Age of Conan

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

Funcom has been cooking up their Massively Multiplayer Online chop-em-up Age of Conan for the past five years. They have plenty of experience as they did pretty much every possible blunder when launching Anarchy Online back in 2001, and while AO turned out to be a fair MMO if you gave it an year to "grow up", it made terrible damage to Funcom's reputation. Unsurprisingly the hardcore MMO junkies have been watching the development of Age of Conan with some reservations. After some wholly unsurprising delays and some worrying noises out of the closed beta, Age of Conan is here - and heads will roll.

Launch Trailer

It's impossible to give a fair review of a huge MMO game within few days of a launch. Some journalists apparently think it's fine to review the game based on first ten levels, some publisher-supplied screenshots and other second-hand material. I personally despise such "reviews", and scores dished out to MMOs very early should be taken with some reservations. The truth is that nobody has really played Age of Conan like it is as a finished game, simply because it wasn't anywhere near finished until last week. Arguably it's still not finished, with plenty of room for polish and bugfixing, but in this case the game was almost unplayable during the beta only 3-4 weeks before launch, and you just can't digest a game like this in a couple of weeks.

So instead of a proper review, I'm going to give you my (lenghty) first impressions based on what I've seen so far. I'm still undecided if the game is good - it has good things going for it, but the list of problems is also a mile long. As you probably don't want to wait for a month while I figure out if the whole game is any good, here is a set of first impressions - both good and bad.

Your honor, the Case for Age of Conan...

The Case For Age of Conan

Age of Conan is pretty. At times it's very pretty. The engine and the visuals definitely push the technical boundaries of MMO games, and while the system requirements are high, they are not unrealistic. It doesn't look quite as pretty as some of the "Kodak moment" screenshots would want you to believe. It's not a massive jump from Everquest II or Lord of the Rings Online, but Age of Conan does have the most advanced MMO graphics engine out there today, and once all the rough spots are polished out, if pretty is what you are seeking, look no further.

Some places are just plain pretty.

Shame that it can't be so picturesque everywhere.

Servers have also been remarkably stable. There has been couple of issues with specific zones causing client crashes due to bugs, but for the vast majority of the play area there are no issues - the game actually works from day one. Personally I managed over ten hours of play on the EU launch day while running into just *one* bug that forced me to restart the client, and the servers stayed up without any performance issues.

In a way Funcom pulled off the closest thing to that ever-mythical "launch day patch" with Age of Conan. In MMO circles the "secret patch that comes on launch day and fixes everything" has an unicorn-like mythical status. Everyone wants to believe it will come and save the day, but it never does. Except with Age of Conan it did. People were worried everything would crash and burn just two weeks prior to launch, but during the last week prior to the opening of Early Access, things improved at an amazing rate. Considering the state the game was in just a few weeks prior to launch, this is very impressive - my respect to Funcom for the bug squishing during the last weeks of beta.

Interesting Gameplay

Gameplay, while building heavily on what went before with titles like Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest II and World of Warcraft, is not just pure copy-paste from the tried and true. Many proven solutions are used, but there is some actual innovation as well. The first 20 levels remind me more of a single-player RPG game complete with voiceovers, dialogue options and somewhat involving storyline that partially depends on your class archetype. There are even some cutscenes to liven up the storyline.

Gasp, cutscenes, in a MMO!

The early story is broken to a "day" and "night" mode - at day you are playing a normal MMO and can adventure with your friends. At night you are playing alone in a separate instance version of the starting area. You switch between the two by visiting the inn. The concept works and is a nice way to re-use existing area for more content. This feature appears to be limited to the early bits of the storyline and beyond the newbie zone, day/night cycle becomes normal. Days and nights go by fairly fast, and the visuals support the day/night cycle very well.

Combat system tries hard to innovate, and I like the idea of melee attacks that affect multiple targets based on positioning. Yet it's not so groundbreaking as Funcom might want you to believe. Sure, there are no autoattacks, and you can swing the enemy from multiple angles, trying to avoid his defenses. There are also multi-button combos where you first hit a special attack, and then to complete it you must swing from the right angle to execute the move, but it's not that revolutionary and constant button mashing feels repetitive pretty quickly.

Yes, there is plenty of blood and gore.

If you finish off your opponent with a combo, you might be rewarded with gory animation and a nice Fatality buff.

Far more interesting is the whole idea of actually trying to make a MMO with proper collision detection. That's right - in Age of Conan you just can't run through monsters or players. It remains to be seen how that works out in practice when in larger fights and raids, but it's a welcome addition that helps with immersion - even when soloing. Spellcasting is more traditional, but there are some quirks - again, spells can often hit multiple targets, and there are numerous cone-based effects that demand careful placing during the fight.

Tempest of Set (a priest class) dishes out some pain.

The available character classes and their feat trees appear to be varied and interesting, and in this regard AoC doesn't have to dish out any excuses when compared to the competition. Sure, some abilities and feats (AoC's talents) seem familiar to veterans of the MMO genre, but that's to be expected. Interestingly the healing classes of Age of Conan have plenty of offensive capability as well. In a way this is a logical extension of the current trend. Back in Dark Age of Camelot healers were healers, and could not do damage no matter how the character was built. In World of Warcraft all healing classes have a damage-dealing talent build available to them, and the recent modification to item bonuses helped healing classes to lay down some damage even in healing builds. Age of Conan goes one step further by ensuring that every class in the game can do it's fair share of damage and healing is considered to be a "support" ability even to the priest classes.

Overall, playability is mostly fine - there is some warping and rubberbanding, and characters have a tendency to go sliding around from time to time, but the problems are thankfully minor. Most of the time things move around as you'd expect them to, and while animations are not quite as smooth as I'd like, things look far better than with the immersion-breaking animations seen in Lord of the Rings Online. Blizzard still rules supreme in this regard, but Age of Conan isn't too far off.

I rest my case. Age of Conan appears to be a good MMO. Ah, but not so fast... Your honor, the case against Age of Conan.

The Case Against Age of Conan

Climb points are back from DAOC. Hurray for vertical travel!

While Age of Conan is, at times, very beautiful, it's also maddeningly inconsistent. The visuals are best described by a single word - "uneven". There are places where you can take postcard-quality snaps, and there are places where you see something that looks like it was lifted out of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and then made uglier. Some of the issues are just lack of final polish. Occasional bugged animation, individual unpolished models and terrain features, specific illogical map design choices or unpolished visual effects. The visual problems don't matter that much, but they betray the rush to launch and reflect poorly on the otherwise pretty game.

But that's just eye candy. Far more fundamental issue is the design decision to go instance-happy. Age of Conan is heavily instanced and zoned. If you found EverQuest II or City of Heroes zoning systems annoying, Age of Conan will annoy you as well. At times it feels like a single player game. I can understand the pros of instancing - no need to dynamically adjust spawns to match the players in the area, and no risk of massive overcrowding in the adventuring areas. Just have static spawns and instance new copies of the adventure zone as the player count goes up. Sadly it harms the "massive" feeling of the game. Same goes for constant, if short, loading screens - heck, when you are resurrected, even by your group member, you get a loading screen before you are on your feet.

It's nice that the UI tells me these things - it's not that I would like to see where I'm going...

You can switch instances manually from a small icon at the minimap. Funnily the list doesn't show which instance you are in - it's the one that is missing from the list.

There are also issues related to zones and grouping - it can be hard to find your friends as the game tries to hide the whole instancing aspect of the zones. In practice, you have to group up in a "hub" zone (city or village) and then venture out as a group from there to avoid issues. Poor grouping UI doesn't exactly help either. In fact, the whole UI needs some serious work - it's clumsy, unintuitive and lacks configuration options. Supposedly you can modify the UI to some extent, and first player-created UIs have appeared, but the system appears to be very limited when compared to the fully programmable UI of That Other Game. It's still early days, and UI is something that can be fixed later on without big problems, so I'm willing to cut some slack here. The basics are there, and many important features have made the transition from the competition.

Content - Never Enough

MMOs always run out of content - things to do, places to see. But in Age of Conant there is a notable lack of starter content. While Tortage area is not bad for a newbie zone, it can get very repetitive very fast. The whole game has exactly one starting city zone (Tortage) and three "adventure zones" (Underhalls, Acheronian Ruins, White Sands Isle) around it for the first 20 levels of the game. While you can level to 20 and out of this area in less than ten hours, it makes the prospect of rolling an alternate character very painful. There are some alternate quests you can do within the area, providing interesting content for maybe two characters, but by the time you are running through it all for third or fourth time, it really sucks. Here Age of Conan could have copied from the competition - Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest II and World of Warcraft all understood the issue and provided several different "noob areas" based on your race to ease the pain of starting a second character. No such luck here, and it's a big downside for the alt-a-holics among us.

Character creation has a ton of options, but it still feels somewhat limited.

Welcome to Tortage - stay a while (well, first 20 levels).

Based on second hand information, same issue apparently also raises it's head around level 50-60. While there are several alternate adventuring zones beyond level 20, the high end game again funnels you through a single set of zones and quests with no alternative content available. Unless Funcom can pull off more unicorns out of their hat with rapid introduction of additional content, this also means that the replayability of Age of Conan is questionable at this point. This is a common issue with the competition as well - I guess right now only World of Warcraft can provide multiple fully redundant leveling paths, and even there the choices diminish greatly at level 60 as everyone is pretty much forced to do the same stuff at Outland. Naturally this is a non-issue right now as you will be busy taking your first character to 80. The problem is, once that's done - 250 hours /played is the often quoted figure - what then? Let's hope that the maximum level content is plentiful and fun, and there is no need to go alt happy.

The content also has another fairly annoying issue. Many quest-related points of interest inside zones are designed with a single person in mind. Should you wish to level up with a group of friends, or happen to the area with several other people doing the same quest, you will run into problems. While mob kills are credited to everyone in group, looting quest items - either off mobs or off the ground - often isn't, and you will end up waiting for quest respawns a lot.

Experience from kills is split evenly in group without any grouping bonuses, and as experience from kills is a substantial part of the expected advancement curve, group leveling will run you into trouble as you run out of quests and have to resort to grinding - all because the monsters you killed during your quests gave you only fraction of the experience you would have gained if soloing. Effectively the only way to level at the moment is to solo or duo. There are some "group" flagged quests that support 3-4 man groups better, but even they are not that difficult, and are often quite soloable. Some may consider this to be a good thing, and it's said that you can level to 80 completely solo if you choose, but in my book the poor grouping support is a downside.

Funcom did add an "epic" mode to all the adventuring zones just before launch and it seems the idea is to address this very issue by offering the choice of "solo" or "group" versions of zones. The problem is, whole Epic mode is very much unfinished, and the only practical difference is that the mobs in the Epic version of the zone got their hit points bumped up. That's all. Extra risk without any extra reward.

Other Annoying Bits

Trader - Bank, Mailbox and Auction House - all in one. Shame they don't work yet.

At the top of my "omg, fix this now" list is the inventory system - it needs some serious work. The UI is clumsy and there is far too little inventory space. Separate quest item inventory is a good idea, but the general inventory is always full, requiring constant trips to vendor off the trash. For comparison, think "World of Warcraft, except you only get your backpack and one slot for an extra bag". It doesn't exactly help that the vast majority of loot you find doesn't stack. No matter how you cut it, "Your inventory is Full" comes up far too often and in this case playability should be put above realism. Honestly it all feels a bit like Dungeon Siege, except you don't get mules to carry your loot. Sure, you can leave the junk behind, but with money being as tight as it is, you really need every tin piece you can muster.

You also can't offload your junk to your bank or to other players just yet, all due to some nasty exploit involving the Trader NPCs. The game definitely has a fully featured bank, mail and auction systems, but they are currently disabled. I hope the issue is fixed in short order as this is definitely one of the most embarrassing faults of the game at the moment.

Another boss down, and once again no loot.

For the munchkins among us, the loot is unimpressive and has confusing bonuses. The character sheet displays only small bits of the relevant information and far too much of the detail is hidden from view. There are numerous non-obvious bonuses on items with no documentation telling us what they actually do. What does "+0.01 defense rating" actually mean? We need formulas and math!

The Quest UI could also use some polish, but the issues are minor and it works, perhaps even too well. What disappoints me is the design choice made with questing - Funcom wanted to be "realistic" with limited inventory space, but at the same time they provide players with a full map and GPS system with dynamic quest updates. You can safely ignore all the quest text and just look up the arrow, head that way, X marks the spot and by the time you get there, it's usually obvious what you need to do. Quest items glow and can be seen a mile away, and even quests that ask you to "kill X mobs" show up on the map with clearly defined spawn area of the mob in question. All that text and dialogue is wasted as you can just click through the conversation (no, 99% of the time those dialogue options don't really matter) and zoom onwards based on your map and quest indicators.

Cue dramatic music...

Dialogue system reminds me of some single player RPGs - sadly it's mostly for show, as the dialogue options don't actually do much.

Recorded dialogue, while nice, goes MIA after you leave the newbie area, and after that all the NPCs are silent. I don't know if Funcom plans to add dialogue to later parts of the game post-launch. The dialogue provides atmosphere, but to be honest - why bother when most players will just click through it all as the all-powerful "Adventuring GPS System 1000" directs them to where they need to go.

The Nasty Bits And Beyond

Then there are the bugs... most are minor, but some are fairly game-breaking. Like when you go to feat fixer to re-spec your feats, and find out that it wiped your feats and your gathering professions - and you can't re-take the gathering professions as the quest NPCs no longer talk to you. Or the fact that if you are a leader of a guild, and accidentally hit "Leave" on the Guild UI, you leave the guild - no warnings, no confirmation dialogs, and no way to promote anyone back to leader status. And if you all leave the guild, the name is still taken and you have to re-form under another name.

You may notice that I haven't said much about PvP or the promised huge battles... I don't have much personal experience with any of that yet, but Funcom already scored some negative faction by announcing that the "massive" battles would actually be instanced as 48vs48. Not much better than your average battleground fight... I can understand the technical hurdles, but at the same time Dark Age of Camelot managed to pull off 200-300 player battles years ago - sure, the lag was epic and servers cried for mercy, but it looks like Age of Conan isn't going to even try to match that. It'll be interesting to see how ambitious EA Mythic will be with Warhammer Online, but those seeking massive armies clashing in the fields of battle - I can already say that Age of Conan ain't it.