If you take World of Warcraft, remove the 12-year-olds, and add some whores (okay, a lot of whores), you’re left with Age of Conan. With some of the most impressive graphics to date (similar to those of Crysis), lots of voiced dialogue, and the best MMO combat I’ve ever experienced, it’s sure to please the MMO fanbase. It combines the best of current MMO games and brings some new features of it’s own to the table.
We’ll begin with the graphics. This game has extraordinary graphics, and some of the best lighting I’ve seen, well, anywhere! Assuming your computer has enough horsepower to play ball (and believe me, when maxed out it makes even my rig run at 10-30FPS), you’re guaranteed a stunning experience visually. It features SM3, Bloom (used well), and the standard host of options. The game’s systems were programmed far better than most when it comes to lighting and use of effects. The end result is simply fantastic.
The audio is also exceptional, with some of the most realistic 3D audio concerning rivers and other environmental features. Kudos to whoever created or chose the sound effects for this game, as this is the first game I’ve heard in some time where I actually appreciated the audio. The monsters sound terrifying, the rivers sound dangerous, and the characters actually sound like men (or women) in combat. This is more than what I can say for most games on the market today, and I doubt I’ll hear comparable audio in any game to come soon. The entire tutorial area (roughly up to level 20 of your character’s development) is voiced, and the story quests after that (there are simply too many quests to have voiced them all, but who knows, they may add them in).
Here is a rundown of the gameplay. First I’ll take you through the tutorial mission… I started the game, got on my feet, and ran to the first character I meet - a whore! She’s tied up, but you need a key to free her, so you kill a guy for it and come back, and she demands to be escorted to the city. You fight your way through a bunch of pirates and poachers (there are laws against killing animals in the world where Conan is king?), and eventually get to the town. There I did a bunch of quests, including many for a brothel (a whorehouse, for those of you who are less educated). These included “Kill the pirates that stole money from the whores”, “See what you can find from the missing whore”, “Save the whore”, and countless others. Did I mention that the sick puppies who created this game included breast physics? Shame on them!
I played through to level 30 in the past week or so, but I’d have to say that the feature that kept me playing was the PvP. Obviously you run around from town to town being a quest monkey who does even the most petty errand (that’s just what heroes do, I suppose), but as you wander the world, you are always in PvP. You can be in a town, and unless it’s a major town, you are still very likely to get ganked if you stand around doing nothing, or are just unlucky. You could get ganked while talking to an NPC (in which case you should press escape and either run or fight back), you could get ganked while AFK (stealth when you do so!), or countless other scenarios. The most fun is PvP during quests. You can arrive at a spawn for a boss that you need for a quest, and perhaps the other person doesn’t want to group with you. Mow them down! I once wandered around an area where people have to go to kill a high-ranking enemy, and killed some dozen people as they fought or wandered the area. The PvP isn’t dry, either.
The different classes are subtypes of Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. Warriors use the heaviest armor and deal more damage per hit. Rogues can stealth with no constant drain on stamina, and do more DPS, but less per hit, and smaller criticals. They can wear light and cloth armor, but the subtype assassin can only wear cloth. This is the same with the mage, who of course focuses on magic, either summoning or casting to destroy their enemies.
Different classes behave differently in PvP. Rogues stealth up to enemies (if attacking), get a stealth critical, and then continue to DPS and DoT (damage over time) you until you die, using poison as well if the class supports it. If attacked (and unable to win) they run away and stealth when out of sight, perhaps to regroup and re-engage. Rangers (rogue subtype with very different PvP) just shoot you until they decide it isn’t worth it, and then they run (and are often caught up to and killed). Warriors just walk by you and kill you with a few well-placed blows and stuns. If you can avoid the stuns, warriors are actually an easy mark. This is a hard thing to do, however. Mages vary depending on class, but generally are easy to kill. If you get on a mage’s bad side when he’s not unprepared for combat, however, they can just as easily decimate you.
One of the biggest differences between this and other MMORPGs (aside from the combat, covered later) is that there’s a singleplayer main quest. The main quest takes place “at night”, which is a night-time instance of various areas. For example, the starting town is on fire, and nobody is there but NPCs, enemies, and you, during the first few quests. This is a pretty fun twist, and it allows you to progress through the main quest without interruption. It’s also kind of lame in other MMORPGs that you’re the hero, but 5-10 of you are all working together to do the hero tasks over and over.
As in most MMO games, there is a bar of abilities at the bottom corresponding to the number keys. You assign and re-arrange abilities here as you please. In AoC, the main attacks correspond to some of the number keys (rearrangeable), and are insta-cast. They give you directional attacks in many directions, meaning that you can swing in different ways to break different angles of defense. It’s quite fun, especially compared to other MMOs. AoC is a much more fast-paced and skill-based combat than your typical MMO.
On to the bad…
After the tutorial island, the game quality degrades. Nobody has voiced dialog except the main quest people at this point, and the quests are less varied. We get lots of “kill lots of X unit”, “gather X of Y plant”, and the kicker is that the quests with a good reward are insane. For example, I was in one town and was given a quest to kill 10 “champion elites” or what have you. These weren’t hard to kill, but there were only about 5 of them in the area assigned to you, and they were surrounded by these giant guys who took groups to take down. This made it take me a few hours to complete, so I could move to the next part of the chain quest. This brings me to chained quests.
Chained quests aren’t bad in principle. However, when you must return to the same area for 5 different quests, and you can’t do them all at once, it makes things take forever. I had to go back and forth across the map for the champion elites, and the groups I got into were often on later parts, meaning I killed things that would have finished the next two parts three, maybe four times over while still on part one. This was all in order to get the few guys in those areas to finish that first part. It was great XP, mind you, but very time consuming.
The tradeskill system in this game fails. In order to simply go through the tutorial missions for the gathering skills, one must gather 10 of whatever material. Let’s use wood as an example. You can’t just chop down any tree. You must chop down special trees, of a certain type appropriate to your level. The density of said trees are perhaps 1/200. Everyone camps these trees and defends them with their lives, or just sits around and waits to kill you when you start gathering. As if this weren’t enough, the trees also have little to no resources in them, and don’t respawn in new locations. This means that the same locations are visited by everyone all the time, and are both exhausted and camped. This is the same for all resources. I was unable to complete a single resource tutorial quest.
The game is great fun, don’t get me wrong, but after the tutorial island I found the money to just not be justified for me anymore. If you get a chance, I highly recommend picking up a trial and experiencing the tutorial area. That segment is just excellent, regardless of whether you enjoy the game in general.
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