But first, a word

Reviewing a massively multiplayer online game like Age of Conan isn’t something that you can really do in a week or two. As many point out – the value of a MMO often truly is determined by the quality and accessibility of its end game – when you reach the level cap (in this case 80).

What we’re going to do is approach it in bite sized-chunks. We’re not going to base a review off the beta – as things have changes.

Re: the score – we’re going to give one to each phase of the game. So maybe subsequent chunks will rate higher or lower than our first. Ultimately, score in a MMO is the ultimate subjective measure. However in the interests of rough classification, we’re going to try.

Also note that we were supplied with the US game – not European – and so were pointed towards US servers (to the best of our belief).

On with the show

So jumping into Hyboria is not as simple as just slapping in the disc and running away, hell no. In the interest of conveying the pain of what new AoC punters are in for, I transcribed the install process. Bear with me:

8.25 Fully installed. Downloading update manager (5.31 MB)
8.26 Scanning local files…
8.26 Patching local files. Downloading (92.8MB)
8.39 Downloading Full resource database hashes (13.2MB)
8.41 Patching resource database (649MB)
10.25 Age of Conan is now up-to-date

More than two hours in (excluding the install time from disc, which was quite lengthy) I was more than ready to play. So at this point I tried logging in. Having yet to be prompted for a CD-Key, I expected to be asked now. Nope. Clicking on the account management button, a browser spawns and I get sent to a website to enter my cdkey and create an account. Somewhat clunky. Anyway, onwards:

10.32 Registered. Now let’s log in.
10.33 “Logging in”
10.34 “Unable to connect to the authentication server”

A quick look around online revealed that server downtime was … frequent. Very frequent. And just like World of Warcraft – server downtime and patches seem to get rolled out in Australian prime time (which coincides with the slow hours, Stateside). The downtime was scheduled to be several hours, so I figured now was a good time to give up for the day.

The following morning, déjà vu:

9.47 Downloading latest update manager (5.31 MB)
9.49 Scanning local files…
9.50 Updating local files (17.2 MB)
9.52 Downloading complete list of content (13.2MB)
9.54 Updating content (16.3MB)
9.56 Age of Conan is now up-to-date

Hurrah, a relatively small 10 or so minute prep time. Onto server selection.

Bane’s “Culture PVP” sounds “role player” specific, isn’t. There’s specific RP servers. Apparently Culture PVP is FunCom code for tweaking PVP mechanics, so you’re warned about a potentially fluid ruleset on this server. For now it means you can’t gank solo people, which sounds fair, but I’m sure that it’s a lot more involved than that. There is a server named “Bluesteel”, so it’s hard to go past that for my first AoC guy.

Onto Character selection

One thing WoW taught us is the characters who suck at the start of a MMO’s lifespan don’t stay that way. After all – Warlocks and Druids were the very worst in Blizzard’s game, and currently more bandwidth is spent moaning about their overpowered-ness than anything else.

Tempest of Set is my final selection – a badass destructopriest who does major damage with a little healing on the side. After fooling with my appearance a little it’s onto a cutscene, getting washed up on shore on the initial island – Tortage, your level 1-20 zone - and off we go.

First, binding controls. Problem number one – can’t bind mouse buttons. Burn in hell, FunCom. No mouse buttons for jumping. No “emergency/get out of jail functions to those spare mouse buttons. Then when you start binding your “action keys” make sure you get it right the first time. If you try rebinding those same keys you will be told they are reserved (note: not the same as being told you’ve already used them) – until you figure out you need to click “Apply” first which seems to work.

Let’s fight
Once controls are sussed it’s combat time. Tempest of Set punters have a base lightning spell that smashes people from range and can hit multiple targets to boot. It’s overpowered initially – especially as you can one shot many monsters with it the same level as you.

A nice touch is the fresh kills count – kills that yield extra experience are topped up daily. Great for obsessives who loved WoWs rest XP system but needed to play daily. Kinda welcome (but not really) is the death system – you get ported back to the last saved waypoint, which is lacking compared to being able to ghost-walk back to your corpse. The bonus is you don’t have some cruel monkey hanging about waiting to annihilate you.

The user interface sucks, but the hope is some clever folk start customising it. For now there’s the option of dragging and dropping functions onto the action bars, and you can drop extra bars (which float) if the pittance of slots to drop things in you’re given at the start isn’t enough (it won’t be). The overall look is pretty dated – very boxy.

Moving along
After a cluster of quests outside the city gates, you’ll gain entry and see the AoC engine working hard. Characters and NPCs sometimes can take a few extra seconds to appear – a trifle disconcerting. The action can get bogged down at times as well.

Once you’ve found the local pub and established a rough idea of where everything is, you’ll soon figure out Age of Conan gives you a pretty soft intro to MMO play. Critical in the opening stages are campaign/storyline quests that you do solo. To make it abundantly clear, the game will even tell you. The missions are set at night, and a city without loads of NPCs and other players in it runs considerably smoother. You can work your way through the storyline quest lines for quite a few levels before you reach a point where you must be level ten to proceed. Between the load of quests you can perform in the city, there’s more than enough to keep you occupied whether you’re soloing at night time or running with the big dogs in daylight.

One thing I will say is that the city at night is kind of dead. Hardly any commerce takes place, nobody but guards are on the streets and it just seems an incomplete experience – at least at this level.

Quests in AoC are nothing new – fetch me (x) amounts of (y). Kill (x) people and bring me their loot. It’s not a criticism – just an observation. Some people prefer this kind of familiarity.

Pee Vee Pee
Flash forward to level nine. I’m foraging around the Tortage Underhalls for a couple of bottles that a NPC so desperately needs when I find a pack of punters massacring everyone who enters. Areas like this are open slather for player vs player combat – unlike town areas or surrounds.

Wanting to have a lash myself, I quickly grab some daytime quests for the White Sands Isle – a separate quest area like the group-based Acheronian Ruins - from the city and head over. Seeing someone apparently away from their keyboard – and fice levels higher, I try zapping them. Oops. They’re there and not amused by my scrub player trying to dent them. What follows is a sprinting competition back to the “boat” I came in on. Which in turn reveals a shortcoming in AoC PVP mechanic – at least to my view.

If I’m getting wailed on by melee in particular, it’s very easy to run away. If a caster is chasing me, they need to usually stand still to cast – and meanwhile I’m making tracks – usually out of that 20 yard range so common to many long distance attacks. Because you can specifically develop your skills to accentuate the rate your health recovers, you can sprint off, recover health passively and fast, rest to regain stamina if need be for a quick second or two, sprint off recover more health. It drags things out forever unless someone has the means to do some serious damage or stop you in your tracks.

Fresh pastures
By the time I hit level 10 I’m getting bored. But then I’m meant to, otherwise gold farmers and powerlevellers would go out of business.

I decide to roll a new class – a trusty Barbarian. Now I have a mental questmap in my head, I’m sure I can at least have fun ripping through the same thing all over again. Or not. FunCom opted to have players run through roughly the same newbie zones, unlike *cough* certain other games that split you out by race.

This decision is fine if the starter zone is super fun and varied...but it’s not any more than most training wheels areas in games. So if you’re prone to checking out a stack of different classes, hope you like the scenery of sunny Tortage and the NPC action.

Level one to five is pretty much identical every time. After that there’s a little bit of subtle variation as you enter the city and start joining the resistance against the local rule. I noticed when I flipped to character #3 (this time: an Assassin) that like the Barbarian full use was made of the classes ability to “hide”. Your missions are subtly adjusted to incorporate some sneaking elements, as opposed to bombing the daylight out of enemies with good old ToS lightning fingers.

If you’re just starting...
My recommendation for punters churning through a gig of updates is to be methodical. Don’t touch Acheronian ruins – save it for level 11 on by which stage you should know how to play your guy pretty well. Thrash through as much of the night-time solo questing options as you can. Get to level eight then have a crack at the Volcano mission (don’t worry, you’ll get it). When you hit level nine then make sure you have as many White Sands Isle quests as possible. Reason being if you are on a PVP server, it’s mayhem usually. Going there earlier unless you have protection from higher level benefactors is asking for a long, frustrating session.

Try and wipe out as many White Sands missions as you can in an efficient manner at this level. Don’t bother getting distracted by PVP if you can avoid it – there’s people double your level here as well willing to smoke you. Then again, if you have a reasonably decent group of people together, you could do as I did and create a “stealth posse” whose aim was picking as many fights as possible. Your call.

Either way – by the time you’ve cleared the first four to five White Sands missions, if you’re ticking over your city quests and staying up to date with the solo night-time action, you’ll at least be level ten.

Hitting 10
Having whipped three diff chars to this level for the first stage of our report/review, there’s some promising and concerning things about Age of Conan. For starters, there’s no shortage of punters running around whinging that higher level content is very thin on the ground. It’s a common complaint that by the time you get past level 40 you better be prepared to get your grinding shoes on, as the quests get scattered and slaughtering loads of beasts for experience is the main form of progression.

These complaints don’t surprise – there’s quite a few elements about AoC that seem half-finished at present. While it’s not uncommon to find a MMORPG released with plenty of work still going on in the background, FunCom seems to have cut this particularly fine. It’s reminiscent of the cartoon character sitting on a high speed model train set – laying down track right in front of them to prevent a calamity. The problem with this approach is if at launch you’re busy trying to stuff content in that should already be there – you have less time to address the inevitable flood of fixes required. Hence the current patcharama, gankarama and general whingeorama on some servers.

We’re of the school of thought that says a serious MMO needs about half a year in the market to properly evaluate. That’s why we’re going to be building this review into an ongoing appraisal. Next stop will be levels 10-20, and then... you know the drill.

It’s not a race to 80, as half the people who get the game will never get there. We want to convey what the experience is like, as well as impart advice for people entering. So we need help from AoC players. If you’ve played the game, let us know your feedback – what’s working, what’s not working. War stories from the server. Which servers to avoid. Which ones seem to be relatively sane (hi Scourge!). We’ll incorporate it into this so people get the complete picture.

So to reiterate: our ratings are strictly for this part of AoC. Any feedback about this approach – hate it, like it etc – feel free to hit comments – or shoot us a mail if you’d prefer a more direct approach.