
Agr of Conan Is good but needs work.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
I have been waiting for Age of Conan for a long, long, time. I had hopes it would be the next great MMORPG (which it is and the sales and servers are showing that to be the case). The game looks great but to my dismay Funcom disabled DX10 and announced 2 days before launch that the game wouldn't have DX10 support until the Xbox 360 version comes out later this year. That was a major disappointment for me (and lame of funcom to do right before launch!) since I just spent 2 grand on a super computer to run the game. With the game on DX9 and maxed graphics at 1920x1200 resolution I was only getting 30-40 average frames per second. and I get 19K on 3dmark06! So obviously they need to do a lot of optimizing. The DX9 looks amazing but it's so unoptimized they knew if they released DX10 the only people who could play it on DX10 would be those with extreme edition CPU's and tri/quad SLi or Quad 3870 video cards.
The first 20 levels are strange, at night you are playing single player doing missions and in the day you are at multi player. The night missions ussualy advance the story and since you're in SP mode the world can be dramatically altered for those missions. I thought the first 20 levels were very well done, in fact it's the most thought out, well designed, starting area ever seen in a MMO of this scale. The big problem though was the lack of polish made the transition from day to night and back kind of awkward.
Overall the biggest gripes I had with the game were the terrible UI, performance issues, no DX10, and the world is broken up into instances (think LOTRO) Not just raiding dungeons and area's are instanced but even the map areas are. I feel that that is such a cop out when WOW was able to do it years ago...
The b est part of Conan are undoubtedly the Combat system. What a revolution for the genre! This is going to make this game stand out BIG time. It changes everything. Suddenly skill matters and not just the gear you got when you tagged along with that really awesome guild for a few weeks. The system is an active blocking system, you can see where an enemy (and yourself) is defending and you can change what area you want to defend more so than others on the fly in battle and so can the enemy. It makes for amazing battles.
The City I've seen so far tartia (or something like that) is truely amazing. It looks so cool with huge inclines and wide streets, changes of elevation everywhere. It's sweet.
The missions in AOC are pretty neat too. When you go into a new area and start grabing your ussual "collect 10 bear teeth" and "go get me my ring I lost when the monsters attacked" type missions, they tend to layer missions on top of each other so when you are out grinding these missions you tend to complete several at a time before going back to turn in and it creates a sense of getting a lot done.
The best part of AOC will no doubt be the player guild cities and outpost seiges. Players will spend resourses to build thier own cities that will give their guild buffs and allow item purchases and such, and 8 outposts are allowed at any one time and will be attached to player cities, each week guilds will be challeneged and whoever wins gets the right to build/rebuild the outpost. This will give hardcore players something to shoot for.
All in all I think it is a very solid offering and wil no doubt wreak havok on WOW's sales. essp. when DX10 and the 360 ver arrive. Go buy it, trust me evetually you will.
Review ID: 10000000007493069

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