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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

... And Other Unfinished Parts

There is also a mile-long list of bugs and broken bits about Age of Conan. While the first 20 levels in Tortage are fairly polished, even there you'll notice the incredible disappearing character bug. Allow me to demonstrate with a video;

It appears that the engine randomly skips drawing of characters. They are there, you can actually collide with them as you can see in the video, but they are not drawn. With NPCs this is mostly cosmetic, but when player characters blink in and out of your view randomly while try to group with them, it gets very annoying. The map doesn't exactly help as it's useless when trying to locate where your group members just vanished to.

But the single issue finally killed all interest in Age of Conan for me personally was the pile of problems with itemization and item bonuses. Bosses that drop no loot, loot that is worse than a quest reward from 15 levels ago, item bonuses that make no sense, item bonuses that do not visibly change anything, stats that don't actually do anything... Right now you can pump up your strength (for melee characters), intelligence or wisdom (for casters) or dexterity (for ranged weapon users) all you want, and it doesn't change your damage output one bit. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Fortunately this is something that Funcom has to fix, but it sure makes you wonder how that came into being... Big part of MMO character development is the constant drive for gear upgrades - you do quests and kill bosses in dungeons to get items that boost your abilities and allow you to slay bigger baddies, only so you can liberate even better items. When most of item bonuses and stats do not actually improve your character and his abilities at all, the whole point of character advancement kinda goes out of the window.

There are other issues with basic game mechanics as well. As an example, at early levels your stamina pool lets you sprint for about five seconds. Then you wait for a few seconds and your stamina has filled back up and you are set for another small speed boost. The duration you can sprint is always the same as each "tick" of sprinting uses up 12% of your stamina pool. But... as stamina pool regeneration is not percentage-based, the higher you level up the longer it takes for your pool to fill back up, and less you can sprint over time. One more trophy for Age of Conan; in addition to abilities and stats that do nothing, we have abilities that get worse as your character gains experience and levels. Or how about the silly fact that Age of Conan's weapon swing time depends on the duration of the visual swing animation, and female characters swing their weapons about 25% slower than males - so every female melee character does 25% less damage over time!

As it stands today, due to itemization issues and stat bugs, every Age of Conan character of one class is a clone of each other as far as the abilities and damage output in combat goes. As items do almost nothing, only differences come from feats - and with half of those either poorly documented or just not working, that ain't much. Same goes for the visual look - as there is little variation in armors, if you blank out the faces, it even looks like Age of Clones. There are supposed to be "1500 different types of armor" in the game according to the hype material, but I'm not seeing even a fraction of that. Granted, what's there is visually very detailed and if you ignore the ever-present clipping bugs that try to beat the already dead horse of "immersion", they are visually the most impressive pieces of gear in a MMO so far. There just isn't enough variety.

The Positive Side

After dishing out pages and pages of criticism on the unfinished state of Age of Conan, it would be unfair to skip mentioning the bits that work. The servers have been very stable and it's not a huge stretch to call Age of Conan's launch the most stable start for any major MMO so far (sharing that accolade together with Lord of the Rings Online). If you discount some rare zone-crashing bugs, the servers have stayed up from day 1 without issues. Early patches have brought constant planned server downtime, but most of it has been unavoidable - you just can't wait for a weekly scheduled downtime when there is a major exploit being abused. Reaction time to eliminate game-breaking exploits has been pretty good, and The Banstick has been applied to the miscreants who have gone too far exploiting the unfinished state of the game for personal gain.

Like the game servers, forums have also worked fine and happily Funcom has reversed their earlier stance and opened them for anyone to read. Being official MMO forums, the discussion quality isn't very impressive, but at least you can get a good grasp on what people passionately like and dislike about the game.

Questing, while somewhat repetitive, is made so much easier by the integrated quest "radar" that shows the objectives of your quests clearly on the map - so clearly,in fact, that it's much easier to find the objective of your quest than your group mate. Initially I disliked how it made questing a bit too easy, but I've grown to accept it as a time-saver. Some purists might complain that it takes away the challenge of figuring out the quests on your own, but the vast majority of MMO players tend to just go for instructions and coordinates taken from the spoiler sites anyway. Age of Conan's approach saves a you the trouble of Alt-Tabbing to a browser.

The UI, while in serious need of additional features and polish, has also successfully nabbed many important features from the contemporary competition. It may not be perfect, but you can play without the urge to smash any fragile objects in your general vicinity.

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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