Out of Pod Experience

Interesting game but maybe a day late and a dollar short.

With any luck it'll have a better combat system than the other Conan-based MMO

You can play as a man. There's pecs and dong sliders for men during character creation. You will start out completely naked and crucified, man or woman.

I'm a huge Robert E. Howard fan, and I always wanted a sandbox MMO like Eve with a swords and castles setting. Too bad about the dong slider and the graphic gore gnarliness. I'm just squeamish I guess, can't see going full-MMO for it.

Edit: Herzog, your post reminded me to try a new Google search again after many months. o7 Anyone tried these two sandbox-ish swords and sandals MMOs?
Gloria Victis Seems and looks like a Mount & Blade-inspired sandbox. If so, excellent! But does it work?
Black Desert Online - Graphics look great, if nothing else.

Kergit, you are a fan of Robert E. Howard but you are also squeamish over all that savagery and barbarism? I mean, even Solomon Kane has some really gruesome stuff in there, and that's one of his tamer series.

Well, it's oh-damn-we-ran-out-of-money-and-isn't-finished-yet "early access". It's a different way to die for games that didn't made it through development.

Elmund, I'm a great fan of R.E.H.'s "the Pict fell with a yard of steel protruding from his back," "Conan's sword flashed and the guard's head leaped from his shoulders," etc. But somehow the Age of Conan MMO world seems... I don't know, more sadistic than R.E.H.'s. R.E.H.'s Hyborian Age world has lots of blood and gore, but they come out of men and monsters who deserved it, and who put up wicked fights. It’s full of rogues, thieves and all kinds of greedy curs, but there’s not much misery or suffering on, it’s a pretty fun world. It just that R.E.H.’s heroes go out looking for gudfights and "great gouts of black blood.”

But with AOC, it’s like the whole Hyborian Age is one continuously nasty place, with cruelty, torture, and gnarliness going on everywhere you look. Kind of a gratuitous gnarliness game world, not like R.E.H.’s Hyborian Age. Disappointing to me, I really wanted to like AOC.

Heresy. Blasphemy. Ignorance and philistinism. Gone all backwards, stupid, and insipid. Why you do that Funcom? Why you do that controllers of Robert E. Howard estate? Such a waste.... Crying shame.... It all started with that horrible Arnold Dino de Laurentis cheesy Conan movie. Yes, it was horrible cheesy and a dishonor to the writer and the character. Dino, maker of bombastic 70s disaster movies. King Kong featuring Jessica Lange (ruined her career, she was a good actress but bye bye after the sitting in giant plastic Kong hand prop), Arnold and James Earl Jones as Thoth Amon (way, way too much screen time for a minor character)...

What a waste, a waste, a travesty.... Worst of all is a whole generation met Conan of Cimmeria through that bunk, and the sequel. Missed the original writing, or even the comics illustrated adaptations. And then the next-gen Funcom meme-ing....

RIP
Robert E. Howard
H.P. Lovecraft
Other crazy talented weirdos who dreamt up weird tales and told them in words, back in the day. Shame be on who makes them into licensed properties, and not faithful to the original creators.

I always have seen Conan books as rather unsophisticated kind of fun. Some revievers in my country even call this kind of literature, a S&S literature, but they refer to it as in: "Sword & Shlong".

I dont have anything against all those things people make to sell more Conan. Howard might have been a nutter personally, and his books might have been the toilet grade paper books in his times, but he knew what kind of fun sells things. I think Howard always wanted to express his urges to show life from this more savage, more primal and sexy side, and it sells by the way. Too bad not everyone can be a hero, until you have a game about hero, not only about his world. Dealing justice by administering heavy blows around to save opressed princesses. Like a Cimmerian Mario!

Its'a me, barbarian!

BTW, Basil Poledouris soundtrack decapitates.

So far, the only Fantasy fiction I do not fantasize about (as in, I absolute don't want to live in it) is Warhammer Fantasy (RIP). Goodness me. Randomly getting abducted by skaven or cultists and become Chaos God junk food? Not fun man. Even if I end up in Warhammer Fantasy setting as Karl Franz I will not be having fun.

Goddamn Imperial politics and Northmen.

Yeah, I'd agree, the Lovecraft games seem to nail the Cthulhu mythos. Many movies have too.

Nana, oh yes Howard was kind of a nutter. From some of his letters to other writers, it seems that he wasn't quite sure that Conan wasn't real. He says the stories just came to him as if he were channeling a Conan entity, and he had to write them down as fast as he could. He also said that he didn't know what happened to Conan after the last story, when the character was about 60 years old I think. "He just disappears." Pretty strange. There's a movie about Howard and this stuff called The Whole Wide World.

R.E.H.'s stories are mostly about people with too much testosterone beating down other people/creatures with too much testosterone. But there's a kind of sophisticated arcane metaphysical world order and cultural aesthetic behind them too. (The story The Tower of the Elephant is a good example). There are subtleties and weirdnesses, and Conan is a barbarian whose strategy is to ignore them as best he can and brawl his way through them.

That's my objection to the Conan movies and AOC. The focus just on the muscles and the brawling, and made Conan's world just a World Wrestling Federation with swords. (Marvel Comics didn't help either by putting Conan in just boots and a Speedo-- a visual meme that perma-embedded now. Conan actually wears armor, kaftans, furs, silk or whatever he happens to have). They don't have enough weirdness in them.

-K. Deserters, Conan otaku/ranter