Review: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

By Paul Sherrard | June 5, 2008 | | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: Age of Conan, Conan, review

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.