The game WILL get better with time. You just have to be VERY patient while waiting. The biggest let down of all is the fact that this game will be out for XBOX in a few months.
Read full review. Age of Conan wasn't simply a 5 year disappointment, it even rebuffed my attitude toward World of Warcraft, a game I'd gotten sick of long ago. The first 20 levels of Conan aren't simply bad, they are painful to play. If you only make the minimal, ask yourself how much you'll enjoy playing the game in towns at 8 FPS. I went into this game anticipating a leveling system similar to World of Warcraft's quest driven leveling, but Funcom outdid themselves with Age of Conan.
If you were one of those people who enjoyed WoW the first, second, maybe even third time through each new character you will find that the first 20 levels in Conan are about as mind dulling a s leveling a character in WoW from , 10 times over.
The quests allow for absolutely no creativity in your leveling pattern. They allow for no changes for players wishing to try something a little different. Unfortunately this will completely kill most players' desire to level more toons. After level 20 things do open up, to an extent. If you don't have many friends going into the game with you, I'd advise not playing on a PvP server if you didn't start playing at launch. There are people who will sit and camp the graveyards for hours on end, sometimes leaving you no option other than to log off for awhile.
Conan does excel in graphics, but that's more of a problem than a benefit for most players. Most players I've talked to run the game on low graphics, and despite what some people are saying, playing on low is nowhere near stellar.
Age of Conan is simply not replayable. Anyone wishing to make this game his or her longterm MMO, don't waste your money.
Age of Conan is a good once and done game for most players who enjoy set storylines, but Funcom left out almost every important aspect that would allow this game to survive for years to come especially since there are 10 other games just like this out already.
I do have one major appreciation toward Funcom. They had a very smooth release. Most games announce a release date, push it back two or three times, and then still release the game with bugs people getting stuck in entire zones and being unable to play for days. These releases are almost always behind schedule, follow by patches two times a day, poor customer service the first few weeks, and servers being down on a regular basis. At least Funcom managed to avoid all those To those of you wishing to purchase this game I salute you, but only because I have a pre-order copy I'd like to sell.
I have been waiting for Age of Conan for a long, long, time. The game looks great but to my dismay Funcom disabled DX10 and announced 2 days before launch that the game wouldn't have DX10 support until the Xbox version comes out later this year. That was a major disappointment for me and lame of funcom to do right before launch! With the game on DX9 and maxed graphics at x resolution I was only getting average frames per second.
So obviously they need to do a lot of optimizing. The first 20 levels are strange, at night you are playing single player doing missions and in the day you are at multi player. The night missions ussualy advance the story and since you're in SP mode the world can be dramatically altered for those missions.
I thought the first 20 levels were very well done, in fact it's the most thought out, well designed, starting area ever seen in a MMO of this scale. The big problem though was the lack of polish made the transition from day to night and back kind of awkward.
Overall the biggest gripes I had with the game were the terrible UI, performance issues, no DX10, and the world is broken up into instances think LOTRO Not just raiding dungeons and area's are instanced but even the map areas are. I feel that that is such a cop out when WOW was able to do it years ago The b est part of Conan are undoubtedly the Combat system. What a revolution for the genre! This is going to make this game stand out BIG time. It changes everything. Suddenly skill matters and not just the gear you got when you tagged along with that really awesome guild for a few weeks.
The system is an active blocking system, you can see where an enemy and yourself is defending and you can change what area you want to defend more so than others on the fly in battle and so can the enemy. It makes for amazing battles. The City I've seen so far tartia or something like that is truely amazing. It looks so cool with huge inclines and wide streets, changes of elevation everywhere. It's sweet.
The missions in AOC are pretty neat too. When you go into a new area and start grabing your ussual "collect 10 bear teeth" and "go get me my ring I lost when the monsters attacked" type missions, they tend to layer missions on top of each other so when you are out grinding these missions you tend to complete several at a time before going back to turn in and it creates a sense of getting a lot done.
The best part of AOC will no doubt be the player guild cities and outpost seiges. This will give hardcore players something to shoot for. All in all I think it is a very solid offering and wil no doubt wreak havok on WOW's sales. Go buy it, trust me evetually you will. I installed the game with no problems after buying it. Then when I logged on it went into automatic mode to fix all their mistakes that they released!
Over MB of mistakes and fixes. I could no longer control my computer. After a few hundred MB's of fixes it would freeze up my computer! I had to reset it over and over and try again and again. After 12 hours of something that should of been done in 20 minutes I gave up. Did not seem to make any difference if my firewall was on or off even though it was set to accept Conan and all related files.
I wrote to the makers and they said they cannot refund AND they cannot send a disk with all their mistakes on it. Even their spelling was bad in their responses. What a bunch of clowns! It's nothing major, however, as the bulk of the dialogue isn't all that interesting and the conversation sequence's camera occasionally gets buried behind grass or in environmental structures, ruining the limited sense of immersion conjured.
However, closer to level 50 things start to really bog down and you're forced to grind for a lot of the leveling. Funcom has already stated that it is working to address this content gap later this summer, but for now it serves as one of many reasons you might want to hold off joining the fight in Age of Conan for a few months more. Despite the predictable quests, bugs and missing features, the game's combat system and free-for-all player-versus-player combat serve as a strong incentive to play.
Instead of using a click to auto-attack system, the game requires you hit a key for every sword swipe. Assuming you're using a melee focused character you'll also be able to perform special combo attacks. This kind of involved melee system helps keeps things interesting, particularly when you factor in the game's shielding and dodging mechanics. There's quite a bit to manage during a fight, meaning things rarely get boring.
For melee and spellcasters alike, an attack or ability's area of effect AoE nature also needs to be taken into consideration. Since you're not locked on one target in Age of Conan, your weapon swings and a large portion of the game's spells can affect multiple opponents. It makes AoE grinding--corralling groups of mobs together and dispatching them all at once--fairly easy and also greatly simplifies healing.
Take the bear shaman, for example, whose healing spells affect a swath of ground in front of him and can easily benefit a large group. Without as much of a need to focus on specific targets, combat becomes more of a streamlined process, letting you concentrate on which skills need to be triggered to remove status effects, knock down targets, or trigger a heal over time. Overall, though, the casters didn't feel quite as distinct or interesting as the melee classes, though they do get a spellweaving ability at higher levels which powers up spells while inflicting damage on the casters.
Roaming across the PvP zones you'll see packs of guild members slaughter those who get in their way and stand guard against any who threaten resource nodes or grinding zones they're staked out for themselves. It's primal, tribal, brutal warfare. If only the game's PvP reward system, where world PvP kills contribute to something concrete, were active, there'd be more of an incentive to head out and slaughter all those trying to turn in quests or get to a town.
We should note that Funcom has promised to add this within the month, but we'll have to wait and see. Completing quests, a large portion of which can be completed without a group, also provide substantial experience points.
Because the leveling curve proceeds relatively quickly you'll never find yourself feeling powerless against content of the same level. Of course you're going to find better rewards in instanced dungeons and complete quests more quickly with a group, but if you want to play and level alone, you certainly can here. If you're the other kind of online gamer that absolutely needs to play with others, you'll find joining up with a guild and tackling the tougher instances, like Sanctum of the Burning Souls, to be rewarding for several reasons.
First, especially on PvP servers, it means you can group up to harvest resources, help protect against others while attempting to complete quests, and work with your guild to help build your guild city.
Though we haven't experienced all there is yet, specifically the large scale guild city PvP siege battles Funcom has talked about, there's a definite sense of camaraderie within a guild as your leader must pool money and resource donations from members and coordinate building efforts with whoever decided to pick the architect profession to set up structures in your guild town.
As far as the rest of the game's crafting system goes, it's not all that exciting or remarkable. Once you get the ability to start making items at level 40, which seems a little too far along in the progression curve, you'll find item creation progresses in tiers. So if you pick weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, gemcutting, or alchemy, you'll be given a list of recipes to complete. Once they're all done, which will take quite a while given the way the game's resources aren't labeled on your minimap, you're handed your next tier of assignments, and so on.
Resource collection works similarly in that you have to fill a quota of a resource type before moving on to the next, and gathering them has for me proven to be a wearisome process. While I'm the type of gamer who likes to take breaks from leveling with a solid gathering and crafting system, I just couldn't get into this one, in part because the system is still fairly buggy. Instead of a seamless, open world, you have to load into every one of the game's zones.
On top of that, each zone is layered into instances, lessening the number of players that can occupy any single one. While this helps to limit overcrowding in each of the zones, it also means you won't be galloping on horseback unimpeded from the southern Stygian sands to Cimmeria's snow-capped northern reaches, potentially lessening the element of role-playing fantasy for some. The heavy instancing in conjunction with some user interface issues make it a pain to successfully join up with group members, as those sending out looking for group messages must all first ensure they're in the right instance, and then try to locate each other in the zone.
This wouldn't be a problem if the team icons on the minimap worked consistently, but you'll often find it's an unnecessary hassle to try to get everyone together. The minimap is great for trying to locate quests since it highlights the locations of quest goals and allows you to switch between which quests are active right on the minimap. Any map in the game--be it the circular one in the top right of the screen, a map pulled up with the M key, or map embedded within the quest log--can be zoomed in and out on, making knocking out multiple quests in the same zone quite convenient.
You can see how well the game runs with this hardware by checking out the most recent gameplay footage we've posted. At home, I was playing on a Pentium D 2. Regardless of what kind of level of detail you have turned on, however, the game is gorgeous. I love the armor designs, from the interlocking rings of the heavy armor to outlandish weapon designs, and the incredible detail packed into some of the more powerful items that drop off dungeon bosses.
My only real complaint with the equipment is that the drops you get in the main game world seem to all be similar within their respective armor classes. For instance, before getting a set of legs from a boss in the Sanctum of Burning Souls, I'd pretty much been wearing the same style of knee-length leather skirt for 40 levels even though I'd switched out for upgrades multiple times.
Beyond the game's item designs, the environments can be breathtaking. From sunsets across scorched mountains in Stygia's Khopshef's Province and snow pack that gleams in the sunlight in Cimmeria's Field of the Dead to the spectacular Thunder River, the game's expansive draw distances and realistic graphical style is at times a wonder to behold.
Some may be turned off by the lack of a more fantastical flair as most environments are combinations of greens, grays, and browns, but even so the game's terrain is so varied, rising and falling across ranges of hills, mountains and volcanoes, that it's difficult not to be drawn in.
That is, of course, if your machine can run it. We will say we've received emails from readers complaining about performance with AMD processors, so that's something of which to be wary.
Character animations are impressive as well, from the way melee weapons are swung to the running animations to the way human mobs clutch at their ankles when affected by a root spell.
The smacks and slaps of battle are appropriately harsh and sickening when they need to be, like when someone's head gets chopped off, and effectively convey the chaos of battle. Magic effects aren't really as impressive as melee clangs, but they hold up well enough.
What's even better is the soundtrack and ambient effects, like strings arrangements that swell between the chirps of crickets during the night in the Wild Lands of Zelata, the crackle of firepits in the stone traders hall in Old Tarantia, and the soaring vocal tracks mixed with ambient wildlife effect in Connal's Valley that combine with the graphics to provide an incredibly powerful atmosphere that fits perfectly with the game's fiction.
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