Age of Conan

Heres my view on the game at the moment.

Backgorund: I have reached Lv 52 as a Barbarian on a PVE server and Lv 34 ToS no a PvP server. I have been looking foward to this game alot, and played Open Beta and EA.

I will start by saying the games graphics, music and atmosphere is second to none, IMO in any MMO I have played which is nearly all of them. The games spell effects blood splatter are awsome the fatality animations ae excellent and add to the brutality of the game. There are performance issues dodgy animations on some of the mobs, quest bugs ect but I think its unfair to judge it on that just yet as it has just come out. The launch however was flawless.

The game starts in the newbie starter area of Tortage, and is extenisvly story driven and guides you through 20 levels of NPC spoken narative quests and some single player instances called "Destiny Quests" as well as several multiplayer instances you can quest, group and adventure in. This area is where you learn your class, if your on a PvP server after lv 10 your fair game in all the areas except the city, surprisingly there was little or no ganking going on I was attacked once the whole time I was there. I greatly enjoyed the quests and single player part of the experience and looked forward to getting to the mainland.

I arrived in the regoin of Cimerria, a fresh Lv 20. Eiger and ready for Hyboria starting in a small village I got some quests and went out to my first major zone Connal Valley, the first time you view Connal Valley from a good vantage you will be taken away by how good it looks, it looks huge and beautifull and a land full of adventure I levelled there from 20 to 28 ish ran out of quests then thought were now? So i decided to travel to the other nations zones of Aqualonia and Stygia did a few quests ect to get a feel of the world. I quickly began to relise I was running out of quests through most of the time i was leveling there never seemed to be enougth to do. I gradually got into my 50's after about less than a week of play.

Heres my feedback and opinion of what I got from playing these 50 levels, ignoring graphics ect we all know these are great.

Quests - The quests after Lv 20 pass Tortage are awfull and get worse as you get higher level. All the spoken narative is gone. All the quests are the same they either involve killing so many mobs, go here, collect x amount of items from ground/mob thats more or less it. Once you get a quest you are told exactly on the map were it is by a marker there is no exploring or skill involved in finding your quest location. The quests for me got so bad questing involved me finding all quest NPC's, skipping through all the dialouge and just heading out to the X's on the map to get XP. I didnt care about what the quest was about or what it was, because they all got really repetitive. There are more destiny quests at lv 30 and 50, why not 40? these are good like the tortage quests, they have spoken dialogue some cutscenes and are more interesting than the rest of the cookie cutter quests. Also there arnt enough quests in the game there are times where you have done all the quests and have run out, and the next set are the next level, but you have half a level to go, so you must grind that level. This doesnt help because there arnt that many zones but more on that later. All i all the quest system in this game is a big let down one of the reasons I rerolled a toon on a PvP server, the threat of being ganked gave it some edge.

Zones - The game as most of you know is heavily instanced, it feels very instanced too. The zones look amazing as said before though most are deceptively smaller than they look, there are also alot of hidden walls making you travel in a "forced route" there are also very few major zones, what I mean by this is the games Zones consist of 3 city zones the Stygian and Cimmerian citys are small the Aquallonian city is quite large and split into 2 seperate zones. There are major outdoor zones for levelling, and lots of smaller instances like dungeons, caves, sewers, house ect. Unfortunitly there are very few major zones other than 3 zones for each nation that start at 20. once you reach 40 you are forced into one zone then 50 into another single zone to level. So little replay value in the quests and levelling. the smaller zones you only go into if you have a quest for it they also for the most part look rubbish, some of them are just bare rooms with the same monster in them all the way through. All in all there are eight major levelling zones I was really expecting more than that.

Classes - There are 12 classes to choose from and they are all excellent and a big departure from the usual MMO archtype class such as rogue, mage ect. I played most of the classes unfortunitly most classes don't have many ablities and you get them all by lv 40 only getting other abilities through "Feats". The Feat system is similar to WoW as you have three trees to put points into to unlock bonuses and abilities. You get two unique to your class and one for each archtype Rogue,Priest,Soldier,Mage

Combat Mechanics - The combat is excellent, one of the bet I have played in a MMO. You are either a caster or melee. I found melee more interesting because of the combo system, which requires you to copy a set of keystrokes to unlease the move, the keystrokes are a direction combat attack for example key 1 is upper left key 2 upper and key 3 upper right attack. Mobs have a sheild system represented by three markers on the left right and top of there body, the mobs will shift there sheilds around by taking one sheild and adding it to another, for example they can take the left sheild and add it to the right making 2 on the right and none on the left, this makes the mob more vunerable to left attacks but strong against right, so you use your attacks acordingly.

Items/Loot - I found most of the items that mobs dropped to be garbage even more so at higer levels, quest rewards are what you will be wearing most of the time. Some of the armour sets look excellent and so do the weapons, all though there was little variety in armour.

PvP - The PvP aspect of the game is great, fighting takes skill and timing if you double tap in a direction you can dodge, useless in PVE but excellent if used properly in PvP as you can dodge attacks, there are various attacks to use such as knockbacks, stuns, roots, bleeding attacks. The PvP servers are rammed at the moment compared to the PVE servers.

Crafting/Trading/Guild cities - The trading post (auction house) aspect has been disabled at the moment. There are three gathering zones in Conan in these zones there are nodes to gather resources. This invloves you just finding them (They are always in the same place). You can learn all gathering skills, and there are different tiers for each gathering skill mining,skinning ect. Once you find a node you mine it till its empty. The nodes take a while to regenerate and competion for resources is fierce as anyone can mine a node even if your mining it, if your lucky a new instance of the zone opens and you can get loads of stuff. Crafting involves crafting a long list of item sets to get to next tier. Havent seen much of the guildcitys yet, our guild has a spot there are about 4 or 3 city spots on each gathering zone split between instances so you could have a city on spot in Lachesis Plain zone 3 for example.

In all I have mixed feelings about this game the combat, graphics and PvP are excellent however I hated the quests later on, there is very little content, too few zones to quest in. Im going to perservere to 80 just to see the sieges and guild cities, if that ends up being a let down I will quit and hope WAR brings more joy. I never got to try the mini PvP battlegrounds as no ones playing them on my server, also the crafting for me left much to be desired though its early days.

Ps aplogies for the spelling

Excellent summary review and i agree with many of the observations with the exception of the graphics. They are great no doubt but I not EQ2 / Lotro quality for me on highest.

The Tortege experience was immersive and fun but I would have preferred different start experiences for different classes / races such as Lotro as it got a little boring by char 3.

The animations are great, the combat feels refreshing but the quests are very generic.

A good game, a great smooth launch, but there is nothing particularly new here ...yet.

Good review, thanks for being pretty detailed.

can you comment on this?

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/181893

Originally posted by spinach8puff

 At level 48 finding new (solo) quests was nearly non-existent. 

Once you hit level 50 you have to grind the majority of your level in order to hopefully find more quests in those three places I mentioned. I say hopefully because I don't plan to play anymore past 50.

glad to hear that you are sticking with the game it really opens up when you hit 60 and most of the instancing goes away then also.

Good review, thanks for writing it!

Originally posted by Nadia

can you comment on this?

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/181893

Originally posted by spinach8puff

 At level 48 finding new (solo) quests was nearly non-existent. 

Once you hit level 50 you have to grind the majority of your level in order to hopefully find more quests in those three places I mentioned. I say hopefully because I don't plan to play anymore past 50.

 

There are Solo quests 50 onwards, infact they mainly are solo quests, there a very few group quests when you get them they involve usually going in one of the mini-instances. I think they were refering to how hard it is to level when your 50ish, that may depend on your class because when i was level 50 i could take on mobs 8 levels higher than me, thats with a Barbarian they do crazy DPS. If you miss many quests you "fall behind" and have to grind to catch up sometimes to unlock higer level quests for the zone your in.

thank you