Review: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Installation
Installation for Age of Conan is fairly straight forward, though very time consuming. Installation from 2 DVDs took an average of about 4 hours and the final game installation requires almost 30 GB of hard drive space. You have plenty of time while the game is installing to register your key online, create a forum login, and read the included game manual. Once the game is installed, you’re recommended to install SP1 on Vista if you haven’t already, and then you can run the game to start downloading patches. If you experience problems at this stage, check the forums for solutions.
Character Creation
Character creation is a fairly simple affair, and similar to the experience you’d find in other MMORPGs. The setting of being on a slave ship is interesting, if not a bit distracting, as your character sways about or gets bounced a bit as the boat rocks. It’s immersive, but distracting if you’re trying to fine-tune facial features.
You select your gender, and then one of the three player nationalities in AoC; Aquilonian, Cimmerian, or Stygian. As I wasn’t much aware of the lore of Conan apart from a pair of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies I’d watched as a kid, I didn’t really have a good idea of the background of the 3 nationalities. From first glance, and reading the descriptions in the game manual, I quickly thought of the Aquilonians as ancient Greeks or Romans, the Cimmerians as pseudo-Vikings or Braveheart Scottish, and the Stygians as Egyptians from the time of the Pharaohs. Gameplay so far hasn’t really done much to change my initial impression.
Different nationalities allow for different choices of the 12 character classes. Each of the 4 archetypes - Soldier, Priest, Rogue, and Mage - has 3 subclasses, providing a lot of choice when it comes to the type of character you want to be.
Soldiers are broken down into Guardians, Conquerors, and Dark Templars. Guardians are the plate-wearing, sword-and-board wielding tank. Conquerors are damage machines who also buff their allies through shouts and auras. Dark Templars are life-sucking unholy battlewagons.
Priests arrive as Bear Shamans, Tempests of Set, or Priests of Mitra, depending on your nationality. Each has a slightly different way of buffing and healing, and all three are capable of pushing out damage and soloing effectively. I don’t think anyone who’s used to playing a healer in other MMO’s will be disappointed with the selection here.
Rogues are either Barbarians, Assassins, or Rangers. Barbarians are mighty loin-cloth-wearing, two-hander-wielding wildmen. Assassins dual wield daggers, leaping from the shadows to deal devasting combos, and Rangers stalk their prey from a distance, raining death from their bows.
Mages unleash their magic as a Demonologist, Necromancer, or Herald of Xotli. The demonologist and necromancer are pretty close to their brethren in other MMOs, but the Herald of Xotli is something unique. The HoX is a caster who wield a big 2-handed sword, and turns into a demon to do massive melee damage. Yes, you will want to try one.
Once you’ve picked your gender, race, and class, you can then customize the look of your character by choosing a body type, height, skin color, and body marking. For the face you get to choose one of several standard faces, hair styles, eye colours, and facial markings. You then get the opportunity to go into an advanced customization mode, where you can use numerous sliders to morph the body and face. The overall level of customization is pretty good, but you still end up with variations on a theme. With only 3 different nationalities of human to choose from, it’s not going to be easy to identify your friends just by their appearances.
The starting area was brilliant. Strong direction with good voice overs gave an immersing feel to the game. This is why most reviews are so positive. Unfortunately once you move away from Tortage, the game desends to your standard MMORPG. Missions are simplistic and easy to follow. Many loading screens between areas travelled take away from the expansive feeling of the world that WoW gave you. Several missions are bugged. Content beyond level 40 is sparce. Party interface is small, uninformative, and locating party members on the map is difficult. Chat interface is clunky, hard to change channels and seems out of place to the overall graphic structure of the game. All NPC chats are cutaways. (On PVP Realms you still can be attacked while talking to a NPC, you just can’t attack back) Crafting is near useless as items generally are not as good as found items. Resource farming is slow and awkward. Resources spawn in set areas and are slow respawn. The rock/tree/cotton bush are there but you have to wait till it gets past 10% supplies. (On PVP Realms, resources are a call to be ganked.) While the overall graphics are beautiful, the gameplay for casters isn’t that much different than any other MMORPG. Some of the promised content isn’t there. Siege Warfare, DX10, Spell Weaving. End game content is near zero. Overall I would say give the game 6 months to straighten itself out. Don’t believe me check out the game forums at http://forums.ageofconan.com/forumdisplay.php?f=8
I have reached the vaulted level 80 so I post this with more experience then the original author, though with less writing skill. One major issue I disagree with the original poster on is “more RPG then MMORPG”. At level 80 there are 6 instances I know of to farm for level 80 gear. 4 Short(30-45min) and 2 LONG(1hr 30 min -2hrs) dungeon crawls. There are also 6 dungeons that I currently have quests for, though finding 24 players to attempt them has been hard. Instances however pickup groups seem relatively easy to form, more so if you willing to take a 70 something vs a level 80. I do not recomend this as bosses can be up to level 83, and without a group of level 80’s it is near impossible.As for fps, there is a shader cache problem that is causing the fps lag. The shader cache file grow to large over time and it greatly reduces framerate. Players running nividia cards 8800 512mb or better will have few problems. Players running ATI cards regardless will have a signigicant FPS difference. I swapped out my 3870 512mb card for my friends 8800 gt. I went from 20-30 fps to 35-48 fps, on standard high settings.Content In levels 50-80 is not so much sparse, but its changed. You go from solo quest to group quests, from 1 questing area per level to 3. Content spreads out, and you must hop zones every 2-3 levels to find the new quests that opened up in each zone. The good news, alot of bugs fixes in first 3 weeks, most issues with crashes ext ext are not occuring anymore. Level mid 30-mid 40 zone being added to smooth leveling, and another mid 50-mid60 zone is being added soon. They say this is priority and should be out in 2-3 weeks on there forums. This will make leveling for new characters or alts much easier.The bad, crafting is broken alot right now but they working on fix and was almost live but then got pulled back last patch for more work. Player cities can be built……. bad news is they took out NPC’s and attackablity till they work out balance to them. good in a way cause losing 500g t1 city would ruin anyones day. let alone t2
Yeah, I have played this and Wow…honestly, in the times we are in, AoC isnt doing anything new and for the hefty system requirements, its going to lose alot of the casual games that WoW was able to get.
Also, no one has leard that a HUGE chunk of WoWs success came form being able to play it on a Mac….these nuggets are beating teir brains trying to figure out how to stop WoW and the first MMO that comes along and is Mac Native will have a huge chance, until then, keep trying. I wasted 50 bucks on this game and the 3 months card only to go right back to WoW…..and with Lich Kinh comming up…good by AoC, we barely ever knew ya…..