Review: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
A Great Big World.. of Instances
After completing the first 20 levels, you’re sent to your nationality’s home city to continue your life as an adventurer. If you’re playing with friends, access to the other nationalities’ major cities isn’t so difficult, so you can continue to level up together. The game is designed to let you solo from 1 to 40, however, so don’t worry too much if you don’t have a buddy to level with.
Leveling is a pretty smooth experience, even after the starting zone. With FunCom touting 250 hours of playtime to get from 1 to 80, you can expect 2-3 hours per level, though leveling will be faster at the start, and slower at the end, much like other MMOs. Each of the major cities have a large number of quests, so much that it can seem overwhelming at first. Just grab what you can, finish everything in your city of choice, and head out to one of the questing areas when given the chance. Sadly, all the wonderful voice acting that really made quest dialogues immersive disappears after level 20, except for during your rare Destiny quests. Quality is replaced by quantity, so after you finish your first round of quests from any given hub, you can return, gather up a number of quests again and head back out. Rinse and repeat as needed.
Rinse and repeat seems to be the order of the day until level 50. You’ll learn some new spells and combos, get plenty of new feats, and explore the world, but it starts to feel like more of the same after awhile. The most troubling feature of Age of Conan for anyone looking for a truly immersive MMO world is that everything is instanced. Every small quest area, every little dungeon, even bars and inns are their own little instances within each server. This leads to a bit of a disjointed feeling, reminiscent of Guild Wars. It really depends on the kind of experience you’re looking for as to whether or not this will grate on you. Even in the early game, to hang out with your friends on a busy server, you’ll have to change which instance of the world you’re in, from a dropdown arrow located on the minimap. Each time you change instances, there’s a chance you’ll be separated, and you may need to summon a party member to your instance, or be summoned to his.
At level 50, the number of quests drops off drastically, and you may find yourself having to grind out experience on mobs for a few levels, grab a couple new quests, and then grind some more. There are dungeons to do, so if you don’t mind dungeon-running, leveling won’t slow down much for you.
What Else is There To Do?
At level 20, you can learn gathering skills in one of the specialized gathering zones, which are also where you’ll find Guild cities. At level 40 you can pick up a crafting profession of your own. There have been some technical issues with gathering and crafting, but these should soon be ironed out to make them a viable part of the larger game.
Organized PvP and siege warfare are definitely on the horizon, as this feature is one of AoC’s most touted. With the game being so close to launch, and there being so few people at level 80, don’t expect to see much going on in this area for a month or two.
If you’ve rolled on a PvP server, feel free to gank and be ganked as much as you like. In fact, until a recent patch that makes someone respawning invulnerable for a few seconds, many players were complaining of resurrecting only to be dead before their client can load them - frequently for hours at a time.
PvP mini-games should be interesting and a lot more fun once the PvP XP and level system is implemented. For now, FunCom has disabled PvP XP.
Overall Impressions and Rating
FunCom has made a beautiful game with an excellent single-player RPG experience for the first 20 levels. Unfortunately, this experience is marred by many technical issues that can lead to a frustrating play experience. If you’re looking for a world that’s gorgeous to look at, and geared more to a single-player experience than being an immersive world, then you can do a lot worse than Age of Conan. If you have a need for an immersive, persistent world, then AoC may not quite be what you’re after, but maybe check back in a few months when Guild warfare is gearing up. That’s what I’m planning on doing, with the hopes that FunCom will address and correct the technical issues experienced by a good portion of its playerbase, and implement a number of features that were advertised before the launch.
As it stands, Age of Conan deserves a 3.5 out of 5 for being an enjoyable experience for you and your close friends who are looking for more RPG than MMO out of your MMORPG and have the systems to run it.
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…..