Age of Conan

  I have to say, this was a fluid smooth launch.  (Delayed by a few minutes but, meh, best I have ever heard of in any game, anywhere, anyhow)  This launch was beautiful.  Kudos FunCom et al.  

* AoC Game Mechanics *

Graphics - I have a high-end Quad non-overclocked machine with 8Gig RAM, Dual 8800GT Alpha Dogs in SLI, have a Clean Vista64 install, dedicated OS Harddrive, dedicated Gaming Harddrive and have fully updated drviers... so guess what?  No a single glitch, hiccup, lag, slow-down or FPS decrease that could even be seen by the human eye.  Once logged in, I ran the entire day on Max DX10 settings and was basically watching a movie and controlling one of the characters.

Sounds - I was unsure what the Voice 1, Voice 2, Voice 3... options were so I tried a different one on each of five characters... I found that the voice-overs were too soft to hear?  Not sure if I have set something up wrong, but the ambient sounds were very well done.  (Though I had to stop playing the Necromancer because of the squeeling pig noise of her major DOT spell)

The game sounds could be better, they are still the best I have played in an MMORPG though.  When compared to the crappy ping-bloop WoW sounds of some old game like WoW, it really shows how far MMOs have come since then.  I do hope that they improve the sounds anyhow  over the course of the next few years.  There is always room for improvement.

* AoC Chracters *

Major gripe -  Character names.  Come on FunCom, it is the 21ist century, not pre-Y2K, let us have a given and a surname.  What is wrong with you?  I can't believe we are stuck with single word, pet-style names, Fluffy... Bandit... Spot... grrrrr  that was a mistake.

I did enjoyed seeing the character generator that was used in AoC.  The skin tone doesn't seem to match up between the generator and the game itself.  A slight tan might be very dark ingame or lighter than you expected depending on the race.  I also thought that there should be more options for hair color (Heck, I have had more variation than this over the last few years)  And most definately, there needs to be more hair styles and EYE COLOR.

I have not made it off the island yet but each of the five characters I have been trying are beginning to look markedly different in their armor/clothing.  I have not spent much time analyzing the equipmentso I have no way to know good or bad.

* Game Play *

I have tried two casters, one archer, one melee, and one DT (half & half)  There is no way anyone could be in the position to comment on the spells, skills, abilities if they just started playing this afternoon.  They seem interesting (Not as good as Asheron's Call wide range of abilities and spells, but it should have some room for growth over 80 levels)  If people played CB, or OB then they might know enough to comment on the skills, but nobody commenting on these today after a quarter day of playing is worth reading.  You simply can not know yet and if they are complaining about them at this point, then they have another agenda.

(Though I still see the damage that EQ has done to MMOs in the class structure system that is being implimented here.  That is also caused by PvP and the rediculous falasy - beliving that you can ever truely balance characters that have different abilities.  So they need to stop trying and just make great abilities, not balance.)

Starter Area - I did it about six or seven times and kept five of the characters that I ran through.  I wandered all over the areas that were open for travel and had a really pleasent time.  (I am an explorer in these)  I was shocked to see how different the loot could be between different characters.  I had some that had to trash items to make room and others that entered the city with a few slots left in the bag.  It was a good tutorial and a fun starter area that didn't pander.  (Compare this to Tabula Rasa or WoW's trainer areas and you will see the extreeeeemmme difference between the games.)

I don't like instances, but never ran across a load screen that lasted for more than a few seconds.  There are still some missions that were "Pizza Delivery" in style and I wish they would put more effort to disguise those, but while delivering my Pizzas to the warf area, at least I had gorgeous ocean backgrounds rather than flat, 2-dimentional coloring book style from WoW.

All in all it was a very wonderful first day in Hyboria.

Fantastic job FunCom.  Be proud of your skills devs.  You have made THE next leap forward in MMOs.  Everything from this point forward will have a higher bar to leap over.  Many games currently in developement are in trouble.  They will hit the shelves looking, playing and feeling old and outdated like WoW is now.

Anyhow, sans a quick nap during the server patch, I have been up since 4AM for work and now play, so it is time for bed for this tired Priestess of Mitra.

Tomorrow - I shall try teaming

Excellent review, much appreciated. How much fun is combat? IS the system as unique and revolutionary as claimed, or just a gimmick that feels superficial. Also how easy is it to tyoe and fight at the same time? I always loved COH cause it had fun exciting fights, while still allowing you to banter a lot , and I was wodnering if this was similiar?

GAH!!! wish I had the chance to buy early access... stupid retailer!!.. oh well.. thanks for the review.. now I know for sure this really is what I have hoped..

Great Review!

I have already level 5 characters to lvl 12 and now I have to decide which to take to 20 first :p

Hey there, nice review! I pretty much agree on all your points.

This is one Smoooooth launch, I had some issues to begin with (logging in) but after that no technical issues whatsoever.

I have a system similar to yours - no in game issues at all - absolutely loving it! 

Nicely written first impression.  Thanks for not calling it a review.  Wierd how people play a game for 5 levels or 5 hours, then come back here to post a 'review' of a game that will keep folks busy for 100's of hours.

Regarding the naming policy.  Not all cultures have last names per se.  And even though we are living in the 21st century, I don't think Conan is.

Your computer sounds awesome.  I would expect the game to run very well on such a rig.  But the true test of Conan's performance will be on the average mmo gaming rig.  If it runs well on the average gamer's rig, the game will be much more successful. If it only runs well on top end gaming machines, then it will miss a wonderful opportunity to have broad appeal as people will be turning the game away based on shoddy performance.

The combat system is good. At first it will seem like mashing on any unguarded area is the best thing to do. But then you realize if your combo finishes in a unguarded area, then thats the best damage. So at first it is gimmicky, but when you get more combos, and chain them to get the best DPS then its diffrent. I dunno about spellweaving and range though.

Nice impressions.
You'll be hard pushed to find any of RE Howard's Hyborian characters with surnames by the way. I can't recall a single one. I doubt they are allowing it, but Funcom should be letting players use the dash - to create names such as Thoth-Amon, Amon-Ra, Big-Titz etc.

Wait, not Big-Titz obviously.

Nice look at the game, I like things like this and I hate the people that scream hate. So you just stoked my interest even more.

Originally posted by njai

The combat system is good. At first it will seem like mashing on any unguarded area is the best thing to do. But then you realize if your combo finishes in a unguarded area, then thats the best damage. So at first it is gimmicky, but when you get more combos, and chain them to get the best DPS then its diffrent. I dunno about