Take a few minutes if you will and check out Gametrailers.com's collection of videos of Age of Conan here: http://www.gametrailers.com/game/1905.html

Pay particular attention to the developer presentations of their game at conventions. 

It simply amazes me that a bait and switch of this magnitude could be pulled off in this day and age.  This mess is the equivalent of Microsoft promising their next operating system is going to be better than anything out there then the final product is DOS 6.0.

I bought a timecard since I was in Tortage and thought the game was great and just going to get better.  Little did I know.

Do yourselves a favor and wait 3 months.

Woot!  I never thought I'd see Open Beta actually launch.  Looking forward to a US release, though I hope they beta it here too.

I hope a Korean player can give us a review of the beta.

I've run Sanctum, Frozen Swamps, and the Ymir Camps (they aren't instanced but the epic mobs apply).  Sanctum was by far the best of the 3.  I'm also hoping it gets better. 

Besides the bugs I've only heard good things about the late game raids.  We'll see :)

There's some mis-informed posts on here from both camps.

No content after 50 is a gross exageration.  There's a gap of content missing for levels 45 to 60, essentially a zone dedicated to those levels.  There are, however, zones labeled 40 to 80 since the mobs will scale to the average in those instances.  Unfortunately those instances are small, some are locked unless you have a quest to do in them, and even bugged mobs.  Also running through each of these instances once does not level you up to 60.  So... the alternative is grinding.  Either grinding those instances over and over again, grinding mobs in the wild (great for collecting mats), or going back and finishing all the "grey" quests(low level). 

Once you hit 60 though some other zones and bigger instances open up all the way to 80.  Again, doing these zones and instances once through won't get you to 80 so you're back to grinding (usually the last 8 to 10 levels)

Hope that clears it up.
 
 

That sounds absolutely terrible.  Those "end gamers" must be masochists.

If they can tweak something like the xp rate then they can also tweak level requirements.  There's no excuse for it.  Also, the stereotype that asians somehow love the grind is unfounded.  I've seen many reports that the asians hate the grind as much as anybody, and apparently there's also a prevalent use of bots to get around the grind as well.  Catch 22 isn't it?

If they were somehow making ad revenue I could somewhat understand it but it seems to me the grind is there just for the sake of it.  Lack of content maybe?

Seeing as there's a community manager that posts here I'd like an answer from him as to why AFK leveling is OK with K2.  Isn't it a bad sign when your playerbase has to resort to not playing your game to play your game?  I think you guys need to re-think your excessive grind requirements.

For those that don't know or never played the game, there is a hot key that allows your characters to "auto attack" creatures.  This will last until your characters are knocked down or killed at which point you have to hit the hotkey again to re-enable it.  People will use this to sit in a corner and level up while they are away from their keyboards.

Let me also say that I love the environments, graphics, story line, and having multiple characters to control.  It's really only the grind I have an issue with. 

I guess they can get away with it because it's free, but doing your monthly maintenance from 3 to 6 pm pacific, which I would think is peak hours for half the country, seems pretty dumb...

Yeah, it's usually in the form of the option of buying equipment or items for a few dollars.  Some games allow limited timed stat increases as well.

The asian market is full of games like that and it seems to be doing well.  The downside is of course the misbalance of payed players having an advantage.

I'm seeing a lot of mis-informed people still arguing and waving their e-peens around about PC vs 360 controllers for Huxley.

Just to be clear it's been confirmed in the latest round of interviews at GDC that Webzen does not plan to implement the ability for PC vs 360 players.

From the IGN article:

 "There's no cross-platform play, but both systems should get the same game when all is said and done."  (emphasis added by me)

From the Warcry article:

"He also noted that they will likely try to keep the 360 and PC players largely separate, although some limited cross platform play is anticipated on the cooperative side. The emphasis for the PC version is clearly online PvP, while on the 360, they hope to put more detail into the single-player/cooperative aspects of the game."

From the 1UP article:

"Servers will support up to 5,000 people each, and it is undecided whether Huxley will offer a subscription-based or microtransaction-focused business model. Plus, according to Jason Wonacott, Webzen's director of corporate communications, "the developers are planning for limited cross-platform functionality between PC and 360."

What a really misleading post.  To clear it up, this guy is talking about a SHADOWRUN preview in PC Gamer, NOT Huxley.

It's already been confirmed by the developers during several GDC interviews that PC Gamers and 360 players in Huxley will NOT be able to fight against each other on the same server.

They hope to implement co-op for the two platforms down the road and an instance where a 360 player can take over the body of a powerful boss enemy vs the regular human players.  This is all long term stuff.

Sorry to burst your rant.

To those that don't have the time to click through, the following have been revealed:

• Release date for PC is still set for this year.
• "Hundreds" of armor and equipment will be available as drops by NPC mobs.
• Nine categories of weapons.
• Instanced arena Maps for 1vs1 to 100vs100
• 5000 players max per server cluster.
• Game will launch with about 80 instanced battlefields.
• 2 playable factions, Humans and Sapiens.  1 NPC faction of "Hybrids."
• Game modes included: Free for all, team deathmatch, capture the flag, radar domination, and part pickup.
• Xbox players will not play against PC players.  Though they are working on Xbox players being able to co-op with PC players on some instances or play as a super enemy on some instances.
• They hope to have the Xbox version out 6 months after the PC with more focus on single player.
• Parties are grouped as follows: Up to 4 players in a squad, Up to 5 squads in a platoon, up to 5 platoons in a company.
• In-game voice chat available at launch.  Does not mention how that will work with the squad/platoon/company groups.
• Weapons and armor will have slots for "upgrades" which are basically skills.  The game will launch with over 100 skills.  From the Gamespot preview: ...the ability to sprint quickly, to cloak yourself by turning invisible, to double-jump, to tackle enemies with a melee attack, and some unusual skills, such as becoming immune to headshots (highly damaging, direct weapon hits to your character's noggin) and automatically detonating your corpse as a blinding flash grenade when you fall in battle."
• Game will launch with 2 major cities.  1 for each faction and 8 smaller cities.
• Vehicles can be purchased in the player cities but cannot be taken into the instance battlefields.  Battlefields will have their own vehicles.
• Licenses are required to pilot vehicles but any class can get licenses.

By strict definitions of Vapor Ware, no, since they had a playable demo at E3.  Thing is, they didn't really show off the MMO part of the MMOFPS there.  They had a solid team deathmatch game but where's the reason for me to pay a monthly fee?

I hope my doubts are proven wrong in the near future.  I just can't help but feel like they're going to announce Huxley has become a regular FPS game with multiplayer.

So why is Webzen being really quiet about Huxley?  A website was promised Fall of last year but that's come and gone.  The in-game footage in November was interesting but there was zero media/pr following it.  No developer interviews or previews as you would expect when a video like that is released.  The biggest surprise to me was their lack of showing at CES, you would think it would be a perfect opportunity to show off where they've gone since the feedback at E3.

I hope this doesn't spell bad things for the development, maybe they bit off more than they could chew. 

Since there isn't an Unreal 3 engine based game on PC yet it's hard to say.  UT2k7 is the closest thing we can compare it to and the unnofficial word is that it needs ~2.5ghz CPU, 512mb RAM, and at least a Geforce 6800 or higher card to run at a decent resolution.

Developers will always tweak a licensed middleware engine though, so it wouldn't be surprising to see Huxley have higher system requirements.

They'd be dumb not to optomize it for people with Geforce 7 or 8 series cards as that's a huge chunk of the market.