Age of Calamitous yay or nay?

[Valor]

I was really hoping to get some opinions from the general community on AOC as a mod, I have been talking to a friend who is not a fan of it but is running it anyways and I started to make a pro/con list in my head and really was hoping to get some solid feed back from the community as a whole.

I do want to say first and foremost, I have no intention of crapping on AOC, It's a fantastic mod with a lot of great devs working hard on it, but with anything it has it's issues. So I made a pro and con list to get my thoughts out and I'd like to know what others have to say about the mod.

Pros:
-Unprecedented customization in all aspects, armor, character creation, weapons, etc.
- Adds in a lot of great building pieces, some that clearly inspired Funcom to add (better fountains, etc)
- More in depth crafting for unique weapons
- More levels + skill points to make better builds (For those of us who want those T5 talent benefits)
- Unique and really well thought out items, (Light gem, Astral Waterskin)
- An interesting faction system with lore that isn’t forced on you but is available.

Cons:
- Level very high, grindy system for a server that intends to wipe on a regular basis (Specific to her server).
- Game made more into a crafting game than dungeon and exploration.
- invalidates a lot of the current end game content, Starmetal, Dungeons & (most) Legendaries. (Due to level bloat + Gear inflation)
- You would need custom content (dungeons) to keep AOC interesting, but the pace of leveling
needed to run AOC on seasons would also cause the dungeons to be fairly useless.
- Server bloat - mobs in AOC shrink the explorable world by a lot - taking up large portions of the map

[Jim]

I'm not sure if it's still like that, but I quit the Age of Calamitous servers because of the plague animals. I'm basically a solo player who runs with thralls. My thralls would get wiped out the cloud of poison that the animals drop. Also, hitting mobs of 10+ heavy armoured tanks is kind of a no go for me.
But that was all a while ago.

[Valor]

I think they've made improvements but I don't really think that soloability is one of them from what I saw when I was on recentley.

I know how you feel though as that had happened to me.

But you are right, it is more complicated for solo players and very punishing to them.

[gpcstargate]

There is a Solo add-on to the mod for the single player by AoC for the game.

But I play with and I play without .. running about 36 mods at this time.

[Valor]

Originally posted by gpcstargate:

There is a Solo add-on to the mod for the single player by AoC for the game.

But I play with and I play without .. running about 36 mods at this time.

yeah, the only problem is that if it's on a dedicated server then groups will have it to easy.

[Jim]

With the epic fiasco, a bunch of the people I played with dropped the game so I might just abandon public servers for the time being. I’ve been having a hell of a time finding one I like anyway.

[Jaq]

I'm not a fan. I'd prefer more of a stripped down, "AoC Lite" that dovetails better with the standard game experience rather than invalidating much of it.

[Vega]

AoC has too much content, so much you'll never actually beat it. The only way to truly enjoy it is to play with Better Thralls.

Too much to it, though. Faction stuff isn't even all that great. Warrior Mutator is better.

[Bloodartist]

nay

I have a friend who ran AoC on his server, but he said people quit cause it got too grindy.

[Valor]

^ I've experienced that before, I am fairly well versed with AOC and I joined a server about 2 months after launch and passed day 1 players by quite a bit because I was able to move through it very quickly.

But grindy does seem to be a pretty big turn off for most people.

[ducatnazgul]

I dislike it for several reasons. The plague is ridiculous. Supposedly the creators wanted to make the experience more about the player and less about your thralls. But the plague is so deadly it's more like "How dare you succeed in defeating our monsters? Here's a cheap shot insta kill for your troubles!"

The content is too much. You end up collecting so much crap you can barely sort it all. Very grind heavy crafting system, you basically feel like you're punching a clock to gather things to craft a new ingredient to go grind more things to make something out of the thing you just spent hours trying to grind.

It DOES NOT fit the theme of the original vanilla content. At all. One minute I'm happily living in the gritty world of Conan, the next minute you're grinding (again) and running around searching for quest items just so you can shoot magic spells out of your fingers, half of which will blind you in combat with ridiculous effects that look like the wet dream of a 15 year old's favorite anime.

Half of the "story content" is nothing more than "oh, you want to make magic? find these 7 books, then come back and join our club." That's it. When you find said books, there's no prompt or flavor text, just on to the next one. They totally mailed it in, just forcing you to run around clicking on something so you can do something else. MOST if not all of the crafting ingredients or items have NO item description other than a vague "This stuff is good for crafting" type of description.

It increases the load time of the game exponentially. You will easily spend twice the time as normal staring at loading screens with such inane flavor messages as "Hi Mom" or "is it magic, or science?" accompanied by eardrum crushing music that sounds nothing like the game you bought.

[L3wt]

This basically sums it up lmao. There was like 1 decent looking armor in the mod before I stopped playing it but it required some hardcore greenbelt raid. No thanks that's poo. The textures for the elven whatever were ALL unfinished(I stupidly built my entire base out of this) and never got fixed even months after reporting it so yeah, if you can't even get the basic textures finished then it doesn't give me much hope for wasting more of my hours on raids and sh*t just to find out they are prob unfinished too.

Big NAY. It's like the scope of Skyrim's Requiem mod but with 1 single person working on everything and getting lost half way through.

[Valor]

AOC has come a long way and I don't have issues with the quality of the content that is added, more so how it's added. As I said in my OP. the grind is just insane.

I enjoy the faces, hairs, armors etc that it adds.

[Kiyo]

I like it but I also only play single player with the RP addon that reduces the grind by increasing rates/reducing boss health so the grind isn't as bad. It's fun for when you've burned through the main game and seen all there is to see but I would say it is a hard pass for someone just starting out or still relatively new to the game.

One thing I don't like is the scaling of content compared to the base game, all of the new thralls make even named characters from the base game almost entirely useless. The more you go beyond 60 and access the mods more powerful items the more the world becomes easier, which would be fine but many of the new enemies are centered in one place making the rest of the world a complete pushover.

If I could change anything it would be to spread the contents of the mod out more across the world, scale back some numbers to make the transition less jarring and maybe place more super bosses outside of the unnamed city with lower spawn chances.

[Valor]

Originally posted by Kiyo:

If I could change anything it would be to spread the contents of the mod out more across the world, scale back some numbers to make the transition less jarring and maybe place more super bosses outside of the unnamed city with lower spawn chances.

I think the only real way to save a lot playability would be to tune dungeons + rewards up and then make custom areas outside the wall with their own content. I just can't stand the fact that all of Funcoms content is made useless.

[Malimber]

We made our whole base out of AOC blocks so we cant really abandon it now. Its been surpassed by Warrior mutator and EEWA for content. Its good mid game for us but we grew out of it very quick. Screw magic with AoC. I went a magic faction but I refuse to deal with the grind they added given the very poor damage output and utility for it.