AoC: First Impressions
Hello again,
If you’ve read my previous post you know my mental state when it comes to MMO’s at this time, but I wanted to follow up and give my impressions on Age Of Conan since it was with much reluctance that I spent the money to purchase it.
My expectations for this game were very low between what I had heard about the blood splashes on the screen and that it was Conan in general wasn’t very appealing. I started and played several class types, but found myself having the most fun so far with a Ranger and a Demonologist. The Demonologist has turned out to be my favorite so far and I’m happy to report as of last night I’m now level 16.
The Good:
Graphics are excellent - best eye candy by far out of anything I’ve played on the MMO market. The drawback to it is I can see it requiring a very high performance machine in order to fully enjoy what it has to offer.
The storyline of your character is worked into the game in such a way that it remains fun and you want to get to the next leg of the story to see what transpires. Your story is only progressed through a series of quests and events done in the “Night” instance, which is pretty much and instance just for you. During the “Day” you are free to complete dozens of side quests that each have their own story. The quests usually have just the right amount of difficulty to them. You DO still have to do a lot of back and forth quest turn ins, but the quests and the givers are fairly close together and if you plan your quest order a little it isn’t so bad.
The inventory is way on the small side, so I frequently find myself making stops into town I wouldn’t otherwise make, just to sell all the crap I picked up. It also seems a bit lacking in terms of action bars. After WoW I’m a bit addicted to having a lot of action bars to put stuff on. I believe I have four right now, but whereas WoW had like ten or more slots on each one, this has like six.
I haven’t used the market at all to buy/sell as I feel I’m too low and nothing I’m getting is really worth putting up there. Quests and random drops have kept me decently geared and I don’t find that I need to buy anything really. So thus far, everything I loot and sell is pretty much for 100% profit.
The blood splashes and gratuitous gore do fit the Conan mythos of course, but the only time I’ve really seen any was when playing a melee character. Since I play a caster class it hasn’t been an issue at all. There are several “instanced” areas that seem to be PvP free-for-all areas. As I discovered the hard way, people will hang out in them just for the sake of ganking people trying to do quests. It sucks and doesn’t really belong and is probably my only major complaint at this point.
Every MMO to date has had either PvP enabled areas or ways in which you could PvP enable your toon specifically. This game just seems to make any instance area PvP enabled. So what this means is either you get used to spending several hours to complete quests that should be done in about fifteen minutes or you stay until those quests are green or gray and then go back and do them. I’ve done the former, hoping not to miss out on any gear rewards that would be useful now.
Luckily there seem to be enough quest instances that you can hop from one to another depending on which one is full of more buttheads…the zones are fairly large too so you can sometimes sneak around the would-be offenders. This is on a RP server by the way - I can only imagine how much worse the ganking is on a normal one.
As for RP, I’ve not seen any to speak of, but in fairness it is still the starter city and everyone seems focused on leveling and questing. I’m hoping this improves as I move higher in level and into different areas with higher populations of RPers.
So in conclusion, while my expectations were very low, I’m actually very pleased with the game so far and I’ve passed that ten level hump and I’m still not bored. There may be hope for me yet.