Age of Conan

I started off playing as a conquerer. I’ve found that most RPG’s I’ve played have always been geared towards a tank-type char at low levels… in that… at low levels on a new game that’s never been played, the tank gives you the most amount of leeway to make mistakes. So I played a conquerer – which is like the “full plate and packing steel” kinda guy from D&D. Been pretty easy with him so far.

The Good: Combat. Combat is really fun, there is no auto-attack so imho that’s a big improvement over the norm. Press the “1” key, and you do an attack on the “left side”, press “2” and you do sort of a “overhand chop” attack, and “3” attacks the right side. Now this is important, because like in SFC, you as a defender can do shield reinforcement. I can defend in any one of those three directions “more” than the other, or I can spread my shields around equally (think… “I can focus my defense in this direction”). If I attack where someone is focused, then my attack does a fraction of damage. If I attack where someone isn’t focused, then my attack does a heck of a lot more damage. This is huge in the game, there is a very noticeable effect from attack/defending where they aren’t. I like this alot, it makes you "pay attention" in combat instead of just "run up into range, auto-attack, and press heal every 7.8 seconds".

The way I see this work in game? I go up to a bad guy, and start chopping at where he isn't defending. After about three successive strikes on this area, the enemy starts shifting shields over, so then I start attacking from another direction. I haven't figured out how to effectively adjust my shields yet... haven't needed to I guess, but then again, I've only had a shield equipped for about the last level (hadn't found one that I could use, and it took me that long to "step away" from the game play and look at some of the other stuff like finding an armorsmith to go buy one)

That’s your basic combat… on top of that, you get “combo attacks” as you level up. These are nothing more or less than “special attacks” that you’d have in other games, have cool-down timers, require stamina to perform. Yada yada yada. The usual.

The combat is really fun, so far. That’s definitely the strength of the game. I don’t see why any MMO would go back to auto-attack after this… but then again, when I saw how CoH/CoV did 3D flight, I thought 3D combat in an mmo was solved and things would never go “back” they way they were. I was wrong.


Questing: In this game, there are two “modes” you can play in… one is “daytime”, in which you can interact with others just like a normal mmo, the other is “nighttime”, in which you’re basically playing a singleplayer game. You can switch back and forth fairly easily (the bartender at the noobie tavern). There are other differences too, (some merchants don’t appear at night). It seems as if the “character quest” takes place at night, as night is where people will talk about things that happen at night like assassinations and rebellions and stuff. Sounds stupid in a way, “who wants to pay to play an online singleplayer game”, but I guess the reason is that on the full PvP servers, this will at least give your char a chance to get a little exp under his belt before heading out into gank-ville. It makes sense in that way. Most of the quests are the same stuff you’ve seen before “oh the big guy that run the town is a tyrant and is in league with these other bad guys”.

PVP: Tried it a little bit… a couple of “capture the flag” type games. Fun, hectic, but my performance issues made this a problem. It was choppy and laggy and that was just with about 5-10 people on screen. Good luck having these “200 person battles” that the devs keep raving about.

Levelling: Fairly easy. You’ll go from level 1 to level 2 in 1 kill. So far… doesn’t seem to be any great differences between speed of leveling between this game and others. I haven’t read anything about being able to respec a char – but did see where you can have your feats cleared to re-select them, so that’s basically about the same thing.

I haven’t been able to check anything else out (mounts, crafting, structures, etc.) as that doesn’t come until after level 13, and level 13 is the max you can get. Supposedly, there’s a major plot decision to make around level 13 that they don’t want to give away just yet. That’s not a bad thing, cuz since my conquerer is level 12 right now, I’ll go make a priest type char, then a rogue type char, than a magic-loser type char, and see how they all play.

The Bad: Performance. Yes, this is supposedly a stress test and all that… however… in noobie city, I get around 5-10 fps max. This is unacceptable, my rig is not ancient, it’s above the recommended specs, I should not be getting fps this low. When I get outside of town, or in a dungeon, I get around 15-20 fps. I would gather that my machine is probably above your average gaming machine (especially with all the upgrades I did earlier this year), so I’ll say it now that if this doesn’t improve, the game isn’t going anywhere. If too many mobs attack, it gets choppy and laggy. There’s no way in hell that this is going to be able to have these “massive guild and siege” wars that are being billed as it’s attraction, not when I can barely fight 3 or 4 mobs without choppiness, and certainly not when I PvP and it lags/chops with 8-10 people on screen. I will say that when I set the graphics to max and just look around (when I can), the game is beautiful, but then again, what game isn’t?

Maturity level: So yeah, they call prostitues "whores" and I'm on a quest where "the blood of a virgin was used to sustain life through this magic thing"... and to stop that life-sustaining feature of the magic thing, I have to taint the magic thing with the vaginal blood of a whore. Yes- it's for mature people. No, it doesn't really add to the game. The end result is to "go here and 'use' this potion on that magic thing". The whole nipple/cussword/mature thing is a marketing gimmick imho... take a look at the forums, and judging by the in-game chat, the player base is as immature as every other game out there. No better, no worse.

The Bad: Invisible walls. I don’t like playing in games where there looks to be enough room for you to “squeeze through a gap”, but there’s an invisible wall keeping you out. Or, you get those “run up a hill but get magically stopped” invisible walls. Imho there’s far better ways to stop people from going where you don’t want them to go… like… go ahead and let them jump off that cliff, and see what happens when they land and explode like a watermelon…. And… if you don’t want me trying to squeeze through that gap between the wall and the house, then don’t make it so friggin big.

The Bad: Crashes. I crash a lot, probably every 45mins to an hour.

The things that offset the bad: Since beta playing began, there’s been two patches released. Each patch has helped improve the performance and ctd’s. Yes, performance still sucks, but it’s better than it was a week ago (I basically couldn’t play it when I first logged). Yes, I still crash, but not nearly as much as I was before. Loading times between the beta release and this latest patch have improved tremendously.

Now, I know this is an open-beta, and is supposedly a stress-test of the servers… but don’t kid yourself, “open-beta” is really just a marketing trick to “generate a lot of interest right before release” and get sales. So it irks me to hear “you’re going to crash, it’s a beta”. Yeah, I know that. I know it’s a beta, not the released version, blah blah blah. I also know that in my business, if I’m going to try and get people to buy a prototype that hasn’t been released yet, I’m not going to make a prototype that has too many issues.

The Verdict: In short: I’m going to buy the game and play it free for a month. If at the end of that time, I can’t do everything that I’m supposed to be able to do because of performance (as in “oh, I haven’t done that mission where you kill 1000 beetles in a row because my machine lags out” or “I can’t join your guild siege, I lag out / gets choppy / etc”) than I’m not subscribing.

Would you kindly list down the spec of your rig? =)

just nit picking at your view but the daytime/nighttime scenerio you describe is only viable till level 20, after lvl 20 there is no singleplayer whatsoever it will be pure multiplayer.  Think of the first 20 levels as the tutorial.

Just a question, did the performance not increase massively for you after they released the last patch in beta? My framerate shot up and everything was running smoothly after that.

That last patch they sent out, right before the lvl 20 PvP event... made this game COMPLETELY unplayable for me.

Now, I'm lucky to get 2 fps in Tortage (before like I said I was at 5-10, terrible, but enough to get where I"m going). 

When I click on ESC twice to get to the settings, the game crashes. 

The review I wrote up there was written about 2 weeks ago for a different gaming forum (SFC = StarFleet Command) who were asking about it.  It was barely playable then, but now after this latest patch?  Unplayable.  I was so excited to go ffa PvP'ing, and I quite simply, can't.

Nnot to mention, my cimmeran (sp) assassin climbed up that tower and is now stuck up there, with no way to get out. 

I really want to play this game.  Dedicated servers for FFA PVP in an MMO setting?  You just can't beat that.  I'll buy the game (got nothing better to spend my game money on at the moment)... but right now it's a "pray to play" game. 

Hang around till release and just give it a week or 2 after release for them to start ironing out some of the wrinkles and I think we'll have a playable game.  Not sure how much the debuger affects performance but that will be gone and I've heard that the textures in the game have not been compressed which might be doing something for performance as well.  It's what I plan to do.  I'm in the process of building a new comp.. I need to upgrade anyways so when I finish that I'll give AoC a try.

I have a 2.6 ghz phenom, 2gb ram, Radeon 3870 CF, 32 bit vista and it is unplayable for me.  The part in the review where it says if this isn't corrected will be the doom for this game should be in bold, that was one of my first impression when playing the beta.  I guess they didn't allow dual or quad processors or CF/SLI for the beta, which might explain the performance issues, why they would do that I have no idea. It's strange because even on the absolute lowest settings and resolution, it is still horribly unplayable.

No offense to OP but I hate these beta reviews. You are essentially revieing a half-cooked hamburger. Why not wait for it to be off of the grill and actually eating it before you decide if it tastes good?

The client we used was months older than the release client so do not make judgments until May 17th.

I liked the whole guide. Too bad you had those performance issues. After that patch before FFA pvp. I had a good fps of whatever i desired. High settings gave me 15fps which was lagfree (i guess it was broken) and low gave me whoppin 70-90fps.

Anyhow, the singleplayer story is wonderful, detailed, entertaining and whatnot. I love that they added a legacy quest for your character to know who you are. Where you come from and what your destiny is. Though, at a Roleplayers perspective. It's way to guidelined. Then again, i will not bother with it and still go with my idea for a character :)