Age of Conan

I posted my impressions of the game last week as I was in the low 20s.  At that time I was very positive about the game strongly recommending it.

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/180634 

No I'm lvl 43 and have a totally different feeling about the game, at this point I'm telling my friends to NOT bother and either wait or forget the game completely.

Issues

Bugs - I'm running into lots of bugs.  Quests that are broken, events in dungeons that don't work, abilities that do nothing, etc.

Higher lvl zones with problems, crashing, or not being completable due to the need for climbing skills. 

Itemization that is truely pathetic.  We were promissed like 1500 armor sets?  At 43 I'm seeing like 2 melee cloth sets and those were available in the first 20 levels.  In fact there was more variety in equipment in the first 20 levels then there are in the next 40 cause some of the unique items in the first 20 are not worth using as you level up and there aren't even any higher lvl versions of them.

Mob AI is totally broken.  Some mobs will just stand there and not even fight back.  Sometimes you can fight one mob right next to another and the second one doesn't agro.  Sometimes I can run up close to one mob and one like 5x the distance away will agro.  Spell casters can cast though walls.  Sometimes when you die mobs maintain agro and appear on top of you attacking and kill you a second time for fun.

Death is a joke.  The fastest way to travel is dying.  Anytime you want to go somewhere fast in an outdoor instance the only challenge is finding a nearby good way to die fast.  Ha in the sanctum it was even a strategy with my group since you need to do the end of the dungeon and then go back to the start to get a quest to come back to the end and kill an idol.  The strat was to leave some mobs near the final boss alive so we could die and go back to the start teleport then die again to get to the second teleport that is near the end.  Admititly it save a ton of running but it just feels so wrong...

Harvesting system is crap.  All harvest nodes are static nodes and everyone is constantly running from node to node.  Resources respawn really slow so most nodes are depleted or have one item.  Lvling harvesting the second quest requires a rare harvest which is super rare.  I have over 100 items and have not gotten a rare in any harvet type other then cotton and skinning which both seemed to drop in like 5 harvests.  Everything else nothing for over 100 items.

Crafting is mostly broken and very expensive. 

Instance dungeons have major issues.  Sanctum has a altar you poor water on to summon a boss, and many times it just doesn't work.  The pyramid dungeon boss quest is kinda poor and doesn't work anyway.  The pyramid has like 3 instances in it and it isn't that big at all...  The dungeon is also rather poor quality in terms of artwork worse then what I've been expecting.

Combat system is getting old fast.  Now that I have 5 attacks for combos and most of my skills are taking 3 attacks to execute I'm running into lag problems.  I'll hit an attack which then requires me to hit q13 for example.  If I hit the attack and hit q13 fast the attack will fail.  The keys like maybe queue a couple key strokes.  So the skill, q, 3 will result if I type it fast.  You see it will drop a keystroke in the middle.  So when Im fighting I really need to hit the keys slow and watch the UI.  It is also kinda tedious as the numbers of keys is going up.  I was likeing the combat system as I liked the directional attacking and that strategy but now with the long combos and the lag I'm finding it a pain.  Even worse the fatalities are turning into a problem.  Seems like some of the fatalities are more involved and going a bit longer.  I have one as an assassin where I stab someone, they fall to there knees and I slash their throats.  It is wicked cool.  However while the animation is playing my character can't fight while mobs can.  So while I'm being entertained if I'm fighting several mobs at once I'm quickly dying while that happens.  Even worse the animation changes my facing so after it is done I'm no longer facing the mobs so I have to turn which adds another second or so before I can fire off the next slow combo..

Graphical glitches are also becoming more common...  The maze the water is like a mirror reflecting everything with no water effects.  Very messed up.  In the pyramid there is a boss some wierd spirit thing on his body that definitely isn't working rright.  The princes you save runs off without animating so her arms are up in chains.  The boss gets stuck in a dying animation loop.  One time my character after changing my armor seemed to loose his arm.  character sliding around instead of walking...  I saw one player running around in a sitting state that was kinda funny.  Players and NPCs popping into existance like 5-10 feet away and randomly vanishing.  This even happened in a dungeon where the players in my group could be 15-20 feet away and they would just vanish.

Combat ability freezing bug, this one is really irritating.  I'll be in a fight when suddenly my attacks stop working.  nothing works.  I can't use potions, abilities, or any fighting.  All I can do is run.  To fix the problem I have to relog.  Even emotes don't work when this happens.

party tools.  The summoning feature doesn't work.  The group member arrows and dots on the mini map have a very limited range.  In fact in some cases it can be as small as 20 feet.  The dots on the map are hard to see being dark purple they just don't show up.

Traders/banks/mail being broken

Money stuff is completely nuts.  Bags and horses cost a fortune.  Bags are the worse.  You get like only a few extra slots as well and the description doesn't tell you what you get at all.  2G for a bag that gives a few extra slots??  Horse training is 1G and a horse is like 2G.  At lvl 43 I think I have around 35S and I've really only bought some food and a few healing potions.  So other then these huge price tag items money seems kinda pointless.

Inventory is really limited.  You got the aformentioned bag limits where you can have only one bag and that bag only adds a few slots.  For 50s I think the bag gives you 8 slots.  For 2G I'm guessing you might have 12 slots...  This is not enough I'm always out of space and end up leaving tons of stuff to just rot..

Gonna mention death once more in the context of doing instances.  This is also a joke cause you just die die die and really there isn't any reason not to.  Take the toughest instance you cna do where you can kill one mob before the group kills you.  You get great xp for killign these harder mobs and in an instance the run back to the fight it like next to nothing.  So you just chain die and make great xp and get good loot.  That just seems soo wrong to me.  But I've gotten half a lvl at 42 doing this in just one small instance...

There are probably other major issues I'm forgetting to mention but bottom line is this game is in aweful shape and I shutter to thing what it is going to be like in the 50-60-70-80 range....  I'm already hearing that one of the instances I'm going to now is severely broken and causes the game to crash a lot and yet to get from 40-50 it is the only place to go....

good review, you gonna get flamed.

lol this is what i think and when i buy the game in a few weeks this is what im going to do....next time level slowly enjoy the game and other games and your real life, if you level up fast when a game first releases no matter how spooth the launch you will be disipionted....in other words the devs put polish on the first 40 levels because they know that these levels are more important because 80%-90% of players it takes more than 3 months to get past these levels so once the game releases they will have more time to fix these issues..........here are your options

1. make more charcters and level up to 40

2. suck it up

3. come back in 3 months

have fun

P.S.      Aoc is the best mmo ive ever played

Good review man..theres alot of bad reviews...and i know why..

If someone reviews aoc saying good things about it... they have to lie...lol

Understandably, it seems Funcom spent most of their time developing the first level experiences. I say understandably because the first few levels are important to grab players' interest. Blizzard, and almost every other studio, made sure the initial levels were 'fun' and engaging.

However, I think Funcom underestimated the rate of leveling.

Beyond the PvP issues, the rate of leveling is my primary issue with AoC so far. Players are blasting through content only to find that the upper levels aren't fully fleshed-out.

AoC is still a good game overall. I'm not experiencing many bugs, or at least ones that may compel me to log off, and generally speaking I'm enjoying myself. Funcom has a great opportunity to become one of the major studios in the genre, I hope their vision comes to fruition; particularly the PvP parts. : )

Nice review!

Trying to recall what WoW was like after level 30 within the week after it launched. I think the general tone of the post exaggerates the issues...I'm at level 28 myself but I have friends past 40, and while they say there are broken quests and rough edges, they're on the whole, fa rmore positive.

Perhaps you simply burnt yourself out by level so quickly since you grw tired of the core mechanics? I plan to take my time. As the previous poster said, things that are broken will get fixed. After a rough start it seems they're now well on the way to making regular and meaningful improvements.

About the leveling part.

I'm level 48 and i dissagree what you have said, its not that hard from lvl 40-48 as i thought it would have been and i play as a Guardian wich is very slow if you compare to other classes in AoC. Ihavn't been going into a lot of crashes either only the sometime memory leak bugs. I just hang in there and try to do all quests i can have, like earlier today i ran out of quests in Fields of the Dead so i went back to Noble District and did all the quests there, including the arena quests wich almost gave me a whole level (46-47), then i went back to level in the fields. And its a mmorpg game and i really dont think its that hard to level up as in other games such as Vanguard SoH .

Just hang in there and keep questing and doing dungeons. Yes i often try to be a optimistic, VG -.-'

Originally posted by ethion

Itemization that is truely pathetic.  We were promissed like 1500 armor sets? 

if you look at that video it's 1500 pieces. Not sets. Quite frankly I don't know how many that will exactly break down to, but if you say 5 pieces (helmet, gloves, top, bottom, boots) then that is 300 sets.

I don't know at what lvl those sets become more prevalent if they are indeed in the game. Just an fyi.

I am lvl 42 now and find the game more fun than ever but then again I have avoided the field of the dead so far and concentrated on city adventures in Tarantia.

I ran into the bugs in the Pyramid where I managed to kill the 2 mini bosses with the eyes before I got the quest to kill them and they never respawn and that means I cannot complete the quest for killing the main boss. Those kind of bugs are a little irritating but I got 1.5 lvl fighting my way through and had fun along the way until the bugged end.

1500 armor sets, well yes for NPC, on that I agree. Where is the massive costumization of player toons? Ok you do get unique looking armors from random drops from time to time but its impossible to plan a cool look so far.

To harvesting. Get your