As you can gleam from the image to the left, it appears that each side of a siege battle in Age of Conan will be able to bring 48 of their best players to the fight. For some reason or another the VN Boards are all a tizzy and so are the official forums.
To me, 48 people versus 48 people sounds like a pretty hectic and fun time. I imagine it's going to be a whole lot of fun when you toss in trebuchets, catapults, War Mammoths and Rhinos and the whole shebang... so what's the problem?
Apparently this little image, taken from the in-game beta manual, is not exactly what people wanted to see. Though Funcom never said how many people they were hoping to have in a siege battle, maybe they should have as it appears lots of players were hoping for 100s of players on each side taking part... which of course would be an astronomical feat.
I mean let's be serious. In WoW our biggest battles are 40 versus 40, and in WAR I believe WHOLE CITIES will be fought over with just about the same (though obviously this could change before launch). In a game like Age of Conan, with the visuals their Cheetah engine is sporting, it's amazing to me that they can even get 96 people together in a relatively small instanced area and not crash the server.
Not to mention the organizational logistics of a clan getting 48 people together, or 2 clans even. I suspect there will be a few clans that can on any given day, but for the most part I'm betting it will be a trial to gather that many players for a fight... which is where hired help from the general populace will come in.
Also keeping the numbers restricted ensures that siege battles will be relatively even instead of seeing the same 200 person clan overtaking the smaller 30 person clan each and every chance they get. With this set up, the 200 person clan is limited to 48 members at a time, and the 30 person clan must hire on some helping hands. Is it still lopsided in favor of the larger group? Probably, but at least the little guy stands a chance at holding his ground.
However, let's not forget that there are only going to be 8 keeps in the Border Kingdoms too. The rest of the fighting will be over smaller objectives like towers and other control points, and these will be up for grabs for any group of players from what I can gather. The Keeps are pretty much solely intended for the same set of Clans that would have been running Black Temple on day 1 in WoW. Whether that's a good design decision or not remains to be seen (I'm personally against excluding any of the player base), but the fact remains that the Keeps are intended for the most organized and active of clans and not just every group of 5 people who want to take part. For those smaller groups, there are other PvP objectives as well as the Mini-Games, and each have their own set of rewards for participation.
Call me weird, but I think 48 x 48 sounds damn good and whole lot of fun. I just hope I get to participate in a few of those battles during my time in Hyboria.
15 comments:
I feel the same way like u. 48 vs 48 is more than enough.
Depending on how big of a "battlefield" we are talking about, that could even be too many. That does sound like a lot of fun, though. I can't even consider AoC right now though, since my computer can't cut it. Hopefully I'll get to upgrade at some point in the near future :)
Yeah, to expect there to be no limitations on the size of these kind of engagements seems unrealistic to me. 48 vs. 48 is actually kind of huge. I don't see the problem.
I'm in a small Lithuanian guild so 48 vs 48 is really ideal for us :) Also, it prevents large guilds from using 'zerg tactics' or whatever the slang is and using purely their advantage of numbers.
It's just that Funcom devs said we'd be able to see hundreds of players on the battlefield... But we won't.
"Though Funcom never said how many people they were hoping to have in a siege battle, maybe they should have as it appears lots of players were hoping for 100s of players on each side taking part..."
Well, actually Funcom said that hundreds of players could participate into siege battles. They even talked about 500 players in this interview ( http://www.uberguilds.org/radio/node/348 interesting part starts at 18:00). People are mad on the forums simply because Funcom lied to them.
I'm not sure why people are freaking out about it now, Funcom made it pretty clear early on that sieges would have limited numbers.
48x48 seems like quite a lot to me actually. It's probably not a static limit either, because they've reportedly tested with hundreds. Most likely, they've decided this was the happy point where it worked well.
The first instinct for most people is that bigger = better. In this case, I don't think it is.
"...Funcom lied to them."
Oh come on now. How many games in development do you know of that DON'T have changes from what the game's supposed to be in beta by the time it launches?
Isn't WoW just now getting ONE hero classes when they were "supposed" to have been in years ago, even at launch if I remember right?
I mean, this is why companies should just keep their traps shut and leave NDAs up until the game comes out. Because of people feeling personally hurt over a feature that was touted while the game was in development but later had to be cut.
By now players should know how development works. LOTS of things are planned on, but in reality few make it. For crap's sake people... take a breath, step away from the computer and put your priorities into order again.
There are other things that matter more than the size of siege battles.
Looks like I'll be hanging around here as Keen banned me for my last discussions.
I think we agree on too much for it to get overly interesting though =)
- kmxs
Okay, I'll bite... why were you banned? I can't read through all those comments.
If AoC did nothing else for my good buddy Keen, it sure did raise the talkbacks on his blog. Dude's a celebrity now. :p
Thanks for dropping by too, KMXS. Looking forward to some conversation when the urge arises.
He banned me because I disagreed with him, if you read from my first comment to his big block of bold text crying about people who disagree with him you can get the scope of how I was banned because I said the Warhammer quest system is just the same business as before and his blog seemed more like marketing fluff rather then any relavant information as to "why" the this new quest system was actually any better then anything that has been done before.
Either way he really has a problem with authority and certainly isn't afraid to remind people who's blog it is and how if they want to disagree they can post somewhere else =P So here is a link to hitlerandgraev.com starting where I first posted a link that has a differing opinion on the AoC quest system.
http://www.keenandgraev.com/?p=1044#comment-11953
Hey now, keep in mind that Keen's been my friend for over a year now (albeit across the internet).
I don't mind you disagreeing with him (lord knows I often do), but please refrain from bashing him here.
For that, maybe make an I Hate Keen Blog? :)
(Sorry Keen, if one of those pops up.)
I assume you'll be getting AoC, KMXS? What class are you itching to try and what do you think of 48 x 48?
I'm sort of getting stuck with Guardian. I lead a rather influential guild in WoW and a lot of them are coming over but someone needs to sort of commit for Guardian, and nobody else really wants to. I'm ok with it just a bit leary about leading raids with the monster up in my face blocking my view of what everyone is doing.
I think the 48x48 is fine actually, I mean I had 20 on 20 fights that seemed chaotic in DaoC and you don't want to feel totally insignificant in the fight. That is deffinately a large enough number of people to start with and get an idea of how it plays out. If they made the number too large then it would make for imbalanced fights a super guilds that have no function other then to be massive to fill up the PVP teams. I'm not really into that.
TBH I have my reservations as to how the siege combat will work out at all but if its anything like the mid level BG's in DaoC I think it could be a big hit.
I didn't mean to come across as a bash against Keen more so just being frustrated that I would be banned for the discussion we were having. I guess I am mostly just disappointed as I enjoyed bickering with a lot of the guys who visited that site. But honestly give that thread a read if you think I am being out of line with what I said, I am really not exaggerating.
I'll try and persuade some of my guildies to come visit your blog and get posting. A lot of us have been mmo'ing 11 - 12 years now, if you read any of my stuff on k&g.com you'll know I love to get into the mechanics =)
Looking forward to it, even if I am just a refuge from Keen's clutches. :P
More posting tomorrow, for now... sleep.
I don't know.. 48X48 does sound like plenty and balanced and stuff so I can see why they picked it but... I like unorganized warfare I guess.. less "set up" as you might put it. Thats why I like the Ettenmoors.. theres no number limits or set times at all. Thats my take on the number game. The siege weapons and war mounts I'm all about that though.
Well, once they get tired of your nonsense, Bildo, send em' over my way. ;)
I have a feeling the guild I'm in will be populating the Tyranny server. And, we planned on handling siege combat with hundreds particpating, but with the cap at 48v48, we aren't really all that concerned. The way we are organized actually makes it perfect for rotating siege windows.
Moreover, there are rumors floating around that the cap on the siege battles will go up after the first run throughs with actual guilds.
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