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Age Of Conan: First Impressions

The Case For Age of Conan

Age of Conan is pretty. At times it's very pretty. The engine and the visuals definitely push the technical boundaries of MMO games, and while the system requirements are high, they are not unrealistic. It doesn't look quite as pretty as some of the "Kodak moment" screenshots would want you to believe. It's not a massive jump from Everquest II or Lord of the Rings Online, but Age of Conan does have the most advanced MMO graphics engine out there today, and once all the rough spots are polished out, if pretty is what you are seeking, look no further.

Some places are just plain pretty.

Shame that it can't be so picturesque everywhere.

Servers have also been remarkably stable. There has been couple of issues with specific zones causing client crashes due to bugs, but for the vast majority of the play area there are no issues - the game actually works from day one. Personally I managed over ten hours of play on the EU launch day while running into just *one* bug that forced me to restart the client, and the servers stayed up without any performance issues.

In a way Funcom pulled off the closest thing to that ever-mythical "launch day patch" with Age of Conan. In MMO circles the "secret patch that comes on launch day and fixes everything" has an unicorn-like mythical status. Everyone wants to believe it will come and save the day, but it never does. Except with Age of Conan it did. People were worried everything would crash and burn just two weeks prior to launch, but during the last week prior to the opening of Early Access, things improved at an amazing rate. Considering the state the game was in just a few weeks prior to launch, this is very impressive - my respect to Funcom for the bug squishing during the last weeks of beta.

Interesting Gameplay

Gameplay, while building heavily on what went before with titles like Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest II and World of Warcraft, is not just pure copy-paste from the tried and true. Many proven solutions are used, but there is some actual innovation as well. The first 20 levels remind me more of a single-player RPG game complete with voiceovers, dialogue options and somewhat involving storyline that partially depends on your class archetype. There are even some cutscenes to liven up the storyline.

The early story is broken to a "day" and "night" mode - at day you are playing a normal MMO and can adventure with your friends. At night you are playing alone in a separate instance version of the starting area. You switch between the two by visiting the inn. The concept works and is a nice way to re-use existing area for more content. This feature appears to be limited to the early bits of the storyline and beyond the newbie zone, day/night cycle becomes normal. Days and nights go by fairly fast, and the visuals support the day/night cycle very well.

Combat system tries hard to innovate, and I like the idea of melee attacks that affect multiple targets based on positioning. Yet it's not so groundbreaking as Funcom might want you to believe. Sure, there are no autoattacks, and you can swing the enemy from multiple angles, trying to avoid his defenses. There are also multi-button combos where you first hit a special attack, and then to complete it you must swing from the right angle to execute the move, but it's not that revolutionary and constant button mashing feels repetitive pretty quickly.

Yes, there is plenty of blood and gore.

If you finish off your opponent with a combo, you might be rewarded with gory animation and a nice Fatality buff.

Far more interesting is the whole idea of actually trying to make a MMO with proper collision detection. That's right - in Age of Conan you just can't run through monsters or players. It remains to be seen how that works out in practice when in larger fights and raids, but it's a welcome addition that helps with immersion - even when soloing. Spellcasting is more traditional, but there are some quirks - again, spells can often hit multiple targets, and there are numerous cone-based effects that demand careful placing during the fight.

The available character classes and their feat trees appear to be varied and interesting, and in this regard AoC doesn't have to dish out any excuses when compared to the competition. Sure, some abilities and feats (AoC's talents) seem familiar to veterans of the MMO genre, but that's to be expected. Interestingly the healing classes of Age of Conan have plenty of offensive capability as well. In a way this is a logical extension of the current trend. Back in Dark Age of Camelot healers were healers, and could not do damage no matter how the character was built. In World of Warcraft all healing classes have a damage-dealing talent build available to them, and the recent modification to item bonuses helped healing classes to lay down some damage even in healing builds. Age of Conan goes one step further by ensuring that every class in the game can do it's fair share of damage and healing is considered to be a "support" ability even to the priest classes.

Overall, playability is mostly fine - there is some warping and rubberbanding, and characters have a tendency to go sliding around from time to time, but the problems are thankfully minor. Most of the time things move around as you'd expect them to, and while animations are not quite as smooth as I'd like, things look far better than with the immersion-breaking animations seen in Lord of the Rings Online. Blizzard still rules supreme in this regard, but Age of Conan isn't too far off.

I rest my case. Age of Conan appears to be a good MMO. Ah, but not so fast... Your honor, the case against Age of Conan.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: The Case For Age Of ConanPage 3: The Case Against Age Of ConanPage 4: The Case Against Funcom and EidosPage 5: Tech Of ConanPage 6: Summary, Initial Verdict

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