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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

Dungeons! Raids! Endgame!

You actually hit the endgame far short of level 80 - you see, Funcom kinda ran out of time, and the actual endgame is to be patched in later. The roster of available quests thins out dramatically after level 40, and unless you scourge through every available quest in the lower level zones, before level 50 you get to experience The Grind. Mindless bashing of random monsters to gather enough experience to get to the next level, all done in the vain hope that some new quests might open up - and when they do, you are back on the quest train only for a level or two until it's again time to grind.

The Grind is made worse by the decision to dish out new spells and abilities very rarely. You get Feat points every level, but once you are past the newbie areas, new upgrades to spells and abilities are handed out only once every five levels. You often receive multiple upgrades at once, so I fail to understand why they couldn't be spread over the past five levels - I guess in theory it helps to balance PvE content as the characters stay mostly the same for full five levels, but it's a pain to look ahead for another five levels of monster bashing with no hope of new skills or abilities.

The group-based alternative is to grind the dungeons. They offer slightly harder opponents and a very target-rich environment, but effectively you are doing the same thing. Any bosses you may run across are nothing but slightly glorified trash and they often drop nothing. There are actually two separate types of dungeon zones - while some zones spawn private copies for your group, most are actually "public zones" designed for soloing and instanced the same way outdoor zones are - and that adds one more twist for those who are used to group-based instancing of dungeons as seen in World of Warcraft. Boss camping is back from the dead! I bet you didn't expect that from instance-happy game like Age of Conan. Many players and groups share copies of these zones, and you get to compete with others for the "tag" on a boss - and on PvP servers, kill rights discussions usually get all bloody. Low level dungeons have the added bonus factor of high level players solo farming the bosses for money. This was bad design eight years ago, and it's still bad design.

There is actually only one "private zone" dungeon before the later parts of the game - Sanctum of Burning Souls at around level 38-42 - and while it's definitely an improvement over the other dungeon areas, it's an exception that seems to prove the rule.

Interiors of a Stygian pyramid.

Look, we didn't have time to do a proper ground texture here, so lets just stamp this little bit over and over again...

Most of the dungeons look fairly crude. As an example, the map of Stygia's first dungeon, Black Castle, looks like "My First Dungeon in a MMO", straight from the first week of game development school. Dungeons are also often split into smaller pieces with loading screens breaking the immersion several times along the way. Funcom's excuse is that many of the dungeons in the game are already scheduled for some polishing and re-working Real Soon Now. Whatever happened to this concept of actually having a complete game when you put it in a box and start selling it?

I can't say much about raids that isn't second hand information, but the "word on the street" is that what's in the game is either broken, unitemized or plain unfinished. Raid gameplay is apparently similar to grouping with zerg AOE mashing being the key "tactic" required. Additional "skill" is required as some bosses apparently test your knowledge of the golden rule of raid encounters everywhere, "not to stand in the fracking fire". Overall, I'm told raids are currently just unfinished attempts to copy basic stuff from Everquest, World of Warcraft and other raid-centric games... well, just set your expectations very low for now.

Other Bits - Crafting, UI, Customer Support

I can't say much about crafting as the system is too bugged at the moment to really analyze it much. Material gathering is in slightly better shape - it actually works, but has its own unintended issues. Most materials are gathered from static nodes that are spread throughout the zones. Each node slowly "regains health" and one harvest takes 10% off the "health" of a node. Just one problem; the regeneration rate of the nodes is such that you almost never find a node that would yield more than one harvest. Fixed nodes in high traffic areas also draw gankers in PvP servers - as every passer-by is almost guaranteed to stop and try to harvest the node, what better place to hide for easy kills?

One thing of note about crafting - apparently some high level items you can craft actually require that you have access to a special building only available as part of a player-built city. Solo players need not apply.

The user interface is passable, but lacks in customization department. Biggest issue related to the gameplay is the chronic lack of bag space - the inventory is constantly full, and most of the loot you find does not stack. Quickbar options and other in-game means to modify the UI are very limited, and overall the UI just feels inflexible and clumsy. There is some limited modding support, but it is miles away from the completely programmable user interface of World of Warcraft. Lack of programmability might please those players who consider any kind of a helper addon to be against the "spirit" of playing with absolutely identical tools, including the user interface, but in my opinion it's yet another piece of Age of Conan that is poorly thought out and implemented with the least amount of effort.

As far as the in-game customer support goes, it appears to be caught off-guard by the initial popularity of the game and there are rookie-level problems with the in-game support tools that don't exactly help the issue. Petition response times are often counted in days, and to put it bluntly - if you don't play the game for most of the day, it's a hit and miss if you ever get a reply. Your petition stays in queue regardless of your online status, and if a GM happens to get to your problem at 4AM while you are sleeping, you get a canned reply stating that as you weren't online the GM couldn't help you. Your petition is then closed and you get a suggestion to re-petition the issue - back to the tail end of the queue.

Funcom has apparently never heard of the amazing petition queue technology introduced by Dark Age of Camelot - a queue that is based on the timestamp of the petition and your online status. In DAOC, if you go offline, you drop from the queue only to return to your original place based on the time when you originally filed your complaint.

I also dislike the fact that Funcom offers no phone support for billing and account issues - it's hard to petition if you can't log on, so in some cases your only hope is to fire off an email and pray.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Visuals, PerformancePage 3: Combat, Server TypesPage 4: GameplayPage 5: Gameplay, cont.Page 6: Gameplay ProblemsPage 7: Bugs and Little PraisePage 8: Conclusions, Scoring

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