98 of 11.6gb... :/

I'm off to tidy the kitchen

No comments:

Post a Comment