Sitting on the Fence with Age of Conan

Posted by Stropp on June 20, 2008

It’s nearly over. The free month that comes when purchasing the game should end on or around the 27th of June.

And I’m not sure if I’ll resubscribe to Age of Conan when time’s up.

I think the problem is the hook.

Have you noticed that when you start reading a novel there is a certain number of pages that you turn before the author either grabs you and you cannot put the book down, or you lose interest and stop reading?

Funcom has spent a lot of effort on the hook. The first twenty levels in Tortage are well set out and in particular the nighttime destiny quest is pretty well thought out. It even offers a bit of variety if you choose different archetypes.

Tortage alone would normally be enough to hook me. Unfortunately, it’s the problems I have encountered that has spoiled the game for me.

• Yesterday I crashed to desktop twice in an hour, from what I understand is a known memory leak bug.
• Funcoms patches fix some problems and break other parts of the game. Since the last patch some spots now prevent me running past, I have to jump over them. The great boob nerf was also apparently a result of a fresh bug introduced in a patch. And the previously mentioned memory leak seems to occur more often now than when I first started playing.
• I’ve been unable to enter the preorder code in order to claim the mammoth.
• Graphics issues with the map textures disappearing so that I have a gray map with the map icons on it.
• I did have some other graphics issues that I have since fixed.

There are a few game design ‘features’ that bug me too.

• The biggie is not being able to switch characters without exiting the game and logging back in. I find that very annoying.
• Bag space is way too limited. Though to be fair, quest items and resources have their own tabs and plenty of room. It’s vendor trash that’s a problem, on a normal run I have to leave huge amounts of stuff on the ground. sigh.
• The quest GUI is pretty poor. While I haven’t reached the limit, I can only track one quest at a time. It also doesn’t provide the quest level, a feature other games have had for a while.
• The tooltips provided on spells and feats is pretty spare. A feat tip will tell you that it increases some stat or damage, but not by how much. There’s no real way to compare feats until you test them.
• I’m also hearing reports that one of the best features of the game, the destiny quests, have major gaps after 20. After Tortage the next destiny quest is at 30, and there isn’t that much involved. Pity. I was hoping for a sequence of quests like the Tortage quests.

Okay. Now all that sounds pretty negative.

There’s a lot to like about Age of Conan too.

• It had a pretty solid release, even despite the large amount of downtime during Oceanic primetime the first couple of weeks, and that is now much reduced. Like all these games there have been some server issues. That’s to be expected. But Funcom have learned a lot since the launch of Anarchy Online and that’s evident in this launch.
• The graphics are excellent. Of course that was one of the major selling points of Age of Conan, and Funcom have delivered on this point.
• At last there are some skills I haven’t seen in other games like Climbing. I’ve wanted to see climbing in a MMO for years. AoC doesn’t do it exactly the way I’d like — If you’ve trained enough points you can click on a special vine or ladder and climb it — I’d like to see climbing on any face or object if the player has enough points. In this case though, good enough.
• I like the combos. I haven’t done any spell weaving and I understand combos are useless in PvP, but I don’t PvP. The combos add a little bit of additional skill, if you can get them right.
• I like the world. Hyboria is a dark and dangerous place, and AoC brings that feel across. The devs have certainly done a good job and have shown that they know their source material. I think there is a huge amount of potential for a lot of stories to be told here.

The problem is that Funcom have on the one hand hooked me with the good stuff, but by releasing prematurely have loosened the hook with the other hand.

I have no doubt that Age of Conan will come together in the next few months to be one of the best MMORPGs around. AoC could have been released that way if Funcom had taken the time to polish it before release.

So I’m wondering if I’ll keep my subscription going when the free month ends. Do I want to pay to be a beta tester? I haven’t made a decision yet. I’ll give it a few more days.

Popularity: 11% [?]