Age of Conan : Hyborian Adventures (MMO)

[FrostyBoy]

Quite loving the game so far, the graphics and mood really set the scene well. Quite a few bugs though!

But very happy with it, (only level 7), definitely better than WoW as far as I can see. I'm itching to play it again to see how the game unfolds.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Ha! My first game didn't install at all, and required 16K of RAM to run.

And there are some really ancient people here who can probably beat that.

Not me, at least if graphics is required. Beyond that I remember only some text mode games that were smaller. 16K were the standard modules (and cracked tape versions).

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Ha! My first game didn't install at all, and required 16K of RAM to run.

And there are some really ancient people here who can probably beat that.

All you needed was a shelf to put the damn game on. Took about a second to "install". To run, all you needed was a flat surface but "loading" could take 20 minutes or more, for a war game with a lot of units.

[Wiglaf]

I just had sex and didn't need a shelf.

[DrSpike]

I owned my first system at age 7, so you must have been an early starter.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Ha! My first game didn't install at all, and required 16K of RAM to run.

And there are some really ancient people here who can probably beat that.

/raises hand

Wolfpack for the ZX81 (called the Timex Sinclair ZX81 in the USA) required a whopping 1K of memory and took about five minutes to load from a tape drive.

An inspiring game in which you moved a destroyer to depth charge a submarine... forever.

[FrostyBoy]

The Good:

The fighting is quite fun, I am still getting the hang of the Bow and Arrow (I am a hunter) and defending myself, but overall, the fighting is much nicer than any other MMO I have played, I never feel like I am repeating myself too much.

Graphics are great, some of the places really set the mood nicely and the attention to detail is great. The animations are also fluid and decent.

Voice overs are very believable, various accents, none of them feel fake or sound fake, all good!

Customisation of the character is quite impressive, I don't think you could ever find someone with the same exact look as you.

Quests are better than WoW's, they seem to be more story-like than quests, I mean you have the main quest and the short quests as in all MMO's, but the main quest seems a lot deeper and more interesting than WoW's.

Hiding is a lot of fun; I think only Rogue players can hide, but I am finding it quite useful.


The Bad:

The map is far too small, and the arrows, icons on it are confusing or useless, I hope someone is able to release a mod to improve this, as it is, I barely even use it.

There is no day to night cycle, which is one thing I loved about WoW, instead, night time seems to have become this thing you "travel to" when a quest requires it. Only good thing about night time is that certain places are quite intimidating.

Loading screens, there are LOTS of them, I HATE them, way too many, how am I supposed to feel like I am travelling a long distance if I have to keep passing through gates and doors? I really hope when I get off Tortage, these gates will stop, I am getting sick of it, I feel like I am playing Commander Keen, traveling to a new world, beat the level, then go back to the start and pick another! It's ****! That's NOT an MMO! An MMO should be seamless travelling from one place to another throughout the entire world, otherwise you kill the illusion that the world is a big place.

Not sure if this is good or bad, but leveling is very easy, I hope it gets much much harder as time passes. But I have heard people are already at level 80. What is the point, really? The game is not about the destination.


The Ugly:

Bugs, there are lots of them, and they are noticable everywhere, in all sizes, want to see one? Just jump over something, you will see a glitch or get stuck. Or just go to White Isles and look for a guy gliding across the surface because his animation is not working.
Quite disappointing.


Let's say you run (holding down shift key) to an enemy, then attack, but you are too quick to do so, you press the number 4 key to attack, but you have not let go of the shift key yet, what happens? Your attack controls scroll up to the 4th list of attacks, which happen to be blank, so you end up with no way of attacking and nearly get yourself killed or get frustrated thinking its a bug, coz there is no indication as to why the hell you have no attack buttons, you start thinking it's a bug because the game is riddled with them. Well.. at least that's how I felt.

Lag, it's terrible, when I exit an inn, the textures on the ground and the NPC's hanging around (traders, blacksmiths, etc) are all gone, do I have to RELOAD it from the server!? Holy crap.. I have to stand there waiting for the blacksmith to appear before I can do anything. Is this how WoW did it? I NEVER experienced this problem in WoW, why the hell does AoC have to redownload the textures and NPC's?! (If that is, what it is doing).

Aside all the bugs and bad stuff.. the game still passes, I still want to continue further, in hopes that it will improve when I get off the damned island.

[Quillan]

Actually, reloading is not really what it's doing, at least not from the server. They made the textures incredibly detailed, which is why they broke everything up into zones (which I also dislike). However, to prevent you from sitting at the load screen even longer, they put your character in game with low res textures and let you start moving while the high res textures are extracted from the data files and loaded into video memory. The day/night cycle bit is only for the newbie area; once you get out of Tortage there's an actual clock, on a much slower time rate than is normal for most MMOs. I've heard a rough estimate that 1 minute real time = 5 minutes game time; that seems awfully low to me but it's still slower than the old 45 minutes day/45 minutes night that EQ had.

[FrostyBoy]

Good to hear about the day/night cycle.

Yah, I was just reading the boards at AoC.com and I read about the zones too. I wonder if I lower the graphics setting, I won't get that reloading problem, it's really pissing me off. Currently I have the settings to their max and AA to 2x.

[vee4473]

Gamespot 8.5 (for those who care what they say). They mention the combat as the best yet in any mmo. However they note the large amount of bugs.

It seems that this game may be a good choice once bugs are tweaked out. Or even now, maybe i'll buy it this weekend.

One question for those who play: Does the fun of the combat system wear off after mob #523,000 and become even worse than auto attack? Or does the constant attention needed stay fresh?

Or is AoC less grindy than others?

[FrostyBoy]

While I am still only level 16 (I like to play slowly ) I have found that I am not often killing as much as I had to in WoW. In fact, If I don't feel like killing, I can find alternative ways of getting what I want.

For example, lastnight I had to steal a bone from a camp on White Isles, they were 2-3 levels higher than me and there were a lot of them, plus there was a boss Gorilla hanging around and other stuff, so I decided to jump into the water and swim my way round to the camp (which was close to the shore), when you approach this camp, it gets dark (kinda stupid actually.. oh well), as a rogue I can hide, so I did that and sneaked into the camp, and grabbed a bone, of course, as soon as you do that you will exit Hide mode, so you have to be quick to get the bone, jump back into the water and swim away. But I did it and it was fun, an alternative to killing.

Just exploring the White Isles was also a lot of fun, you get the sense that there is a lot to discover and see; as you peak around a clump of bushes or over a hill, you find a lot of buildings/stuff tucked away from view and it gets very interesting. I really enjoyed it. And to think, I have only just begun the game. The world of AoC seems more fleshed out than WoW, in WoW, things seemed conveniently placed or unaturally located. AoC seems to have more life and realism.

Sure, there are a lot of things about AoC that have got to be fixed, but the positives are outweighing the negatives by a good margin. If you are really worried about the bugs, etc, just give it a few more months before trying. Right now I am playing a slow ass game, but a lot of others have already reached 80, (seriously, what is the point? The only benefit I see to that is that these people can complain what needs to be fixed with any part of the game, while I can only talk about the beginning part). I have been told, after level 50, the game's content begins to drop, like reading a great book at the beginning but the words begin to fade from the pages towards the end. Luckily I am a slow player, by the time I reach level 50, it will have been improved.

[FrostyBoy]

oh btw, vee4473, I have read on the boards that people complained they had to grind around level 50 (coz no quests in their area or something), so you can see, this game doesn't even seem to have grinding at all (or at least until level 50, but I read after level 60 you can stop grinding).

Others have said they have never grinded, and I believe them, this game seems to give off that kind of feeling. I often feel like I am playing a single player RPG or FPS, similar to Half Life or Oblivion. Deep stories, great graphics, no grinding.

I myself have yet to grind.

[DrSpike]

Grind is in the eye of teh grinder.

[Kinjiru]

Talking to some of my guildies (i'm in a really big one), it seems that there is plenty of content all the way through so you should not have to really grind.

What people are running into though, is that they are taking way too many quests before they are "supposed to". What I mean is, they take a bunch of level 40-59 quests when they are still in their 30's. These quests are achievable earlier than the suggested levels (if you don't mind dying more than usual), so people end up skipping quite a lot of late 20's through mid 30's quests. Thus, they end up running out of quests for their actual level range by the time they are into their 50's.

Part of this is a game design issue. It is not at all clear when you talk to an NPC whether or not the quest they are giving is outside of your "range". WoW handled this by having a much tighter level range at which the NPCs will give out quests - if you are not in the right range, the NPC doesn't have the big yellow exclamation. AOC doesn't lock the NPC's down so much.

[Kinjiru]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy

Just exploring the White Isles was also a lot of fun, you get the sense that there is a lot to discover and see; as you peak around a clump of bushes or over a hill, you find a lot of buildings/stuff tucked away from view and it gets very interesting.

Wait until you get to the city of Tarantia. The whole city is just gorgeous and it is really big. I had a fed ex quest to their last night and ended up spending a couple hours just running around the city looking at stuff. Oh and dying some, there seems to be a bit of a low-level civil disturbance going on in the city - not quite sure what is happening as I didn't take any of the quests for the city.