These are my first impressions of Age of Conan, first written in a forum on 02.06.2008. I have changed the format a little here, and made some additions based on more time spent.
Character creation
Characters in Age of Conan are incredibly pliable. You can tweak the thickness of limbs, waist, hips, torso individually, although the change in bust size is not out of this world, so no porn stars for you. While this feature might get Western players excited, those of us used to Korean or Japanese games are quite used to inhumanly huge breasts perched on tiny waists that the amount of tweaking we can do in Age of Conan seems limited. This realistic limits to the tweaking of a body shape, has its downsides, everyone in-game looks like of similar. You cannot even reach the human extremes of a sumo wrestler and Kate Moss.
My main problem is that the faces are hard to make beautiful. Korean MMO and Guild Wars have beautiful faces, but in AoC, you can only make people who have gone through some harsh suffering in their lives, such as being a slave on a galley. Almost all the female faces are wrinkled especially at closeups.
I do not like the one word name system, although it is the least likely to be abused to make weird names. Korean MMO style “xXxOoOxXx” type names are out. “Xxxoooxxx” is how it will turn out. I am partial to the Guild Wars multiple word names, so one word is a bit of a crimp. So no “Conan The Librarian” for you.
There are three races: Aquilonians (Greek style), Cimmerian (Viking style), Stygian (Egyptian style), with 12 classes split into four archetypes: Priests, Soldiers, Rogues and Mages.
Priests
Priest of Mitra (Healing + Holy Damage + Crowd Control)
Tempest of Set (Healing + Electricity Damage + Crowd Control)
Bear Shaman (Healing + Melee Combat + Crowd Control)
Soldiers
Guardian (Melee Combat + Tanking + Crowd Control)
Conqueror (Melee Combat + Combat Buffs + Battle Resurrect)
Dark Templar (Multi-target Melee Combat + Anti-caster Combat + Combat Hexes)
Rogues
Barbarians (Stealth + Multi-target Melee Combat)
Assassins (Stealth + Single-target Melee Combat)
Rangers (Stealth + Ranged Combat + Crowd Control)
Mages
Demonologists (Summon Demon + Magic Damage)
Necromancers (Summon Undead + Magic Damage)
Herald of Xotli (Melee Combat + Magic Damage)
Since I rolled on a PvP server, I had feared that everyone else would be rolling Barbarians and Assassins so they can stealth and gank, but that fear was not panned out. Although in my early stages, I did not see a single Priest of Mitra, although I did not go around clicking to check people’s classes. Until they start to cast spells, all casters look the same. Conquerors and Barbarians can easily be mistaken for each other as they still both wear Medium armour at that stage. Later stages, the classes seem more well spread, with Herald of Xotli, Dark Templar and Bear Shaman being the slightly rarer sights, and no wonder since they are the hybrids.
Game play
The unique play feature of Age of Conan is its ultra light arcadey style combat. There are three (later five) attack directions and attack skills (similar to most other MMO) have follow up swings that you have to tap on those attack directions to follow and complete the combos. There is no such thing as Autohit, you have to tap every swing of your weapon through the fight. It is quite engaging. There is a blocking and dodging mechanic in the simple three directions, which can be ignored at the start, but gets more useful especially in PvP. I am playing at about 350ms pings to the US servers, its still quite doable.
Skills and spells are unlocked when you gain level automatically. There are feats which is pretty much the same system as Talents in World of Warcraft and other games before that.
I do not like that the skill and feat descriptions are ambiguous. Being more used to competitive games, I feel that skill descriptions must be concise and specific. In Age of Conan, the same skill might have two different descriptions in different places, they need to iron that out. Obviously not designed for competitive PvPing. This is the part I most hope would change.
The game world is split up into zones, each zone has several multi-group instance. This means lots of loading screens, but it also means no overcrowding. You can change your instance to meet up with friends, although currently that is bugged, it had worked before the last update. I feel that the benefits outweigh the hassle of the load screens.
Ganking is not as bad as I had feared, of course individual experiences will differ. It is worse in the weekend daytimes and in certain zones. I noticed that the evening crowd is generally more civilised. It could just be national stereotyping on my part. Of course, every instance will have one or two buggers, still enjoyably realistic: You have a bunch of armed mercenaries walking around, they are not all going to be pally with each other. I stop and am cautious when people are around, and 99% of the people are not griefers.
It was a bit overcrowded on the weekend daytimes. The spawn was not sufficient, as a result ganking increased. Might have been a better idea for everyone in the instance to party up so they can share quest kills. The population size and spawn rate got better in the evening, and perhaps as a result the amount of ganking reduced.
There is definitely a curve, when you first start an area as the lowest level, be ready to be griefed almost immediately. When you’re mid-level and run of the mill in that zone, there might still be a bit of cut and thrust, especially in zone exits to higher level zones. When you’re at the top of the pile in that zone no one messes with you, but its time to move on to the next higher level zone and start the process all over again.
Currently, the classes are not balanced for one on one combat, or will it ever be. Team synergies start to show quite nicely once you have two to three people together. Especially if they cover each other’s weaknesses. Monsters are generally manageable one on one, with your level and perhaps a handful higher. It starts getting sticky when you aggro a few higher level ones. Quests are marked with a Group icon if they require you to group. Those are generally fun, I hate playing alone.
Environment
The big selling point of this game is that it is an MMO with nearly FPS graphics. Textures are in high resolution, there is plenty of foliage, and the water is just simply amazing. I saw an incredible improvement with the graphics when I turned on anti aliasing. If you graphics card can take it, put on some AA, even 2x would make the game look so much better.
I love the water in this game. It is highly reflective of the environment, and there are actual 3D waves, that are not textures. If you take a dip in it, you can see ripples form behind you as you swim. The swimming strokes are realistic, including a back stroke, however, entry and exit from the water is too fast and not quite realistic. It must be said that not all water is created equal in this game. There are zones where the water is great, and there are zones where the water is one or two generations ago. They need to bring all the zones up to the high standards of their best.
The envrionment is very navigable. Of course there are terrain that you cannot pass, but it is a lot less than in many games out there. You can jump along the mountain sides that you cannot walk along, this allows you to jump quite a distance. Bashing through the woods lets you avoid gankers. You do not automatically walk off a cliff, it holds you there, although you are allowed to jump off to your death. People have tried but failed to push monsters off the side of a cliff. A bit too much walking around, but that is to be expected from a subscription based game. The cheaper horses do not help much.
In the starter zone called Tortage, every quest is accompanied by a voice over. This is hugely immersive, so much so that when you leave the starter zone, and start getting quests without a voice over, you feel like you are deaf. The main quests in the game will have voice overs but majority will not. There is a problem though, because of the voice overs, the game changes to a head view every time you have a conversation, in the traditional computer RPG style. This works great with the voice over, but is really odd without. Also, this view encourages people to gank you in the middle of a converstion, I would suggest that quests without voice overs should not have this head view.
The character design of their NPC tends to have droopy glazed eyes. No one is pretty or handsome in this game, it might just be a Norwegian thing. Hire some Koreans for head designs. Some character designs and animations like the drunken sailor and prostitutes are quite animated while others are very stiff. Voice overs are a little over dramatic and gives me goosebumps, but I’ll live. No one beats Rockstar Games at realistic voice overs.
Interface
The interface is currently very buggy, and quite frankly, not up to standard. Hopefully better UI will be created soon enough. There are so many awesome World of Warcraft user made UIs out that I do not understand why FunCom ended up with their Primitive and quite frankly, ugly and unwieldy one. After experiencing Guild Wars, not being able to “ping” or draw on the mini-map seems like caveman days.
Conclusions
All in all, very similar to many popular MMOs that have come before it. Familiar feature. Mostly taken a lot of good things. The M18 rated-ness is not too obvious. Yes, there are fatalities that splash my screen with blood, and you can make your female toons completely topless. Not over the top blood like Ninja Gaiden 2, and certainly not as pornographic like some salivating 13 year olds might expect.
Immersive quest givers (in the starter zone), luscious graphics, managed population, acceptable pings and load times, and a combat system that has a bit of a twist to the usual click on icon style MMO gaming. However, still full of bugs, and class balance needs to be addressed, or at least a clearer vision of class balance communicated to the players. FunCom has one gamecard’s time to rid themselves of the glaring common bugs that affect everyone, start to include more higher end content, and clean up the individual classes. then hopefully this game can go the distance. It is more niche than World of Warcraft, so subscription numbers would not be able to compare, however, it has got a healthy start, and hopefully that money is well spent on making the product good.
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