My (hopefully) Objective Review

Triddle

I haven't played the release yet, as the game has not released in Australia and I missed out on EA, so I've naut to say on the launch (Though I'm told by friends that it's very solid in comparrison to many launches).

However,

My experience in the beta of this game was absolutely amazing, I was only in long enough to level two classes to around 30ish and several others around in the teens (Trying to get an idea of each class before release.) I found that the game was just a lot of fun right from the begining, and it was fun again each time I made a new character, admittedly I got bored of the tutorial area after taking two characters through it, but that takes around 10-20 minutes to get through so it's not exactly an issue. I've been involved in MMORPGs for around 10 years now and have played my share of them, this is one that I found I could not help but enjoy, I'll outline a few of the things, good and bad, about this game here.



FUNCOM

Firstly I'll deal with FUNCOM as a company. I'm not exactly impressed with their customer service, but not exactly unimpressed either.

I found in the beta that FUNCOM staff were always very helpful and very fast to respond to any issue I had, they were very enthusiastic not only about making sure we were able to test the game, but making sure we had fun doing it. Whenever a major issue came up in the beta they had GMs personally helping many players through them and the bugs were patched out at a rate of nauts, they absolutely pumped out fixes and by the end the game was extremely polished. They seemd to work bloody hard on improving this game, and they also clearly have the resources, human and otherwise. If they keep up good maintainance of the game I can only see it getting better.

Having preordered the game I was unable to get into EA because my retailer couldn't find the keys until it was too late. FUNCOM limited the spots and they ran out a couple of days before the EA began, this seemed fair enough, and though personally I was effected by it, it's understable that this was how It had to be.

Perhaps the most annoying thing for me is their failure at a world wide release. I don't see why Americans should get the game before anyone else, especially when us Australians and New Zealanders have to play on the same servers as them, we're just getting dumped onto servers and miss the thrill of the brand new server. In my opinion they should have been able to make a world wide release, either push back the US or push forward the rest of the world, or at the very least release the game at the same time for everyone sharing servers. I guess it won't really matter in the long run since oceania having the lower population will just shut up and deal with having to play on already developed servers.

The Game

I've heard tell of many people claiming that age of conan gameplay is 'the same old thing'. This is true in the same sense that Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Quake, Unreal are all 'the same old thing' as Wolfenstein, but not beyond that.

The combat in Age of Conan is a big improvement on the old standard. It plays much faster and is much more interactive, having 90% of the combat based around area of effect abilities and spells makes for a much different gameplay style, as does removing autoattack and putting in place combos. I found that the combination of having combos using different directional attacks and the shielding system made for a much more interactive system of combat than many games already on the market. You actually have to make decisions based on your oponents shielding when considering what attacks to use, not simply 'apply your rotation'. Ontop of this, the fact that you have to perfom combos to use many of your abilities means that you have to actually think ahead in many cases, since if I press crush armour, I'm still two key presses away from actually crushing armour it basically just means you have to think more and press more buttons in order to achieve in the combat.



Quests are something which age of conan didn't really change up a whole lot from what was there previously. They're still very much the old quests you've seen before, though I found that many of the quests had a good level of depth which made them interesting from a storyline point of view. Aside from the use of words like "Whore" and "Wench", references to rape and other vulgarities the quests are much what we've seen before. That said, I did enjoy questing in this game, and I found that they always gave you a great handful of quests to go out and complete in an area so that you could return to a mass hand in and regularly experience the joy of going to town and getting halfway through your next level. I didn't think that many of the quests in the game were particularly tedious and were generally just good fun to do.

As an avid PvPer I was disapointed by Age of Conan's WoWesque PvP. It was nice to see free for all PvP and not have the development team dictate to me who I can and cannot kill, but there was no death penalty and no player looting, so you've no chance of getting the adrenaline dumps of older games coming back to you here. Despite the lack of player looting I still felt rewarded when I got a kill, afterall, what could be more rewarding than chasing someone across the river then chopping their head off, impaling them on your spear, or seeing them run around screaming trying to douse the demonic flames that are ending their being. Spawn camping did seem to be a bit of an issue, but I hear tell of a fix in retail, though as far as I'm concerned it won't be too big of a problem.



What disapointed me the most about the PvP was the inclusion of instanced PvP minigames. I can understand that many people may enjoy these, but I honestly think they're the worst thing ever to happen to the MMORPG genre, and I'd like to see an Age of Conan style fatality on whoever came up with the abomination of an idea. This is especially disgraceful to see in place in such a game as Age of Conan, with it's FFA PvP and mature content it boasted bountiless potential for a good diplomatic MMORPG with KoS lists, guild rivalry and skirmishes to boot. Mini games take away from this because many of the population will be tied up playing these for their 'fix' of PvP instead of being out in the world experiencing the real deal, ontop of this they give it a light feel, just something you can go do for a bit of fun, rather than being something that determines the way you act towards other players in the game. I can't see any serious diplomacy taking place with these minigames in existance on the FFA servers, especially since you're rewarded with your silly little "Look I got an frag" points. If I wanted to play quake I'd be playing quake, plain and simple.



I didn't have much chance to explore much of the world in age of conan, but the zoning made it feel, to me, smaller than I believe it really is. The zones themselves were of ample size and I really did like the ones I saw, especially conall's valley, where I leveled my bear shaman from 19-30. When I looked at the map the world seemed truly gigantic, but I'm not sure how much of it is actually play zone, I was given the impression that not much was. The world itself seemed very attractive to me aswell as being quite immersive. The characters really fit in well with the world as did the NPCs, they seemed in harmony, unlike you see in many games. The characters faces, the armour, the weapons, the rivers, the sky; They all looked the part.

Graphically the game was great, I use a 8800GT with 512meg video RAM and graphically the game was just plain attractive, everything looked so good, and I never looked at something and thought "Well that's a slack job". The game ran damned smooth on reasonably high settings with my card and I honestly could not have asked for this game to be more attractive.

I found that the user interface was workable, I wouldn't go shouting about it, it was fairly familiar and easy to use, but simply not customisable enough. I wanted to remap Shift + number keys to control a tertiary hotbar but this didn't seem to be a possibility. The UI certainly wasn't bad. I found it easy to tell what was going on with my HP, my group's HP and my opponents HP all clearly visible but there is a lot of room for improvement in this area.

Classes in age of conan all seemed very interesting to me, with the single exception of the Assassin (pet hate). Though most classes were pretty generic, the game covered many of the old favorites, with the notable exception of bard style classes. Although the basic class idea, with the exception of Herald of Xotli is very traditional there are some notable differences. There is no wizard/mage in conan, with Demonologist being the closest to the roll, the demonologist does in many ways function like a wizard/mage but it has a dark, conanesque twist to it which makes it really quite interesting. Multiple pets for necromancers is a welcome comeback, I know I for one missed seeing hoards of little zombies charging around the battlefield. Despite the fairly standard classes of this game there really should be something for everyone, even bard lovers get a kind of a look in with the buff wielding conqueror (though really it's not much like a bard aside from having many buffs), but other than the die hard bard players I think everyone is pretty well catered to here.

Class Balance is something I daren't say much on, having only played the game to level 30 (twice) but from what I saw every class was pretty well balanced at this level. No one seemed weak to me and no one seemed overly strong. I did find certain classes took a while to come into their own, for example bear shaman was quite gimp pre 20, but after 25 this was no longer a problem at all. I heard tell that the soldier classes felt weak before getting heavier armour types, but they have heavy armour by level 30 and at that stage seemed pretty damned tough to me. It looked to me like the most gimp class was Dark Templar, I never had much trouble dealing with these, but then, they weren't exactly worthless either, especially when I saw them in PvE.