One thing that has always bothered me about World of Warcraft is how hunters are the only class, which gets to tame beasts. Hunters, of all people. The guys, who, by definition, are trained at stalking and killing animals. I'd love to have my own animal companion on there, but I just don't enjoy playing this particular class.
With the Rise of the Godslayer expansion, Age of Conan (AoC) is a bit different there. Sadly, you only get to tame your own wolf or tiger, so my dream of owning a Warpstalker named Fred will never come true. On the plus side, every character may tame their own battle pet, whether they're rangers, barbarians or decorative cake frosters.
As AoC is a little less casual than WoW and geared more towards people, who eat a bowl of rusty nails with Tabasco for breakfast, the whole taming process is a bit more time-consuming and difficult than clicking on any random critter, spamming a couple heart-bubbles and having the beast bite your ass for a few seconds until it decides to be your best buddy.
Before you get started, it's time to decide whether you're a cat or a dog person. One pet is awarded by one faction of NPCs, the other pet is granted to you by their sworn enemies, so the moment you suck up to one of them, the other guys will pretty much hate your guts.
Since I have scientifically proven that cats are assholes, the logical consequence was getting a wolf. So I started doing a few quests for the corresponding faction, also known as The Wolves of the Steppes. They're quite possibly the biggest bunch of jerks in all of Khitai, so in order to prove my value, I had to kill a bunch of naked, unarmed prisoners, kick some guy off a really tall cliff and set a girl on fire. Yes, those are actual quests.
After proving to them, that I, too, can be a complete jerk, I finally got the possibility to tame my own wolf. Click on the pictures to enlarge them and read the dialogue if you care about it.
So first of all, you have to decide whether you want a black, white or brown wolf. Also, the guy tells you that the taming process is as simple as beating the snot out of a helpless little wolf cub - after killing its entire pack, of course. Feels a bit primitive after they get you all hyped up with their talk about the ancient magicks of beast taming.
Forget what you know about beast taming on WoW or that shit you see on animal planet. AoC goes an entirely different route here: Kill mommy and all of the cub's siblings, make the cub watch and then beat the poor thing into submission.
Surprisingly enough, the little guy doesn't seem too bothered by the whole thing and quickly accepts me as his new alpha. Kids these days...
And here's my new companion
Also, we ran into a half-eaten mammoth
After sucking up to the Wolves of the Steppes some more by slaughtering even more innocent and helpless people, I'm being told that my pet is a complete idiot. Apparently, so am I. To fix that, I'm supposed to take him around Khitai to show him the scents of the world.
The city is just one of the many stations on the way of showing my cub all kinds of scents. I also had to take him to a swamp, a battlefield, a dungeon entrance and... well, now he knows what they all smell like.
To test my wolf's new and improved nose, we're now supposed to find some guy, who had gone missing. Sure, lemme just hand this old sock to my pet and...
...here's the guy. Aw, we're too late!
After a successful search and not so successful rescue mission, it turns out that the Wolves of the Steppes have actually killed the guy I was supposed to find, just because they're jerks and that's how they roll. Also, they're making fun of how tiny and helpless my new pet is, so I'm supposed to hunt a whole lot of animals and feed their meat to the pup.
As if fighting harmless gazelles wasn't bad enough, they do produce some really heart-wrenching screams.
Yes - horses, too. Twenty of them. Can you believe it? What kind of wolf pup eats 20 fucking horses??
After enough meat to feed an Ethiopian family for 12 years, my pet grows into an adolescent wolf.
And that's what he looks like.
Also he sleeps a lot.
This is where my pet changes from tiny, unimpressive sidekick to a combat pet, who keeps me company and even pulls and fights baddies for me. He's not doing any significant damage, but that's not the point - I actually have a pet, which looks cool and fights beside me. Yay!
For the next and final step, you get to grind yet another arseton of reputation with the Wolves of the Steppes. It's not as soul-crushingly boring and repetitive as grinding for the mounts in Tol Barad, but you will have to repeat your daily quests for a while. Alternatively, there are some instantly repeatable quests out there, which will help raise your reputation. In theory, you could do those for 8-10 hours to max out your reputation in a single day, but fishing 14 tiny, wooden boxes out of a river over 200 times is not recommended if you enjoy your sanity.
The whole taming, scent-training and feeding thing was pretty nifty, but this is where they run out of ideas. For the final step, I'm simply required to kill 50 guys.
So I kill, kill and kill some more...
Till my companion changes into a Demon Howler (left window)...
...and grows bigger than my own character.
This is also the point, where you get the option to turn your pet into a mount. Doing so means you'll lose him as a battle pet and you'll also have to spend a whole lot of gold on quest items required for the transformation and there's no turning back. But since I'd much rather have a cool-looking combat pet than yet another thing to ride around on, this is where I'm stopping.
Not everything about this questline makes sense. Feeding the meat of fifty animals to a wolf cub? Taming the cub by slaughtering its entire pack? Sure, I suppose it's one way to show him who's boss and it stands to show that the Wolves of the Steppes are the #1 asshole faction in Khitai. There are other steps along the way, which are cool and highly enjoyable, such as showing your pet the scents of the world and using his new abilities to track down the missing quest NPC.
The one thing that will ultimately stop lots of people from going after their very own pet, aside from having to buy the pass to Khitai, is the reputation grind that goes with the questline, as well as the complete and utter lack of documentation of the involved quests. Let's face it - people are used to having everything hand-fed to them, having a wiki for every tiny quest, being able to look up every step of the way before even trying to figure things out on their own. For the better or worse, AoC and its expansion simply aren't as well-documented and all over the internet as WoW, meaning you have to figure things out on your own. It's not overly complicated, some might find it a lot more rewarding that way, others will end up ignoring the pets altogether or go the cash-shop route by buying a ravager.
Let's just hope Funcom have learned from some of their past mistakes and they won't eventually put these two pets in the cash shop with absolutely no requirement. Because seeing a whole lot of people simply buying the pet that I had to slave countless hours to get will definitely stop it from being cool. They've done it with the lowbie pvp epics and the tiger mount. And pay2win stinks.
-Cat
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