New Conan Movie w/ Arnold

Oh man...this gets me pretty excited. It has been a long time waiting for something like this to be produced out of hollywood. Especially in this time period with too much political correctness demands. A lot of the modern day action stars look like young teenage boys not fit for the action movies they are starring in.

Sure Arnold isn't in the shape that he used to be. The movie will be much better if he starts hitting the gym again. Yes he is 65, but that shouldn't stop him from doing it. If he looks good the movie will sell much better. 

What does this mean for Age of Conan and Hyboria? 

Everything!

Looking at the skins of the game, you will notice a lot of copies of the original movie along with the armor skins of the game. Also, you can almost see the very character classes from the original movie! The game is largely based off of Robert E. Howard's books and this movie.

Dark Templar, ToS, Bear Shaman? :D

The new movie seems to be about Arnold playing as king, ignoring Conan the Destroyer and the Conan the Barbarian remake. He seeks to do one last final battle to reach Valhalla and die a hero. I'm not sure if this is the best twist to put on the movie, but it promises another exciting adventure. Hopefully they won't add too much cg effects to the movie to cheapen the viewing (or insult the intelligence of those watching). The original Conan movie was about strength, overcoming impossible odds, and avenging his slain family. It was also a love story that ended in tragedy. There was a lot happening with the plot, which led viewers to be able to relate to the barbarian and cheer him even while he was a brutal killer and thief. What's not to love!

Will Funcom capitalize on this? I certainly think so. With the remake they came out with the Turan expansion pack, which unlocked one raid, a six man, and a new explorable area. A nice sized piece of content, but really couldn't be considered a true campaign. It is my hope they come out with a compaign, with an enemy as large as Thoth himself. Add at least 3 new mini games or some form of pvp content to show players that all aspects of the game matter. Yeah...a big project that will take time and resources to make. But the return...

All these carebear games coming out will never equal Age of Conan, which still posses better graphics and an intricate combat system that provides a challenge to master. People will return. New players will come when a new generation of people really start getting tired of weakling heroes that weigh 130 pounds.

The real question is, does Arnold still have the star power to make this movie work? Does the movie company have the smarts to make this movie as brutal as the first? We shall see.

I think he can pull it off!

Red Nails Best Enemy Guild of Tyranny

Close to my mind always is the first guild I started out in. The Red Nails. I normally only join 1 guild in a game, and remain loyal rising and falling as the guild grows. This game however, I had to make an exception. I want to talk to you today about the Red Nails and its unique history.

First, Red Nails comes from a short story authored by Robert E. Howard.  You can read the story here. Being a Conan nerd as a kid (and I'm still a Conan nerd) I thought the guild would be a good fit for me. I was right.

The amazing thing about Red Nails is it was a very small guild, a couple guys holding on, joining pug raids and slowly obtaining gear that eventually grew into the number 1 renown producer on the Tyranny server. When the Cimmeria/Tyranny merge took place, the guilds started bumping heads like crazy. It became two servers battling for dominance of Tyranny. So many guilds began to get sucked up by Cimmarian guilds, but only three guilds remained of Tyranny. Red Nails, Mercs, and TaW. 

Red Nails led the charge of being targeted because we produced the most renown. We gained the nickname "Red Fails" by our fans and we soon were sieged every single week. We brought the pvp to Tyranny. We were the favored enemy of all other guilds. This was the best thing that ever happened for open world pvp. We were out geared, out manned, couldn't even complete t3...but we were never about raids. We were primarily interested in the pvp aspect of the game.

Many of our membership didn't like the constant sieges, the fact that if you wore the Red Nail tag, you would be attacked...by everyone. Our only ally at this time was TaW.  We then befriended the guild Unforgiven...and they promptly betrayed us during a siege with the power-house guilds of Cimmeria. (Unforgiven ran to a pve server shortly afterwards heeheehee).

The battles though were healthy and fun. Sure people would get frustrated, but it was lively because you never knew when pvp would erupt in your questing routine.

Here is an awesome pvp video made by Acebane. Req Nex wiped. Subscribe to his page.

Run from the Red Nails vanity cape :)

When SWTOR came out the aspect of the game changed. Everyone started doing their own thing, and the population suffered for it. Red Nails took a big hit, losing our raid leader and many of our other people. We weren't the only guild to lose out, but we were never able to recover and become a "powerhouse" guild that everyone wanted to kill in open world.

We did grow from that, but it was never the same. We started having good numbers again, regular pve content, and we played mini games. The open world was never the same because the sieges completely stopped. We started to lose members when Risen and Req Nex merged themselves.  About six of our members went over, including some long time members which hurt us in a lot of ways. From that, half our officers went and joined the Aco's, while another raid leader quit the game altogether.

We were dealing with this issue when...our entire guild split in half and the Iron Maiden guild formed, vowing to kill Red Nails. It did open up sieging again, but because we easily won, the Iron Maiden guild soon disbanded. The remaining members went to Sentinels.

Soon after we were forced to enter a raid alliance with the mercs. We started doing t3 raids. Our accomplishments there is we had the bottom floor on farm. There wasn't any open world pvp hardly. Some people attempted but could only get...2 or 3 of us. Sometimes the opposition wouldn't be there or we would get zerged down. In any case, it was a large difference.

We be raiding son

Once GW2 came out, we thought it would be a good idea to form the Red Nails on the Sorrows Furnace server, hoping that we could retain some of our membership and keep the guild alive. We formed the guild, started building the members up, but then I went back to AoC, passing lead off to Dag. The people that stayed with AoC...simply quit the Red Nails, joining either Acos or Req Nex. Only a handful stayed playing minis with Red Nails tag.

New Dawn and TaW moved to Set because Tyranny died. The two mega guilds ruined all hopes of open world pvp. All that is left is the pve content, and mini games. To get that you have to play on Set server. So I went and joined the TaW guild, a former ally of Red Nails.

The game isn't dead though, and neither is Tyranny. I moved three toons to Set, but have 2.5 accounts still on Tyranny. The server can be revitalized if people either come back to the game or some form of pvp flagging system is established and they unite the last 3 US servers. I see no other way the former glories of the game to be truly experienced.

The fact remains, you can never have as much fun on a pve server compared to a pvp server. 

Merging Servers Killed Open World PvP

After the Wiccana server merged and became Set Funcom offered free transfers. Many people jumped on this opportunity. I already had my barbarian "Ragnarvor" on Set in hopes of experiencing raid content not possible for me to do on Tyranny.

What happened was Guild Wars 2 came out and the Tyranny server virtually died. My guild, which I had been part of for two years, slowly lost its population (we started a guild in GW2 on Sorrows Furnace server). Many of our members went to Set server. I moved one of my Guardians "Ragsguard" used to be "Rragnar" and my sin "Ragnarx".

Moving my sin was a hard move for me because I love open world pvp. The fact is though, there is really no open world pvp anymore. The Red Nails were bringing it, but it became crazy with almost everyone on the server joining only two guilds = Req Nex and Acos. They have a raid alliance, so they have no open world pvp. Since Red Nails only had a couple players bringing it: Ripstart, Ty, Romad, Unnatural and myself, it was very easy to zerg us down. But....we made them pay.

For more videos go here

I hope that there is someway to revive open world pvp. It is an aspect of the game that can be enjoyable. Maybe not when you are questing and you end up in pvp when you might not necessarily want it (but thats why you sign for a pvp server).

I'm looking forward to the new mini map, and maybe one day there will be a merge of some kind that will unite the players once more so we can enjoy open world once more.