Age of Conan

This will be own, unbiased, review of Age of Conan.  I have played since the early start, through max level 80, and post level 80 on my Bear Shaman.  My subscription runs out in August and I will not be renewing.  My guild has completely exited the game, I will be the last.  That and the fact that I was accepted into the WAR beta do play a role in my decision to cancel my subscription, but I am also addicted to MMOs and needed one to play, which is why I bought Age of Conan in the first place.  Take all that into consideration as you judge my opinions.  I played this game because it was an MMO that I could play with some friends.  I am not a fanboy of Conan, I am not a critic of games, I played Vanguard for the 6 months prior to picking this one up.  I believe my opinion is very unbiased going into my experience with this game. 

I'll preface by saying that Age of Conan was fun, there were many times that I enjoyed playing the game.  There were also a lot of times that I became very frustrated with the game.  My goal for this thread is to outline the undeniable problems with the game and the way it was managed by Funcom, while at the same time pointing out the successes of the game and the takeaways that I feel gamers should take note of. 

Age of Conan's primary problems all stem from technical issues.  The reality is that once I got past level 40, the zones I had to level in constantly crashed.  Every 10-15 minutes, you would get a red lag bar and the server would lag out.  Sometimes the game world would just return to normal after 30 seconds and you could continue going about your way.  Most of the time, you would be disconnected from the server.  Reports have said this is due to the instance you were in trying to close due to a small number of people being left in it.  This issue still exists to this day. 

Age of Conan also launched with a vast number of memory leaks, some still exist after repeated patch notes saying they were fixed.  At least once per play session, you would crash to desktop and get an error message saying the game was out of memory.  This combined with the red lag bar disconnects and all the other unrelated random server disconnects and/or client crashes meant that you literally could not play the game.  You were constantly disconnected or having a client crash. 

Usually when you would come back from a crash or disconnect, you would be dead.  This is not a big deal in Age of Conan.  What is a big deal though is travel time.  The higher level you get, the further distance you have to travel to get to the zone where you can level.  You have to ride through 2 zones just to get to the one you want to be in.  Often when you crashed, your character was rolled back to a place he had been earlier, and when this happened during the middle of your trek out to the higher level zones, it cost you a lot of playing time. 

Also, the game files constantly became corrupted on their own and had to be re-downloaded with the game launcher.  When I came home and intended on playing Age of Conan, it was essential that I got the launcher going, and then went and got a drink, changed clothes, used the bathroom, etc because it would take 5-15 mins (sometimes longer) to download all the replacement files.  I had to continuously defrag my hard drive due to all the downloads from the patcher.  It was not uncommon to turn on the launcher and see that I needed to download 500MB of junk on a non patch day. 

Age of Conan was also released with a lot of bugs.  Some bugs are normal for an MMO, but Age of Conan had an abnormally large number for the quality of game it claimed to be.  For example, all crafted gear gains it's value from the gem slots each item has.  However, up until a recent patch, everytime you zoned or even logged in, if you had the crafted gear equipped prior to zoning in, you would not get the bonuses from gems in the slots.  Crafted gear was worthless without the gem bonuses.  This might not seem like that big of a deal, just log off naked, but you have to understand that Age of Conan is a highly instanced game.  You zone into different places all the time.  This required you to have to always remember to click off each piece of gear every time you zoned and then back on when you loaded in. 

A similar bug existed with getting quest credit for crafting quests.  I personally did gemcutting, and each tier requires you to make 3 gems of that tier.  After you took the quest, you could not just cut the gems, turn them in and be done.  The only time that you could get the quest to give you credit for cutting a gem was for a short time period immediately after logging into the game.  So for each of the 5 tiers of gemcutting, I had to log out, log in, cut a gem, repeat 3 times.  Keep in mind also, when you log out in Age of Conan, you do not go back to the character select screen.  You go all the way back to the log in screen.

There were lots more bugs, just search around the official forums if you really want to know all of them.  I just want to lastly mention that as Funcom fixed some of these bugs, they introduced others.  For example, on one patch they accidentally removed all gem slots from all crafted gear.  This caused all the gems people had put into this gear (which are expensive and rare) to be destroyed.  When Funcom quick fixed to restore these gem slots, players did not get their gems back into their items, they were simply gone.  Funcom's response?  Tough luck.  In another patch they made it possible for players to become completely invisible forever.  Players could still fully function while invisible, and would go around PKing other players that could never see them.  It took a couple days for this to get hotfixed. 

Past the bugs, there were just parts of the game that had logic and functionality that went against what you would commonly expect.  Like healer aggro for instance.  If I was fighting a couple MOBs, and some group was on the other side of an area fighting groups of MOBs and I started healing myself, some of their MOBs would run all the way across from this place I could not even see and attack me.  I cannot count the number of times I got killed by a mass of MOBs that came from out of nowhere due to healer aggro.  Also, Age of Conan's mount system was very strange in that you actually mounted, had an animation, whole deal, looked neat, problem was, dismounting was also a cast, a cast that would get interrupted from being attacked.  This meant that someone could attack you while you were on your horse and you usually could not get off to fight them.  What you would hope for is that they would knock you off your horse as that was the surest way you would get dismounted.  However, even this was not certain, because sometimes when you got knocked off your horse you would bug out and see your self mounting, dismounting, mounting, all the while the other person just saw you standing there so they beat the crap out of you and killed you while you were completely locked out of your character due to your own stupid horse. 

I digress though, I want to get on to the positives I did see, and the jist of that is when Age of Conan did work, it was fun to play.  Once you got used to the character movement and the flow of the combat system, it was really fun.  It felt like you controlled every movement of your character.  The mechanic of hitting whatever was in your line of attack was great, being able to hit multiple characters and MOBs at the same time worked well.  The healing not being based on targeting I think was the best part.  All heals radiated out from your character.  No more playing the mini bar game on the side.  When I started nearing 80 and after I reached it, I was able to be in several group vs group battles that were long and fun.  However, the couple 10v10 battles I was in were huge lag fests.  People who did not play to max level never got to see the balance at level 80.  You really did not even have all your skills and abilites until near 80, and that's another thing, you couldn't judge the classes early on because they were continuously changing in very dynamic ways as you leveled up. 

Last thing I enjoyed that I want to mention, is that I liked the economy in this game.  I'm not sure if it was intended or not, but up to this point the crafted gear with gems is far superior to the raid gear.  Each day I would get on and be able to do a little to gather some resources or farm some coin so I could get another gem or piece of gear for my set.  I could do this solo, but I still had to interact with the economy.  I found the price competition on the auction house to be very high.  I could gather resources, sell them, get coin, buy the armor I wanted from a crafter, the circle seemed complete.  I don't think this will last for too long, but I think it's good to take note that economies are only good when crafted gear is superior.  If it's not the best, it's worthless, and there is no economy. 

I knew this would be long, hope I got everything in as I'm not going to attempt this again.  Like I said, take it for what you will.  Age of Conan was disappointing, but it did have some bright spots.  Hopefully other companies will take those good things and run with them to make better games in the future. 

Actually, though I get all you have written and agree with most of it, bugs were NOT this games death.

SOLO CASUAL LITE SUPERFICIAL NON CONCEQUENCE MINIMAL CONTENT gameplay was.

Thats just the truth.

RIP AOC.

Funcom will Ebay AOC to SOE.

The death of this game is and will be FunCom's lies and incredibly stupid PR decisions. Bugs I can live with. Missing content can be added in later. Blatantly ripping off your customers and keeping on masquerades even when things are burning...that's unfixable.

Originally posted by vesavius

Actually, though I get all you have written and agree with most of it, bugs were NOT this games death.

SOLO CASUAL LITE SUPERFICIAL NON CONCEQUENCE MINIMAL CONTENT gameplay was.

Thats just the truth.

I agree with you as well on the lack of content, but I still think a lot of people were and still are leveling to 80.  What you said was definitely a downer for the more hardcore gamers like us, but I wanted to point out what I saw kill it for people across all playstyles with all differeing opinions about what they wanta  game to be.  That basic underlying reality is that if you can't even stay connected to the game or keep your client stable, you literally just can't play it.  It doesn't matter if you like solo play or hate it, like consequence or hate it, you don't even get to make that differentiation in Age of Conan because you can't even play it.  I mean, you already had a lot of people who never got it to begin with because they have older computers, but even great gaming computers like mine can't overcome horrible programming in the software itself, both client and server side. 

Good review and quite accurate.

That being said the biggest killer for me is that unless you are in a HUGE guild then there is nothing to do once you hit max lvl.

You cant craft since you need a tier 2 or 3 town to do that and small guilds cant build those.

You cant PvP since you need a battlekeep for battles and you need a tier 3 town before you can build a battle keep.

You cant PvE since it takes 24 people.

So you can just sit and look at a pretty world and have nothing to do. And THAT will in the end kill the game.

Stopped reading the review to be honest after the third paragraph. he reasons are the title said unbiassed and i do believe you went out to write one but a few things suprised me.

1: the date you wrote this review was the 24th of july and yet you point out that in high levels the travel time is a problem! yet 2 weeks ago they implemented so many more travel points that others complain that it's too easy to travel now! just suprised me that you havent noticed that one. dont get me wrong i know you cant just apear anywhere you want, but dont you think that if you could that would take away an essential element of a mmo? just my opinion :)

2: You say the problems with the game crashing etc are a huge problem and i agree if that happened to me i would probably be leaving, BUT! i cant understand why if the game is so underpopulated you were having your instance drop in anycase...as there wouldnt really be multiple instances in an empty world :) As for the other crash's...are you sure that's the games fault? it's just we dont seem to see many complaining about crashing anymore and my average pc crashes to desktop once in a blue moon. I'm not saying your wrong just offering something for you to look at on that one as it's not a problem that the majority have with this game.

All in all after writing this i am going to read the rest of your review but i just wanted to write this down as it's fresh :) myself i am starting to grow bored with the game myself and any that have read any of my posts will know a month ago i was backing the game...so maybe thats a big thing. but the reasons i am leaving are down to the style of gameplay and the direction its going and nothing to do with anything technical or anything to do with FC. technically the game runs fine on my average pc. well compared to many other recent release i would say it ran better than average. as for FC's managment and such, it's a game and i couldnt give a toss who runs it, soe, FC, blizzard whoever i dont care as i am a game player not a buisness man :) if they make something fun then who cares about stock prices etc lol.

well! back to reading the review.