Review Age of Conan

With the anticipated highly acclaimed MMOs to be released in years will finally be ready for the masses. Most likely you have heard or even read the Age Of Conan Beta's and boards during its development. This short review is about What to expect from Age Of Conan..a little more than what you get from forums and paid reviewers, but an in depth look at my experience playing this game.

Game setting

Most reviews start with character creation. However, that is NOT the first feature you encounter upon starting this game. You will find that the games greatest strength is the story and its ability to draw you in. After using the Start button after creating your account....the real world fades and you are thrown into the Game world. Age of Conan is based on Conan setting 13000 years ago in the world of Hyboria. And you feel it even before you've made your character. As soon as you choose your server..you get a splash screen with Conan himself scowling at you.

Character creation

The first scene is you slave ship being pursued and attacked. Unwilling men and women man the oars trying to escape, Rough oceans and storms surging, rain screaming and thunder rolling across the planks. Here you choose which avatar you will start as. Age of Conan allows the Male or Female choices, 3 'races' (but all are human) which are Stygian (Dark skinned desert dwellers), Aquilonian (Proud, advanced, snobbish), and Cimmerian (The wild types from the north). There are 4 standard types and 3 subtypes in e

You can just enter your name and choose a class and then go right into the game. However, you can also choose to customize your character. The first section of generation allows for differences of body type, speech , Body Art ( body and face separately), skin hue, eye color, hair style, facial hair style. I would like a little more personal skin and hair hue options, but all its a nice way to make the character

There is a Second section of character generation! Click the customize button again and you can dramatically make change to body aspects like Chest size (big and small...you can guess why), bosom (and again) hips, butt, arms and legs sizes. T

With that, enter the world
...and your Ship is Destroyed!!! Screams of everyone aboard cry out...fade to black
...and your in the game....

part 2 Game Immersion

Let me tell you now, this games greatest strength is in the Game immersion. Funcom, in my mind, did this right. They want to put you in the pages of a Conan Graphic Novel. In this they have succeeded. I would say that only LOTRO can compete in storyline to AoC. To draw you deeper into the world, when you click on a quest NPC, there is no scribbles of text that you read, but your Point of view camera is set as a Face shot. many have voiced dialogue allowing you to hear the fear, sadness, hate or frustration that goes with each quest story. It is a refreshing way to go through what many players now dread...the grind.

The world of Conan was written to be dark and gritty. This game captures that and augments it 10 times. You wont find any Heroes here...No Cavalry to the rescue...the only happy ending is the one where you split your enemies head open. Examples of this include

1. Decapitated corpses are displayed on pikes, or dangling from ropes on the city's walls. Blood flows freely.
2. Fatalities. The killing blow of each fight has a small chance to be 'Fatal'. with that you enter an animation where you could decapitate your opponent, or run him through, or several other specific animations appropriate for your weapon/class. Blood spurts freely..and splatters on your screen. After a while I didn't think the screen splatter was all that cool and became somewhat annoying and obtrusive especially if I was fighting more than one foe.
3. Sound. The music is ok and appropriate, I didn't think that much of it. The ambient sounds are very loud at times. drunks whining, belches, cries and screams. In the tavern especially I thought it became a bit childish..only because every 3 seconds was another belch.

PVE Gameplay

AoC has great gameplay. First I applaud the fact Funcom went the extra mile and placed collision detection for all players and Mobs. About time, no running through this way and that. There is no /face or /Stick that I could find. Combat is directional, you have to be facing your opponent. There is autoface in PVE,if your fighting more than 1 mob, as soon as you kill one you will automatically turn to the next. In PvP however you will be in trouble if your opponent is more nimble at controlling his characters movements than you.

There are many quests and each will give significant XP for the time you invest. Not all quests are "Kill X Mobs" Some are gathering plants, others are delivering messages. Still there are plenty of Kill X mobs, but most are very doable. Understand that for the most part you can fight 2 mobs at once and win 95% of the time. Most mobs will be found in groups of 2 or 3. so killing 20 Mobs goes very quick. The miniMap has build in quest locator function. It will show you where quest NPCs are around you, it will have arrows pointing you in the direction of where your quest targets can be found and a big X marks the spot when you arrive. This makes questing very easy and a very efficient alternative to straight grinding.

For the grinder in all of us, there are many packs of mobs to grind on. The respawn rate is quick but not so quick that your worried about immediate respawns after a kill. One concern I have is that Im not sure there will be enough Mobs. I can see that, at least in the early 30-35 levels that there may be a lot of competition for spawns. Once you tag a mob , it is yours, and cannot be stolen from you if someone else attacks and kills it. A small LOCK icon is displayed by the name of the mob to show others that they cannot get XP from this mob. However, if you pull a group, you better damage everyone in that group..because unless you do, they are fair game to anyone who comes along to take. So watch out when this game is released...it may be frustrating trying to level because there just isn't enough mobs and too many players....a huge number of servers on release may address this in part. That remains to be seen.

A very unique aspect to the game is "your story' quest lines. basically it is a series of solo play quests that only you participate in. No one else around. The first example of this is the Tortage Night quest. Again, this game is about immersion, and after you complete this quest line you will see why.

Another concern that has been brought up a lot in discussion forums is the fact that the game isn't a seamless open world which many players are used to in games like WoW, DAOC and the like. AoC has many mini zones which are instanced together. I will agree that some zones feel more like linker regions...They dont serve much purpose other than being a hallway to various instances. The outskirts of Tortage gives you this feeling, as well as Connarch where you arrive at lev 20. The instances themselves themselves are also a bit linear. There really is one or two paths which are well marked out and which you and anyone with you must follow. However, Ive seen this in many games when they are first released. Now many players have argued that this takes away from the MMO. I disagree, at no point did I ever get the feel that the game was a series of instances. They did flow well. There is a lot of potential in each one and I expect the zones we seen today will be vastly different a year from now.

I would also like to give a shout out to the best scene Ive had in MMORPGs to date....After thwarting the a Sorceress' enchantment atop a volcano...the volcano erupts and just when you thought you had won...its time to run for your life. Escaping the volcano's fury was a heart pounding dash down the mountainside racing to the exit....exploding boulders falling all around you... the ground was shaking (7.8 on the Richter scale)...you enemies screaming , many engulfed in flames only to die in a burning husk.....priceless!

PvP Server game play

Life on the PvP server will be hard. I took it upon myself to try out the pvP servers. Let me tell you it is just not for everyone. That is not news by any means. Ganking is a part of all PvP servers in MMOs. However I write this because there has been a lot of discussion on the Roleplay-PvP servers where 'role players can control/police'. For the first 30 levels, I would consider this game a gankers paradise. note: Everyone has stealth ....let me repeat that...EVERYONE HAS STEALTH. Rouges, Warriors, Archers and casters alike. many of the MMO veterans well know the power of choosing your fight, setting up the conditions and having first strike.

The PvP server issue becomes even more pronounced when you take into account the zone travel is narrow. A lot of the travel to and fro can only go through certain areas due to geographical barriers (Mountains/gorges). Also, many zones are small, as such, your movement (and everyone else s) can easily be predicted or seen by anyone. The counter to this is simple...move in stealth. Honestly, that isn't so bad either..movement in stealth is not nearly as slow as in other games. However, moving in stealth for non rogue classes drains a lot of stamina. Thankfully when you get out of Tortage and into the wild lands do the zone areas really open up.

A further issue is that stealth is broken on attacking (makes sense) but also with interaction like obtaining or turning in a quest, buying and selling from a merchant, falling, and zoning. This leads to several occurrences of zone camping, quest camping, and NPC camping. Expect this a lot at the early levels.

Now, for everyone who reading this and saying "OMG, that sucks..how can Funcom have done this" I will deflty reply. "Because, this is what a lot of PvPers WANT!". Some people like it hard.... they want a