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Review: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Published June 5, 2008
The Early Game
As soon as you choose to enter the game, the slave ship you were on gets rocked with a giant crashing sound, and everything goes black. You wake up on the beach of an island, where an old man finds you. I really don’t want to spoil anything here, as what becomes your “Destiny” quest line is one of the most interesting single-player RPGs I’ve come across in a long time. The interactive dialogues between yourself and the many NPCs recalls Mass Effect’s conversation system, and the voice acting is excellent. After reaching the first city at around level five, and continuing hrough the first 20 levels of the game, you can choose to stay in single-player “night” mode, or move into multiplayer “day” mode based in the pirate city of Tortage.
Tortage and its surrounding jungle areas are beautiful, if you have the machine to handle it. Day and night each have a unique feel, adding to the atmosphere of the game. If you’re playing with friends, you’ll spend your time with them in the Day scenario, which has a good number of crossing stories and quest lines of its own. If your friends aren’t online, or you prefer to play alone, you can stick to the Night scenario, which is full of intrigue, movement in the shadows and unique quests for each of the 4 player archetypes. To really get the most from Age of Conan, do both the day and night scenarios to their end - you may find yourself with a level or two advantage once you hit the rest of the game world.
While leveling up, you’ll learn new spells or combos to put on your hotbars, and you’ll also earn skill points to place into different types of recovery (Health, Stamina, and Mana) or skills such as hiding, climbing, and perception. Climbing is especially useful - this is a 3d world, and sometimes you’ll find yourself needing to scurry up a ladder or scaling a rock face.
After level 10, you’ll receive a feat point for each level. Each class gets 3 trees for feats - 2 unique to that class, and 1 shared with other classes of your achetype. Feats really can change how your character performs in the world, so I’d definitely recommend joining the forum community to find recommendations from other players and get feedback on your choices.
After trying a few different classes through the early stages of the game, it doesn’t get any less enjoyable. In fact, I’d recommend trying one of each archetype just to experience the differences in the Destiny quest story. FunCom has done an exceptional job of drawing players into the world of Conan for the first 20 levels, but what’s next?
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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…..