Azaroth

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

According to Damion’s blog, female characters in the upcoming Age of Conan start out as a sex slave.

I guess reaching a mass market wasn’t one of their goals. Forcibly disenfranchising half of the worlds population really isn’t a great start here. I suppose they’re hoping to REALLY nail down the “greasy 14-30 males” demographic by being “uber hardcore”. That’s probably a really bad idea. And not only has it proven to be a really bad idea in the past, but they’re creating one hell of a headache for themselves in the future.

Not only are these guys asking for a playerbase that’s going to destroy the will to live of every CS person they have on staff, and not only is it going to cannibalize itself by its very nature, but going so far as to DARE women to play the game by threat of forced cockslap?

Now, seriously guys.

And hell, what about all of those males out there who like to play females? I imagine *most* of them are going to forgo that particular habit, since any guy playing a female character in this game will get far more than the odd strange look for doing so. “So how’d you like that newbie experience, dude?” “It was aight, my guild totally helped me powerlevel”.

Update: Comments seem to imply that this particular aspect of the game is “tastefully done”. There are ways to do that, I suppose. But even being the heartless chauvinistic misogynist that I am, I think it’s probably just a little over the top regardless of how it’s ultimately presented. In any event, they’re seriously handicapping their potential audience - and that’s never a good thing.