Age of Conan

I really want to say it is a great game but the bugginess is really a problem. 

Here is the bad stuff

• I had mobs pop up on me sometimes.
• I was disconnected from the server numberous times.
• Some instance area's have horrible lag that isn't graphic but must be server based.  I tried them on low settings and it didn't cause the lag to go away.  Curiously this was only some instances...
• Ugh lots of long loading screens.
• npcs with no voice overs or voice overs that are different then the text
• every time I camp out of the game I get a crash
• getting into the game seems kinda hit and miss and I need to reboot my computer to clear up UI issues in XP after AoC crashes.  One time It took like 4 tries till I could get AoC to load.
• sliding characters and npcs.  This didn't happen too often but did happen several times.
• Graphics issues minor things like items showing through clothing and things like that but also more major things like a mountain in the lava instance where the mountain was missing but the top was their kinda floating in the air.
• Combat is kinda fun but pretty combersome me and my friends all agreed that it was simplistic and kinda irritating.  ie no reative abilities, constant key pounding, combos are just a bother that cause your abilities to sometimes fail due to miss keying which is just irritating.
• The world feels constrained in that there are many artificial boundries or invisible walls where you see a rock you want to jump over but you just can't for no reason.
• Environmental damage doesn't make sense and needs bigger numbers of something.  I did swiming in the water because I froze to death.  Down by the lava I died when I got stuck in a rock and I wasn't even in the lava.
• Death is totally meaningless...  I mean I don't think death does anything other then give you a free teleport to your bind spot and makes you unable to fight or be hurt for a minute.

The good stuff

• The story line quests and the general feel of quests is very good. 
• The UI seems pretty functional.  It helped a lot when I figured how to add two extra hotbars
• The graphical environments are very nice.  Great use of 3d and I love that they have climbing in.
• Combat animations and animations in general seem pretty good.
• chat window needs more functionality.  I couldn't figure out how to customize it the way I like and create multiple chat windows.
• character customization is fantastic

...Meh what MMO doesnt have bugs when its first out?

Well after a second night of testing I gotta say I love the quest dialog and voice overs.  The quests are well written and there are lots of them around.

The world is also very nice with lots ot see and lots to discover.  White sands area is a great example if you explore it you find ruins, temples, and many area's tucked away behind hills.  For an explorer type player it is really nice.

I also love the fatalities.

Agro seems kinda strange in that apes tend to agro from a mile off where everything else is much shorter distance. 

Also I noticed that shotting a bow seems to frequently separate mobs.  I haven't tried it on many but with panthers they can be standing right next to each other and one shot will pull only one panther.  I was able to pull pirates too but didn't try two standing next to each other they were a bit appart.

If they can fix the bugs i listed above this could be a very good game.  Right now I'd only recommend it to someone with a very high tolerance for bugs :(  Yeah I know it is beta but I got no confidence that release will be much better then what we are playing now.

At least half your list is related to server lag, which is fairly understandable (but hopefully fixed for launch) considering the massive amount of people entering beta. Some of your other issues (such as the voice acting/text) are nit picking and can easily be fixed so those aren't really a huge issue.

You may also want to look into doing some PC maintenance things, such as virus/malware/registry scans as well as disk defragmentation, updating Windows and your drivers, all that kind of stuff.

I will attempt to answer some of your other points as much as the NDA lets me.

1. Loading Screens - For me, these are generally very short (a few seconds) and I haven't been zoning enough for these to be an issue. It may be a bit of an issue in Tortage, which is a bit constrained; but it is an island after-all. This improves later in the game.

2.  Graphic Glitches - Some times the RDB folder can become corrupt, this is easily fixed by selecting the Settings button from the launcher and navigating until you find the option to Repair/Verify the Resource Data Base. This fixed a lot of issues I was having. I am not saying there aren't underlying bugs to blame, but doing this can help rule out a game problem versus a problem with your install.

3.  Combat - This point doesn't really hold much weight unless you are a high enough level to be using a combo that uses more than one step (which there are none prior to and including level 13). And yes, there are reactive abilites like you are describing up to, and past level 13. You just need to know how to use or find them (such as pressing control to bring up the shield interface and the 1-4 keys to control the shields; not mention dodging by double-tapping a directional key).

4. Constrained World - I touched on this above, you are only seeing the beginning of Tortage, which is pretty constrained compared to a lot of other zones in the game. It should also be noted that there a large number of glitches in the game world (accounting for a lot of the invisible walls and some things that seems like artificial boundries) left behind or creating as the game world has change a lot from the time I got into beta to the point it is at now. These are being cleaned up.

5. Death - It has been announced that the death penalty is a sort of "Penalty-Lite" for beta so that people can get up in levels faster to test some upper level content easier (also, the leveling rate in beta is faster than the leveling rate that is supposed to be in on launch). The death penalty will be buffed for launch, an XP loss will also be introduced to the penalty as well.

I have a very top end system, quad core, 4gb ram, 8800gtx, 2 raptor drives.  I run a defrag automatically every night.  My computer boots itself up at like 3am and defrags and does virus scans and backups you my disk to a large backup disk.

So my system is pretty fast all around.

Loading screens tend to vary quite a bit in speed.  Sometimes they can be blistering fast taking as short as 5 seconds.  Other times I can be waiting several minutes.  This can be rather irritating.

Yes I recognize that server lag is likely the issue but when I look at the server loads and see them at low and I'm getting server lag I get really concerned about what it will be like when the server load is high?  This really makes me nervous as I was a beta tester of AO and AO had server lag problems which after release went from bad to intollerable.

Also I think that between thursday and friday night I actually had a small roll back on my character.  This also makes me remember AO and not fondly.... 

Don't get me wrong this is NOT AO.  Even if they shipped the game as is it is clearly better then AO was at launch.  So the launch will not be that bad :P

My biggest issue right now seems to be just getting into the game successfully.  Seems like once I get it loaded and running it doesn't crash.  But there is the rub getting into the game seems kinda hit and miss...  Last night when I loaded the advertisement videos when you startup were all messed up, what the heck is up with that...  Fortunately the game loaded and I was good for a couple hours play time.

The only huge issue is the freezing problem many have mentioned.  It really reminds me a lot of Vanguard but even worse.  They really need to fix this problem or a lot of people will just dump the game.

The combat system isn't really looking that good so far.  But as you say I'm only playing the first 13 levels.  So far I'm seeing a combat system that looks a lot like EQ2.  The only thing different is the no autoattack thing and shields.  At the low levels I'm not too bothered by the combos since they are 1 key combos but I'm nervous that when I'm lvl 80 I'll be doing much longer combos and that will get old and tedious really fast.  When I say it is like eq2 I mean that all the abilities are just usable.  There are no chains, no build ups, no reations, no counter abilities, or so far any positional abilities.  The only dynamic in combat is watching the mob shield which seems rather simplistic they generally shift to your last attack so as long as you rotate you are ok.  And you have a basic positioning issue where you want to get multiple mobs in your cone of attack.  Maybe this all changes at higher levels but looking at ability lists I'm not seeing it.

yes I am evaluating the game based on the 13 levels they have exposed to me.  The only reason I can think that they are limiting players to 13 levels in beta, and 20 levels for preorders is that they feel people who are into the higher levels of the game will not be favorably impressed.  If there is another reason why they would hold people down and keep them from exploring the world I'd love to hear it, cause at this point I'm like going back and forth on canceling AoC and walking away.  The only thing holding me Is I love the quests and graphics I'm seeing in the starting areas and I'm wanting to believe something will change for the better in the next 3 weeks or so.

Well I have been reading loads of posts on AOC beta of late. The OP's post and his follow-up replies are the best I have read thus far. Very balanced and fair tbh and you can tell he is being open-minded here; he wants the game to succeed, but is critical enough to express existing misgivings.

Thanks for these cool posts, I have been reading SO much trash of late.

I have the CE ordered and I really hope that the retail release is free of some of the major performance hitches being highlighted. I want this game to succeed, I really do; but if "serious" performance issues persist into June then I would probably quit and play non-mmo's for another 6 months.

These next few weeks are critical for Funcom, I hope they get it right.

Regards

Melmoth

PS I would NEVER cancel CE pre-order as it comes with cool stuff and even "if" AOC bombs on release, it may improve over the months and I would find myself returning.

I just hope Funcom won't repeat what we saw with the launch of anarchy online.  The game turn out great though, but the horrible launch really hurt the game financially.

I'm starting to think that the problems with performance are similar to AO where you just get a bunch of people in the same area and it lags?  I went into a new area today and instance called the mausoleum and the lag was horrible.  I went in there and my fps dropped from 40-50 to 2-4.  I did notice that if I turned toward the instance wall my fps would jump back up.  I tweaked my settings and put AA off, moved my view distance down to like 700 and went to shader 2.0.  This gave me enough fps that I could move and kinda start to explore.  It seems like it got better after a bit and I was able to function in the zone for awhile.  One thing I noticed was that there were quite a few other players in the zone. 

Oh one more thing someone said to type a command that I should have written down I think it was /instance iirc or something like that.  Anyway it brought up a menu with what I thought was supposed to be a list of instances I could switch between but there was only one on the list.  None the less selecting that seemed to reload the instance and that might have helped some.  In the end I was able to get through the lag and once I got further into the zone it was ok.  It did seem to spike when I would turn in certain directions.

I had a similar experience in another zone I went into the first day with this really bad lagging issue.  Hopefully this is something that will be fixed.  The stuff I've read on the forums about shaders doesn't have any effect on this issue.

After playing in this instance for maybe 20 minutes I crashed.