Age of Conan : Hyborian Adventures (MMO)

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
So, is anyone playing this? Any first hand info?

I was following it early on but haven't seen much recently. It's probably because I'm not looking though - MMORPG.com has an Age of Conan forum that will give you what you need.

[Kinjiru]

Been playing for a few hours a night for the last couple days, got a couple chars up to around level 15 and one up to 8.

Quite enjoying it so far.


The Good: Combat is much more like Guild Wars than Wow. You get three basic attacks (upper left, center, upper right) and all your more powerful attacks (aka Skills as one would think of them) are available via your hotkeys. You press a hotkey once and you swing/cast once. You don't press any more button - you don't swing your weapon anymore.

Fatalaties are in where, once in a while, rather than just killing a foe, your toon does a whole little sequence with some pretty brutal moves. The fatality seems tied to your class and your weapon, and anecdotal evidence also seems to tie them to rough level groupings.

Lots of voice acting, and most of it is actually decent.

Mobs are not brain-dead. They will shift their blocks to counter your attacks. They use their skills in a sensible fashion. Some of them hide.

Mature content. Meaning NPCs talk like actual adults. Oh, and the second NPC you meet is a whore. With pouty lips...

The Okay: All classes start at the same place with the same basic quest line. There are some fairly big differences in how you progress through that storyline (depending on your class), but it is the same area.

Much of that initial storyline is actually in single-player mode. So, you don't get thrust right into the whole big world. You can move in and out of this mode (meaning jump back into the non-instanced world) whenever you wish.

Active blocking is in, but I haven't had much success with it. That might just be me though.

First month is free.


The Bad:
Chat interface is not well-designed. It's not unuseable, but it looks like an after-thought.

(this one comes from some guildies that are much higher level) It's a little tough to solo the cloth-wearing classes. It can be very easy to aggro multiple mobs (some of them hide) and with cloth armor, you have to get lucky with interupts in order to survive.

No free trial. You have to buy the game to get the first month free.


The Unknown: I don't know how much medium and high-level content is in at this point. Of course, it's still the first month of launch.

I haven't done much PVP yet, since it seems kinda silly to get into it when I haven't yet reached level 20...

Overall the launch seems to have gone pretty smoothly. Some bugs, most addressed. Frame-rates are respectable even on the lower end of the acceptable hardware spectrum (I play on a Macbook Pro).

If you want to play an MMO, this seems like a good choice. If you are just looking for a new game and don't care about the MMO-aspect, I would say wait a few months and see how things develop.

[FrostyBoy]

Thanks for the heads-up Kinjiru. I was going to buy it on launch, but I think I'll finish GTA4 first, by the time I have done that, AoC should be a bit more polished than it is now.

[Harovan]

Thanks for the heads up. Glad to hear, that the combat system isn't quite the button mashing orgy as was announced during development.

Is the game playable in third person view? By that I mean, is it practical to stay in 3rd person even during combat?

And how's the morons to mature players ratio of the main audience?

[Kinjiru]

I have only played in 3rd-person view and it's quite workable. I actually think it would be difficult to fight in 1st-person simply because it would be harder to see the blocking indicator's of your opponent if there is more than one.


The moron ratio seems surprisingly low. In this game, even in the US version, the women have breasts with nipples and do not wear bras. Even with this, you don't see too many idiots running around topless. General/OCC chat is always going to be full of inane chatter, but I usually only have Guild chat visible anyway.

[Quillan]

I've been playing since release. The moron count is very low in the game, in my experience, but astronomically high on the forums (big surprise there, right?). Kinjiru has pretty much nailed my experience in his summary, with one exception: the voice acting mostly stops once you get out of the starting area around level 20. Beyond that, only the destiny quests have voice acting.

[FrostyBoy]

Yeah, but understandable, if there were voice-overs for every quest, I can't imagine what the size of the sound library file would be.

[Harovan]

Reminds me of the dwarf in the Thundering Steppes (EQ2), who still offers me (level 80) by voice call his level 20 quests everytime I pass by. "Aaaah, there ye are! Oi need yer help again!" (I can sing it... unfortunately I can't shoot him)

[Asher]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy
Yeah, but understandable, if there were voice-overs for every quest, I can't imagine what the size of the sound library file would be.

The game already takes up nearly 30GB on install.

This isn't a size-constraint, it's a budgetary one.

[FrostyBoy]

I read 26gb, what are the other 4 for?

[Asher]

26GB is post-install. When you start patching **** it inflates pretty quickly.

[FrostyBoy]

Oh right. I just bought it, the collectors edition (thats all they had left available), but pretty happy with it, still installing the bastard.

[DrSpike]

26GB.

[Heraclitus]

I rember when games where 4MB

[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.