Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

"Fun for first 40ish levels, then boring grind afterwards"

Age of Conan is Funcom's second MMORPG but the launch was rocky and they didn't have it together, delaying the opening of the servers the first day multiple times and extending downtimes. They also put downtimes during prime-times angering many players but then changed it. I played from the launch and all the way up to level 51 and decided to write this review so this is from a level 50's perspective.

Gameplay: Age of Conan has a real-time/combo fighting system instead of the traditional MMO auto-attack and use special abilities in one button press. You have 3 directions you can attack with at first, upper left/right and forward. NPC's will shield a certain area requiring you to attack an un-shielded area for more damage and players can do the same but it only shows an NPC's shields. To do a combo attack you need to hit the combo button (which does a hit for you) then hit the buttons that pop up. Combo's do more damage and have special effects like your traditional poisoning hit or hate grabbing attack.

Of course if you think it through (and experienced it like I have) rangers and mages have a distinct advantage that they don't have to be constantly mashing near you to do damage. (Rangers still have to do combo's but they can pretty much slow/trap all melee and kill them) And if you move during a combo it cancels it.

Levels 1-40 are chock full of quests to run around with. These quests are your traditional MMO quests, kill this, get this, or explore here. But you also have a story quest which has all text voice acted for you. Around level 40 you start to run dry of quests and will need to grind in between levels to unlock new quests as you level. The story quest is also non-continuous, you will need to reach certain levels before continuing on with it, usually ten level increments. This is not WoW quest grinding we're talking about. I'm saying you actually have to kill monsters repeatedly until you level, no quests to do except repeatable kill X quests which give you about 4 monster's worth of exp. No red quests to do, you'll have done them all because they were so easy.

Story: The story is based off of Robert E. Howard's books on Conan the Barbarian and it's pretty much shown through the areas and the zones. Not much to say here, it's an MMO the focus is on you!

Graphics/Sound: This game is a high end computer game, and thus has really nice graphics and sound. But it's a double-edged sword, and not in the good way. Unless you have a decent graphics card (Not an integrated) with shader version 2.0 you won't be able to play this game. I bought a new computer and it still lags terribly in cities and sometimes in combat. I'm assuming graphics are the reason it is instantized, IE it's like Guild Wars where there are districts or in Korean MMO's where there are Channels. A lot of players fighting at once slows down the game.

I had to play the game on low with no water reflection, no shadows and no grass. I play on a new computer that cost around $400 from Dell with a Radeon HD 2400, 2gb ram with 4 gb extra virtual memory set, and a dual core Intel processor. If you're not somewhat knowledgeable about computers that's good enough to run every other MMO in existence above decently and it's much faster than my older computer which I used to play other online games too without lag.

Playtime/Replayablity: Not much out yet, but it took me 3 days and 4 hours in game time to get to level 51, and there are 80 levels (There are already level 80 players running around as of writing this). So far, not many people looking for PvP Matches such as Capture the flag or team death match. Only 40 people in total for the Tyranny server (the first listed PvP server). There are Guild Towns you can create and Battle Keeps to be fought over which could keep you entertained, this is a MMO after all. The replayability and playtime really varies with the kind of gamer you are. It's not over when you kill the final boss because there's always patches/ PvP.

Community: I play on a PvP server, alooot of people randomly killing you, jerks on General (OOC) chat and on the forums it's even more trolled and full of complaining posts and people flaming each other. I only met a few nice people, so I deem this community bad. It's especially worse since you can speak the same language as the people you PvP (in game language that is).

Final Recommendation: I would not buy this if you have a bad PC or even an average PC that doesn't meet the system specs minimum. A lot of bugged things in game and grinding post level 40-50 so I would wait to see if it speeds up and things are fixed. Ah also, Funcom does a lot of stealth fixes/nerfs and the PvP isn't even balanced yet so Rangers/Mages pretty much rule over Melee and Healers are needed (and can actually kill you because they heal almost 3/4 their own hp and still put out good damage) I personally canceled my subscription before the free 30 days (plus 10 days because I got into the early access) were up.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/30/08

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