Age of Conan, The Review
Posted May 26th, 2008 by Isobelle
So! Age of Conan! I just got kicked off the server for 4 hours downtime at
There’s a little problem in that I only have about five screenshots to work with, since I was planning on doing this in a few days; but I honestly think the five I have will be enough to illustrate exactly where this game is in the Here and Now. Please also keep in mind that I’ll be constraining these images to 550 pixels wide to fit in the layout of our glorious new website. Without further ado (and even less time taken aside for the correction of spelling and grammatical errors), I present to you, the people of the jury, Exhibit A, to be labeled “The Hot Damn Oh Shit Factor That Everyone is Wetting Their Collective Pants Over”:
Age of Conan looks good. Like, REALLY FUCKING GOOD. Usually. I have a billion dollar videocard, with a 90 dollar CPU to back it up, but the game runs pretty lovely on my system with enough eye candy turned on that I can safely call the above screenshot ‘Far Cry, The MMO’ and not be completely full of shit. The water needs to be seen to be believed, as it just looks pretty sweet when you’re bobbing around out in the bay. The above screenshot isn't very good, but floating around in the water next to town, you realize that the water has actual volume. It isn't some flat 2D plane thay applied some bump mapping to. The waves are about 7 or 8 inches tall, and are individual waves.
It's good. Then you get out of the water and are confronted by the guy whose arms fold into his chest, and his forehead juts through his helmet. Stuff like that is pretty common. The little details need to be nailed down, but the engine is good. Over time, it will just get better.
You’re not really seeing it here, but the water moves and reacts to your
wading through it, and omg blah blah blah i've spent about three paragraphs on 'teh wet'. Look, the last time I was this excited over water
was the first time I launched CS Source, and just shot my Glock into the river
for a few rounds of play, until I bought the shotgun, and entertained myself for
another good ten minutes with that instead. You remember how you felt when Half
Life 2 came out; don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don't say you didn't crouch in front of that little bottle on the ground of de_dust to see your reflection in it. If your system has a used piece of toilet
paper underneath the heat sink, I dunno what to tell ya buddy. Turn everything
way down, and hope for the best? The game doesn’t look BAD at lower resolutions;
it just doesn’t look as good as it could.
The character creation system is hot. Hot hot hot. For facial features, you get about 25 sliders with stuff like nose curve, cheek width, eyebrow height, eye depth, mouth size, mouth width, etc. You get sliders for individually beefing up the legs, while leaving the arms skinny, etc. Boobs go from.. uhh… big to bigger… err…. Yeah. No A or B cups in Hyborea, ladies, sorry : / I'm happy to say tthat the new Ixobelle is a hawt piratey chick, and it’s good to not have bones sticking out of my kneecaps anymore. I do miss cannibalize, though... ;)
There are a few graphical kinks to work out… I can see thru my hair while stealthed or swimming, and certain NPC’s breasts tend to… uhh… look around… while I’m talking to them.
Yeah.
I’m just going to leave that out there and let the imaginations run free on that one.
Anyway, moving right along…
Combat! Woo boy, here’s a big one, and you might remember in my LotRO
preview and Warhammer Rants that I take this very seriously when it comes to
MMOs, as over 95% of honest to god PLAYTIME is spent killing shit. Standing
around with your dick in your hand at the
The attack system is broken down into three keys for attacking Left, Right,
and Center (overhead), with ‘uppercut’ moves (from the left and right) being
supposedly unlocked at 40. It sounds really stupid, and it felt really stupid
at first. The first mobs you come across are so painfully easy that you wonder
if the combat system is going to go easy on you for the whole shebang because
they pity you for buying their stupid game and buying into the hype. Then,
around level 10 or 12, everything clicks, and it’s fucking awesome. I can’t
really explain when it happened, but fighting one mob, I suddenly ‘got it’ and
from then on out I was having much more fun in the random killing of mobs.
…this is a mockup I made in Photoshop… this is similar to what you’d see pop up in a (draggable, if desired) menu on your screen. You activated Multi-Shot (or whatever), and now you need to activate a Right-hand, then Overhead attack to ‘execute’ said move. For a while I just didn’t get it, and was like ‘fuck those other buttons, I already did the move, the follow-up doesn’t matter’. EXCEPT (!) that the actual move is executed on the last button push of the combo. Ohhh! Gotcha! Okay! It sounds stupid, and I probably would have understood it much earlier had I read the manual, but once that little light went off, I was bashing heads in left and right and having much more fun with the combat. The system is so different from WoW it honestly took a complete overhaul of how I 'do combat' until I came to be comfortable with it.
With LotRO, I pretty much just recreated my WoW UI, and went to work on the game. This game isn't "right click a mob to start swinging, and throw in a different move once in a while" though. If you aren't hitting a button, your dude is just soaking axe to the face. I still wanted to have my Belkin be WASD + 1-0, but that doesn't really apply here anymore... except that it DOES, you just need to tailor it differently. After trying to map certain buttons to Right, Left, and Overhead, I finally ended up just mapping the buttons directly to my mouse. I have one of those newfangled mice where the wheel tilts, and used that as right and left. There are two buttons below my scrollwheel for increasing of decreasing the sensitivity of the mouse, and remapped those to Overhead and Sprint. I made the mouse buttons F1-Fwhatever, and just remapped those buttons in the keybindings. When I get the left and right "uppercut" moves at 40, I reckon I'll make those Alt+mouse tilt left and right.
In conjunction with the realtime combat thing is dealing with the way mobs react to this. The mobs block in a way that has them ‘putting their shields up’ almost like enemy ships in Wing Commander. The shields are full left, full right, full top, or spread out among the three. If a mob is blocking right, and you execute a combo that utilizes ‘swing left, then overhead’, it’s gonna fucking hurt, and there’s going to be blood on your monitor when it gets pulled off. If you smash a mob’s face in so bad that his grandkids feel it, you pull off a “fatality” of sort… jamming your sword in his gut and twisting it while backhanding his face or something equally over the top.
The UI is lacking. Like, Severely. There is no Addon system in place like WoW, and from what I understand, there won’t be. This is both a blessing and curse. There will be no Damage, Boss, or Threat Meters (hooray! just play the fucking game!), but there are no Bongos or Xperl either (/cry). The UI is XML, can be reskinned, and people are already popping up with some basic rewrites. I’m using a "MirageUI" that I found on Curse, and it does the job, about 800% better than the vanilla UI. This will only get better with time.
The talent distribution and ‘dinging’ in general feel pretty subdued. There’s no huge BLING signifying a level gained, and of the 19 levels I gained, I think I only realized the ding as it was happening 2 or 3 times. The other times I just looked down at my XP bar and realized I was 16 now where 5 min ago I was 15. I actually went 4 levels at one point without spending my ‘talent points’ and got to splurge on the ‘feats’ pane for 4 points straight. Woo! Feats are basically WoW’s talents, and earn you crap like ‘activate this skill to inflict more damage with bow attacks for the next 13 seconds’ or ‘increase all bow damage by 2% and offhand weapon attacks by 3% (up to 5x for 5 points spent). It’s WoW’s talent points. Nuff said.
There are also, however, general ability points that can spent for sprinting longer (the game has a sprint button like Battlefield or Call of Duty), regenerating health out of combat faster, or running faster. There’s one skill called Climbing that I totally ignored, until I came to a ladder that was like ‘oh I bet you wish you had 30 climbing skill right now eh?’ at which point I respent the points I spent in RunFast into Climbing (for a small fee). All classes can Hide, as well, and all classes can also put points into perception to detect hidden characters. Tobold has complained about every class being able to effectively stealth in the game, but for me (as a stealth class, Ranger) it hasn’t been a huge issue. Yet.
The first 20 levels are spent on an island where you get to learn your class without too much pressure from the outside world. During the ‘day’ you run around in AoC much as you would anywhere else, but selecting to enter ‘night time’ (by talking to a certain NPC) takes you into Destiny mode, where you’re on your own. It’s solo content focusing on your classes strengths. Apparently rogues stealth around stealing shit (what I did), while healers heal some NPCs or something, and maybe a warrior charges in the front door to somewhere killing everybody. I’ve only seen one side of this, the rogue side, but it’s pretty fuckin sweet. Apparently (and again, I’ve only seen the one side) it retells the same story from different angles. So even once you’ve played though it, you know the drill, you’re just filling a different role this time around. I’m pretty sure the entire Destiny thing is optional, as I was seeing dialogs saying ‘wah wah Destiny mode is too hard, lemme skip to the next mission’. If you can make it to level 20 just during Day mode, then you can probably catch the boat off the island without ever doing night mode. The server went down right as I hit level 19, so I’ll know later.
PvP! Oooh! Oooh! Kill anyone. Anywhere. I invited some guy to group with me for a quest, and not only did the fucker refuse, he took a swing on me and thought he was bad ass. Apparently Rangers (my class) are OP as fuck, so yeah… GG. People are running around just killing anyone they can, all the time. It’s fun, but there really isn’t a huge penalty (sorry Khatib). Dying doesn’t really even involve corpse runs. You stack a debuff on yourself that starts out really weak (-2 damage dealt or something), but eventually gets to be a pain in the ass if you keep getting camped. By voluntarily doing a corpse run back to the spot where you died, you can loot your ‘gravestone’ that will remove the debuff. Walking around outside, you discover spawn points’ (graveyards) which is where you’ll repop when you die. Fuckers camp these, but yeah. I just rezzed, went stealth, then beat the shit out of whoever was trying to be cute, since my class is in dire need of a nerfing, I guess. Roll a Ranger, lol. You’ll be fine. The alternative is to choose a spawn point ‘further back’ and either just hearth back to town, or continue questing around that area.
Overall, the game is solid. It isn’t as TIGHT as WoW, but nothing is.
Earlier today I was thinking how fucking awesome it would be if Blizzard just
licensed out the WoW engine like Epic does with Unreal, and allowed people to
make MMOs based on their toolsets. The combat engine is different enough that
you aren’t playing ‘a different version of WoW’, but every time your toon jumps
you kinda get kicked in the face for immersion and wonder aloud C’mon,…. Is that
how someone REALLY looks when they jump? Not that WoW is photoreal motion
captured or whatver, but it has a flavor, or style, and it pulls it off. Conan
is all I have going at the moment, so it’ll keep me entertained, but I’m not ‘settling’
for Conan. It’s honest to god fun, and once you ‘get it’, you’ll dig it.
Forreal.
Yeah, the death penalty is sadly lacking. :(
I still give this game a huge +++ over WoW for having PvP keeps in the near future, as opposed to mindless gear grind battlegrounds where time matters as much as skill.
The game definitely starts strong, but I gotta say... I think the later levels start to show a certain lack of testing. Somewhere around 40, the balance issues start to show up, as well as some bugged quests and such, but the game is definitely playable, and they're doing their best to patch down the ridiculously out of balance leveling strategies/exploits people have come up with. The end game is going to be extremely mess for the first couple months I think though from what I'm seeing now at lvl 50, but if they stay on top of their shit and patch it up, it could be a pretty solid game. Then again, I don't know that anyone has a clue just what exactly the end game will hold... and it better be good, cause the leveling curve is short as shit, and a week played or less will get you to 80... at which point we do... ??? what exactly?
So I guess if Funcom totally fucked the dog on the lvl 80 content, WAR is gonna be in a pretty good spot to pick up all the 4-6 month fallout of people who get tired of a nonexistant end game. I still haven't heard really strong things in favor of WAR though from pretty much anywhere.
yeah, the one other thing is the quests themselves... i'm not saying WoW had the most terribly advanced or compelling quests to perform, but jesus christ... conan gives the illusion of "conversation trees" instead of just spitting out the quest text straight up, but every dialog is "tell me about yourself" or "give me the fucking quest already", and every quest i've done is typical FedEx or Kill X Alligators for N tails, EXCEPT for the previously mentioned Destiny mode, which was actually pretty sweet. I wish every ten levels had another Destiny part to fulfill. it's one of the freshest parts, and since you end up soloing to endgame anyway usually, why not just accept it?
At least every alligator drops a tail like it's supposed to on collection quests, but the combat is the real gem in this game. the rest is just trudging towards the next level / town / zone.
That mouse mapping wont work so hot when you get the other 2 directional attacks (im not sure what level that happens) but by default they are suposed to be Q and E which are my strafe keys. That might be annoying.
The mirageUI thinger looks amazing. I was irritated as hell at the hotbars at first but that looks promising.
Playing on a PvP server here reminds me of UO for some reason, without any sort of pentalty for dying of course.
yeah, i use a belkin n52, and have it with 1-0 and WASD mapped. one of the directions on my DPAD thumb thing is ALT, so pushing that and mushing the wheel left or right will replace Q and E in the equation.
The game is still very buggy, but solid where it counts for me.
Starting around level 40 you find more and more bugged quests. The content is nearly non-existent when you reach 50-55. Almost no quests, just finding a good spot to grind. The grinding, however, goes pretty quickly.
The descriptions for the feats aren't very...descriptive. You need to get the feat, see if it works, and if it works see if you wanna keep it, if not find a trainer, rinse and repeat.
My guild currently has every tier 1 building up in our guild village, but we get no benefit yet, which is painful mostly because of the cost. I think I had 75 silver at 40 and buildings are 2G a piece, plus resources. Our guild has had to make it mandatory to donate almost every cent you make just to get the buildings up in hopes that the buffs they provide will come soon.
I'm enjoying the PvP and combat system and just hoping that they implement the guild village and 50+ content relatively soon. I think they have a good base to build on. In some senses I think it should still be in beta, but for every complainer on the AoC boards there seems to be someone enjoying it. I don't think it will de-throne WoW but its the first alternative that isn't painful to play.
I've never tried WOW before, so I don't really quite understand why AOC isn't as "tight" as WOW. Mind elaborating?
"I wish every ten levels had another Destiny part to fulfill. it's one of the freshest parts, and since you end up soloing to endgame anyway usually, why not just accept it?"
Actually, they sort of do have this, but it is at larger intervals. I had a destiny quest line to do at level 30 and another that will need to be done at level 50 (I am only level 42 right now). I assume there will be even more at higher levels.
nope, 30 50 80
80's quest gives you 1 piece of epic gear, for your class.
When you push a button, things happen. Unless you are in a cooldown, the game responds quite quickly. But, it's a more "cartoony" character, so it's easier to do.
In AoC, the characters (especially if you juice up the settings) are purely amazing looking. They've got a lot of work in on the swings, gestures and such for combat; notwithstanding those that need improvement. So, with the characters looking more lifelike, the moves have to be somewhat under control to still look good. I think that is going to be something we will have to get used to. When you click a button, you aren't going to get the instant feedback like you did with WoW. But, it's not horrible, and it looks a hell of a lot better doing it.
I'd agree with the review for the most part. It's accurate through lvl30. lvl30-40 is alright too.
Things are pretty brutal after lvl40 though. Spellweaving just got ripped out because there was an exploit. Traders were ripped out for over a week due to exploits. Most of the crafting skills are bugged or completely broken. Half the more advanced feats don't work either.
I really enjoyed 1-20. The voice acting was incredibly well done. the graphics are great. The 20-32 zones are also pretty well done.
However, lvl40 ... oh man, just brutal unless you're "that guy". You know who I mean. He spends 6 /played days to level a toon to the cap no matter how bad the MMO is. Well, it's not that bad, but 40+ isn't for the feint of heart either.
Lastly, nipples. Ok, had to say it.
Let's see if you still like it when you hit level 50 or so.
There aren't any quests over level 50 at the moment. The only way to continue to level is to grind mobs, and they're all camped.
I had an AoC subscription. Here's why I cancelled:
1. The combat system sucks. Look, the whole "move direction move" thing looks good, until you realize you can just program that into your nostromo and be done with it. Then it starts lacking something, I started thinking "why am I pressing 3 or 4 buttons to do what I'd do with 1 in any other game? Do they *want* me to destroy my wrists?" So rather than play "Age of N52 Programming" I elected to play "Age of Cancellation Page".
2. Not ready: The auction house didn't work until 2 weeks after release. Clipping, clipping, clipping. There's lots of clipping in WoW, but it's not supposed to look "real". This is supposed to be hyper advanced ubergraphics, and the clipping just makes it look shoddy. I especially like when I'm standing in an area with lots of undergrowth (grass etc) and spin in place...and all the grass and bushes spin with me. It's like we're having a little dance party.
3. Quests: Not particularly challenging or difficult. Not special. More along the lines of annoying. "Wow, I have to click through 3 dialog boxes to accept a quest from this asshole." They give you creative and insulting ways to role play, like you can insult a questgiver over and over and...still get the quest and the same reward. Pointless and just a waste of clicks.
4. Abilities: I played a guardian. Knockback quits working at level 6. There's nothing in the tooltip, nothing in the manual, it just quits knocking people back as soon as you hit level 6, even if you're fighting level 4 mobs. I'd pick up a weapon and look at the description, compare it to another weapon and realize that the itemization is wacky. Level X green drop 1 hander with more dps than a Level X+5 green drop 2 hander.
5. I quit before I hit a high enough level to do player housing, but...sorry, that's not working right either.
6. The forums. The AoC forums really make you appreciate...how good the WoW forums are. I posted a question asking if there was any way to skip the 4 ads and the startup movie every time I started the game. I got told no, there wasn't, that I was a noob and my parents didn't know each other. Umm...ok. Thanks.
7. Logging into the game and seeing a message of the day of "AVOID ZONE XXX AT ALL COSTS". Yes, an entire zone was broken. Also, there was a spell that all casting classes get at level 29 or so that was crashing the server.
They delayed this game for 18 months to put more polish on. My only question is this: Did it actually set people's computers ON FIRE 18 months ago? Because I don't see any polish here at all.
Actually the developers didn't want to release the game yet, since it wasn't (isn't) ready yet (if an MMO ever is ready :D). But like everywhere in the world the people providing the money have the final word on this, and they decided otherwise... seems they got impatient and wanted some extra funding from box sales, or wanted to launch it before WotLK was released due to marketing reasons.
When WoW was released it was a very buggy and unbalanced game aswell, they polished over the years to get where they are now.
As for the combat system.. if you find pressing 1 button over and over more entertaining then anticipating on your enemy (NPC or player)with blocks and hitting directions... meh!
Trying something new has always more risks involved then recreating something that has done before... I'm actually glad some company had the guts to innovate the MMO genre a bit. I'm sure if enough people keep believing in the potential of this game it will grow into a very entertaining and imba game.
yeah, i think my next article may be 'part 2', after having played it a bit...
36 now, and not really seeing any point in playing much further. our guild has every building in the town, but they do nothing (like, don't even 'work' yet, they just sit there). in 4 levels i'll be able to buy a mount, but i have 20 silver of the 3 gold required, and even then, the mount apparently moves like 'barely faster than walking' speed.
i spent all the last playsession farming harvested goods (copper, wood, etc) as this is where money is usually made in MMOs, raw crafting mats... came to find the 'auction' system looks to be about 20% implemented, and i can't even vend the goods themselves. the NPC trader doesn't even 'see' the materials bag in my backpack.
bag space is retardedly limited, UNLESS you preordered the game, and were given more bag space? umm.. yeah, a bit more, but in general, my free month is up june 24th, and i don't see this going much further than that.
I honestly imagine if they can make it through this crap phase, the potential to have a good game is there, maybe i'll just check back in 6 months to see how it looks when it's finished.
There are definitely some bugs left in there.. Several quests are completely borked. But with just about every patch something gets fixed (and not too many more get broken). I just dinged 59 last night, and there are tons of quests to do so the fellow ranting about no quests over 50 is just an idiot, even if it was 2 weeks ago, they were there then. I love the combat system, very refreshing but can get really tiring after several hours of intense fighting (with all the extra keystrokes).
Some of the rants above are valid, but most aren't. Slam stops working at level 6? Yes it does. You get a different one to use. The trader (bizaar/auction house) isn't working as well as it should at this point, but it does work.
I'm liking it. B+ right now. It's no WoW, and I'm glad for that.
I think I have logged in maybe five times since hitting 80 and the last one was ~2 weeks ago. I tried raiding a couple of times but it was like old school EQ raiding but somehow even more boring. You know the old exciting planar raids where it would take like 5 minutes to beat down one mob. The mob doesn't really do anything interesting and in AoC the person tanking doesn't really seem to take much damage but it just takes forever to die. On top of that random bugs causing the mobs to go into evade mode double the time it takes to kill one. I don't think I have been that bored in an MMO in years. I know raiding always devolves into utter boredom over time but the first time doing new content should be a little bit fun : /
I may level up a couple of alts in between sacrificing infants in hopes that Funcom doesn't make the secret world as bad as AoC.
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