Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

"Age of... well..."

Having quit WoW, I picked up the new MMO Age of Conan last week. I decided to get a little way into AoC before I shared my thoughts about it. As of posting, I am a level 21 Cimmerian Defender fresh out of the starting city on the server Bane. Ive also spent a little bit of time as a Herald of Xotli.

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~~AUDIO & VISUAL~~:
First off, this game is beautiful. My computer is about to burst into flame, but I cant deny that AoC looks good. Damn good. This isnt necessarily a good thing though, some of us do like to play games where our computers get over 20 fps.

The audios of this game are very well done as well. Waterfalls crackle and birds chirp as I wonder around the world. The epic background music is still pretty top notch for mmo music.

A very nice feature in the game is the voice overs for what I have encountered of the games populous. Everything from the impish and underfed slaves to drunkards on the pier yammers on. The big bad blacksmith growls at me as he tells me to go fetch him some bricks and the town whore seductively tells me a story about how she killed one of her customers.



~~GAMEPLAY~~:
Game play is the meat and potatoes of any game.

Questing in AoC is like questing in any other game. Joe Smoe needs some thieves killed or Jill Bill needs her necklace back that she lost. You kill Joes thieves and get Jills necklace and collect your dues, and move on. With the exception of the Night Time mode quests, which I will get into later, most of the quests were fairly bland, although plentiful. I have to note that despite my initial thoughts, the quest log and quest tracker in AoC is quite good. On my mini map at any given time I can see the direction to head in grey arrows for all of my quests, but the quest I am currently tracking is a different color, so if I walk right past Billys lost ammo pouch then I can pick it up on the way to kill the pirates that destroyed Toms house. The majority of the questing has you running around instanced areas where, depending on your server type, gankers run wild and allies are few and far between.

Ill move on to one of my favorite hooks in AoC thus far, Night time quests. These quests are only accessible in a game mode referred to as Night time, which is more or less a single player instanced world where everyone else is, presumably, sleeping. Here you continue on a quest line that immerses you in the storyline and does things that you wouldnt be able to do in the normal mmo-world. For instance, the final night time quest has you battling with the townsmen to rebel against the citys oppressors the Red Hand. You run out of the Inn and see rebels battling pirates and houses burning to the ground. The down side to this is that it is only available in the first part of the game, to my knowledge at least.

As for the leveling curve, thus far it seems that AoC is a fairly quick paced game. Ive went from level 1-21 without an exhaustive amount of play time and there is always a lot of quests to keep me busy and away from just grinding mobs to level.

One of the biggest parts of an mmo is grouping up with some buddies and running a dungeon or something to that degree. Being 20 levels into the game I feel like I should have experienced that already. But no quests or proper guidance to these Epic versions of normal questing locations is in the game. They are things that as casually mentioned that no one takes a part of.

The new fangled combat system was one of the things that drew me into AoC. Its very much more involved than other mmos and takes a bit of time and skill to get the hang of. The combat system is made up of 3 (and later 5) points that you can attack from and block from; upper left, middle, upper right. At any time your opponent could guard heavy on his left side, at which time you would promptly start to bash his head in from the middle or right unguarded part. It sounds a bit complicated but it actually makes the grinding and killing fun, makes most fights different from the last and is quite refreshing. The melee skills rely on a combo system. I would hit 4 which is Enraging Strike II and somewhere near the middle of my screen a box with an arrow facing the upper left appears below an icon for the move I just used. I hit the upper left attack and my move goes through and does its damage and effect. Later on the combos become strings of two and three attacks which require a bit more concentration and attention than normal button mashing. Having not played a spell caster as much as a melee, I still notice that the spells lack the fun of the combo system and are simply just click and cast, which is a bit disappointing.

~~User Interface~~:

Over all the UI is disappointing and isnt very customizable. Im often stuck with having way more abilities then I have visible action bars. I can hot key and stuff sure, but Then again the game has so many abilities mapped to various buttons that I am afraid to unbind things at leisure. Such a predicament is that self buffs I just received on my Guardian. They are 24 hour buffs that I would change every now and then depending on the situation. I would like to have some sort of small bar I could put them on, but no, I filled up my other bars with key binds and skills I use every fight. So I am forced to hide them away on a different action bar or just click from my spell book. Being only 1/4th the way to the level 80 cap, I assume this probly makes itself more and more prominent as I would gain more skills.

The chat system is clunky and a pain in the ass. I can resize it and choose between a whooping 3 chat font sizes. Wahoo. What I cant do is change the color of my text, thus I am forced to look a purple color for guild chat that I cant read without an amount of effort Im not comfortable with giving to read someone go LOL I LVLD UP. The chat short cuts are often plagued by bad design choices. For instance, If I have a tab for guild, group, and OOC ( think General chat from WoW ) I have to set one as default and I cant just switch between the three at leisure. Every time I hit enter I have to look at what I picked my useless default window. All of this may seem nitpicky, but Its an mmo, communication is important and shouldnt be like pulling teeth.

The games ui has I built in Tutorial section, that quite frankly is about as useful as the chat system. I read over it as I leveled and still didnt properly know how to perform the simple combo attacks or how certain features like apprenticeship work. The game could do much, much better on explaining how it works to new players, especially since it boasts a new and improved combat system and several innovative new features. The game also includes a player search feature, which isnt very user friendly either.

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In closing, Ill say that playing Age of Conan is like playing baseball in the woods beside the baseball field. I can see what looks like a good place to play a fun game of baseball at, but because of a frustrating UI, a severe lack of informative and useful tutorials, and an overall lost feeling I cant get over there so Im left hitting my ball deeper and deeper into the woods and becoming more and unhappy. Unless very soon patches address some of these issues I wont be renewing when my time is up. Sure, I want to see the features like Guild PVP, Siege combat, Mounted combat, player and guild cities and housing, but I dont want to get there gritting my teeth at all the over obvious flaws in this game.

End Score 8/10 but quickly falling.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/08

Game Release: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (US, 05/20/08)