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

1. Introduction
2. The Case For Age Of Conan
3. The Case Against Age Of Conan
4. The Case Against Funcom and Eidos
5. Tech Of Conan
6. Summary, Initial Verdict

Age of Conan: First Impressions

Funcom has been cooking up their Massively Multiplayer Online chop-em-up Age of Conan for the past five years. They have plenty of experience as they did pretty much every possible blunder when launching Anarchy Online back in 2001, and while AO turned out to be a fair MMO if you gave it an year to "grow up", it made terrible damage to Funcom's reputation. Unsurprisingly the hardcore MMO junkies have been watching the development of Age of Conan with some reservations. After some wholly unsurprising delays and some worrying noises out of the closed beta, Age of Conan is here - and heads will roll.

Launch Trailer

It's impossible to give a fair review of a huge MMO game within few days of a launch. Some journalists apparently think it's fine to review the game based on first ten levels, some publisher-supplied screenshots and other second-hand material. I personally despise such "reviews", and scores dished out to MMOs very early should be taken with some reservations. The truth is that nobody has really played Age of Conan like it is as a finished game, simply because it wasn't anywhere near finished until last week. Arguably it's still not finished, with plenty of room for polish and bugfixing, but in this case the game was almost unplayable during the beta only 3-4 weeks before launch, and you just can't digest a game like this in a couple of weeks.

So instead of a proper review, I'm going to give you my (lenghty) first impressions based on what I've seen so far. I'm still undecided if the game is good - it has good things going for it, but the list of problems is also a mile long. As you probably don't want to wait for a month while I figure out if the whole game is any good, here is a set of first impressions - both good and bad.

Your honor, the Case for Age of Conan...