Age of Conan First Thoughts

Posted by Stropp on June 3, 2008

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days. I’ve been spending much of my time in Hyboria on the island of Tortage.

So far I have three characters going, all on the Wiccana server. There’s Stropp the male Dark Templar, Perditos the male Ranger, and Marrow the female Necromancer. Out of these Stropp is the only one to have left the starter island of Tortage. The other two are very close to completing the destiny quests.

I haven’t rolled a character in the priest archetype yet, but I probably will soon. Each archetype has a different trainer, and some of the destiny quest line is different. I’m keen on seeing where the priest line fits into the story.

So far I’ve seen only a couple of major bugs show up in the gameplay. On one occasion my avatar stopped responding to commands completely. Which was a problem since I was in a hostile area. I used the /stuck command (the only one that worked) to shift him out of harms way and shut the game down.

The other issue was with the Necro. There were a couple of occassions when my pets just wouldn’t attack, leaving me to fight the mob off on my own. Luckily, the Necro seems pretty powerful (at the lower levels at least) and can dot the bad guys down.

Other than that, there have been some minor graphical glitches like icons and buttons not appearing, the necro pets sometimes being invisible, and some other graphical artifacts that I’ve seen — but not too much. Other players are reporting more serious issues but I haven’t encountered them yet. Touch wood.

There are some annoyances though. The biggest by far is that to change characters while in the game I have to exit the game and log back in. I don’t know why Funcom has gone this way. It makes quickly switching chars impossible. It’s not really a user friendly system.

There is also a major limitation on the number of alts that a player can have. The number of character slots available to players is eight per account. You can have one avatar on each of eight servers, or eight avatars on one server, but that is it. Very limited considering there are twelve classes. A player cannot play each class without deleting some of them. To be fair, this may change later once the number of subscribers settles down. Once Funcom gets some solid statistics they may be able to increase the number of slots. As someone with severe altitis, I hope so.

Having said all that. Age of Conan wasn’t ready for release. The starter area is very polished. The quests all have cinematics and decent voice acting, and are very well thought out. Once you leave Tortage, as far as I’ve seen, none of the quest givers have cinematics. And while the quests are reasonable well thought out, there is no voice acting for any of the NPCs. It’s a little disconcerting after the polish of Tortage to simply have NPCs grunt at you, or "woo hoo" when you talk to them. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to give them a canned greeting, a’la "Zug Zug" when you open a conversation. Sad.

There’s a lot of talk in the forums about the effect of skills and armor stats. No one seems to know exactly what effect, if any, increasing these values seems to have. One forum poster claimed to have tested combat at level 55 in green/blue armor and then in vendor trash armor and seen very little difference in the fight. From what I’ve heard and seen, skills seem to be the same, with little in-game (and out of game) information on what different things do.

Content is also a concern for some players. It seems from the complaints that there are level ranges in the game where the quests run out and players have to grind for five or more levels. If this is correct — not good. However, from what I’ve put together, a player needs to do all the quests from all the starting areas and all the green (and perhaps gray) quests to get the XP for them. It seems at this stage that rushing through the levels will mean much more mob grinding.

The Great Boob Nerf also has some players up in arms. In one patch, Funcom appears to have reduced the size of the female avatar boobs. Players who created the largest size possible have been complaining about the reduction. The biggest, and best argument so far, is that regardless of the anatomy being changed, Funcom is changing an aspect of the players character that they selected, and this is wrong. There’s apparently also been some reduction of the mature content; language of NPCs, and female graphical attributes that has some players concerned that the mature content is being nerfed in response to complaints.

The upshot is that Age of Conan was released a little prematurely. Funcom probably should have taken another three to six months with its development. A little more polish above level twenty would not have gone astray. Some additional work on the game systems before release would have a good thing too.

In the end, Funcom had a nice little window in which to release Age of Conan before Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online. Releasing when they did certainly paid off. Age of Conan apparently has over 600,000 subscribers in the first week or so of release. That’s pretty good going.

Popularity: 12% [?]