Age of Conan

I had a lot of fun. The way they did the PvP (nonconsensual) was annoying for those of us who just wanted to poke around but hey..it was one day.

Even with my crashes (mostly my end due to drivers, I believe) and the PvP continuously putting me back at the end of Connals' Valley....(sigh) I had a heck of a lot of fun.

I'm not even a grouping sort of person and at least 5 different times I was in a group. I think 4 of the 5 times the person said 'So what are you doing?' and my reply was 'Exploring and avoiding the gankers'. In each case the response was 'Cool. Me too. Let's do it.'

So the PvP had it's good side too.

I am sure they will  fix the lagging with the groups. That made it difficult for at times.

In general, the game ran well for me. There were slow moments, for example zoning into Conall's Valley when there were 40-50 people standing around but for the most part my performance was around 20 FPS and ran well on high. I kicked the shaders down to 2.0 and turned off shadows and bloom. Otherwise was quite the beautiful time.

I was having some BSoDs that I thought i would have to resolve next week (time will tell) but I think I fixed them. Once I saw the game continuing to run this AM I was able to test my changes for almost 2 hours and nothing for than a couple of 3-5 second lag hits makes me hopeful I fixed the issue.

Most people seemed quite awed by the cities. I ran around some but generally wanted to see teh countryside so I was only in the city for 30 minutes or so. The details were incredible. Sure there are things that need to be fixed but in general everything was good. There were some points of confusion with people getting out of the city (normal confusion) but that will go away once the gates open for retail.

There are a lot of quests (some people were screaming 'LINEAR...LINEAR'..*shrug*) and most that I saw seem to be oriented towards the area you were in. For instance, go run errands in teh city and see where things are. Once In the Valley, run down and kill some wolves. Later it was 'Go kill the Vanir' or some other carnage to them but the quests seemed to be staggered enough that you could level by doing each set plus a bit of garatuitous killing along the way. Sure care had to be taken to not get killed (first time I ran into the half Giant raid boss and his group of level 20 henchmen I laughed h my head off) but in general it was a very playable and very fun time. Soloable or in small groups was entirely doable (solo you just have to go slower and maybe RUN LIKE HECK a few times.

*Note: I didn't get outside Conall's valley so I can't comment on stuff after that.

Okay that's it. I need some coffee. I enjoyed the game and aside from a few folks that need to naysay or really don't want to play around with settings, I think people are going to enjoy it. It requires some effort and some THOUGHT which is a refreshing change from the norm, if you ask me..and even if you didn'nt ask I'm still saying it. Heh

Thank you Digna, very informative.

We need more "informative" and less "pure opinion sans experience".

You are quite welcome. I always try to back up my opinions with reasons  but when it comes to observations, I try to state them without color (other than a few sighs here and there ).

Questing seems the only way to level your Char which is a plus in my book and no matter how hard i tried to ignore the relevance of the quests they still managed to grab me and  make me understand what was happening in this valley, this was a great place for funcom to do there testing but not a good place to address the screams of linear game play, the zones open up much more further on as you would expect, when i hit the dead fields the mobs where at 40+ level so this will be horse teritory and it was pretty expansive.

Well, you could grind it out. Didn't make a lot of sense to do so though. I think about 20% of my XP was killing along the way though that was more of the 'process of questing' than it was grinding, IMO.