Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Language - Mild,Nudity,Sexual Themes
Publisher: Funcom
Genre(s): MMORPG
Home Page: http://www.ageofconan.com/

Game index

System Requirements

Review

Preview

Screenshots

Downloads

By: Jarno Kokko May 24, 2008

Verdict: Shows Promise

The day/night cycle is very pretty and brings lots of atmosphere, even if the visibility at night is bit poor.

You may think that after listing so many negative bits about Age of Conan, either the game sucks or I hate it. That's not true. While it's too early to dish out the final judgment on Age of Conan just yet, despite all the obvious faults and lack of final polish, it definitely shows promise. I can't recommend it as someone's first MMO - there are far too many rough edges, bugs and balance issues - but for MMO veterans who are desperately seeking for a new fix and don't mind the fact that the game is still work in progress, Age of Conan is already worth a look. The fundamentals are there - the servers have stayed up, the client is (mostly) stable, and you won't run into a show-stopping bug every ten minutes.

In comparison to the competition, I would put it below Lord of the Rings Online at this point, mostly due to lack of polish and balancing. Lord of the Rings Online may have been light on content at launch, and it still suffers from sub-par character animation, but at least what was there was pretty well balanced and playable. Age of Conan feels too rought as far as the balancing goes - in just a few days, several quite spectacular exploits have already been uncovered, mostly due to inadequate testing related to class and ability balancing. A MMO lives and dies by the balance of the content and classes, and a PvP-oriented MMO even more so. Several "OMG, look, silly overpowered feat combo of doom"-style issues have already been uncovered, and the fact that the bug related to redoing your feats ever got to live servers tells volumes about the QA process at Funcom.

I'm willing to give them a break - it's early days - and I sincerely hope Funcom can keep up the rapid pace of fixes they pulled off just prior to the start of Early Acces. We need more good MMOs to challenge the monopoly of Blizzard. Unfortunately I can't say that Age of Conan is going to cause sleepless nights for Activision-Vivendi just yet, but I'm sure they are watching carefully. One should not dismiss Age of Conan - the fundamentals are there, the launch went far better than the pessimist in me predicted (despite the problems). As a good sign, even as my own initial impressions were very negative, the game does grow on you and there is definitely hope... so, a partial "thumbs up", with some reservations.

A full YouGamers review will follow in the coming weeks, once I'm qualified to say something on the long-term appeal and PvP aspects of the game.

Update: The full YouGamers review of Age of Conan is now online. YouGamers has also published a technical article on the performance of the game - Age of Conan - The Quest for Lost Performance.

If you wish to comment on this preview, complain about mistakes or bash me for hating Age of Conan (I don't), then please click here (registration not required)