Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
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ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Intense Violence,Language - Mild,Nudity,Sexual Themes
Publisher: Funcom Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.ageofconan.com/
Fundamentally Broken Bits...While there are numerous "teething issues" with the game that will most likely be fixed if you give Funcom enough time, Age of Conan is also hampered by three fundamental problems that are pretty much unfixable. Disjointed Game WoldThe game world is designed as a set of zones that are not physically connected to each other, and you constantly run into barriers - usually visible, but sometimes invisible - and both types prevent you from exploring the local area any further. Major bits of the scenery are just set pieces - pretty, but just background graphics. Major parts of Old Tarantia look majestic, but are in reality inaccessible, and same thing repeats in the other two starter hub areas - Conarch Village is probably the best of the bunch, but it is surrounded by an impassable wooden stockade, and the only way to venture outside is to use one of the designated zone points. Khemi being a small island is surrounded by water you are not meant to cross - and if you do, you find out that everything beyond the island is just fake.
It's a fundamental design decision, and to me it gives you a feeling of playing in a fenced sandbox. Travel from zone to zone is either through NPCs that offer to give you a ride, or in some cases, through a clickable door or gate that immediately tosses you to another door or gate in another zone miles away. It hampers the immersion and feel of a working world. I'm not absolutely against loading screens and zones, and it's true that no game world can be infinite, but in Age of Conan little effort has been made to masquerade these limitations and transitions. When moving from zone to zone, your character will just teleport from one arbitrary spot in the world to another, dumping immersion somewhere along the way. Misused Instancing And here you can build your very own city - just like every guild can, in their very own copy of the area. Instancing done wrong. Funcom also took the easy route in balancing the spawns and quest content in relation to the amount of players roaming each area. Instead of a single dynamically adjusting game world where you can meet your friends if you just walk to the same spot on the map, every non-city zone in the game is instanced. Depending on the player load, there can be easily 8-9 identical copies of a zone up at any given time, and each of them has so few players that you might mistake Age of Conan as a single player game. When trying to group, fiddling with instances destroys the last remaining illusion of an immersive game world. Yet at the same time Age of Conan dumps the universally accepted fix to avoid boss camping and most dungeons are public instances that get copied just like the outdoor zones - so it's highly likely that the end boss of your dungeon is being camped by a Chinese gold farmer. Same instancing continues in zones set aside for building player cities and keeps. You can pool resources and build up a great city, but most likely only your guild members will actually visit it. It appears that the whole city and keep building business is nothing but popping up buildings in specially constructed areas designed for those "massive" instanced and pre-arranged PvP battles. I'm sure Funcom had great plans going in, but the actual implementation can only be described as weak. Kindergarten Economic SystemFinally, Age of Conan has a fundamentally broken economic system. While you gather up money in the traditional ways - completing quests, looting coins and selling all that looted junk to NPCs, there actually is almost no way to get rid of all that money. Items do not decay, and you do not have to repair anything, you do not pay for skill training, travel is free and in general there are no constant "money sinks" to keep the inflation in check. Sure, that best mount costs 150g, but once you have it, then what? Only simple way to spend money that I can think of is by buying consumables such as health and mana potions. In a way the "economic system" of Age of Conan reminds me of the toy economy of Anarchy Online - that other Funcom game well known for runaway inflation and utterly silly prices for anything remotely rare or valuable in player-to-player trading. You may hate all those small money drains present in most MMOs, but if you play Age of Conan, sooner or later you'll learn what's on the other side as everyone is rich and there is nothing to buy with all that money. While there are plenty of other bugs and minor problems that will get fixed over time, all these fundamental issues drag down the gameplay score as they run so deep that they would require major re-working of the game and it's highly unlikely to ever happen.
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