Originally written May 2008.
Straight up, Age of Conan is a mess. A technical disaster right through to some poor design choices and (most importantly) a forced release, resulting in an incomplete game. No self-respecting developer would ever willingly launch a product with so many areas unfinished, unless the publisher made the call. I'll break it down into what I felt were the three major quality/quantity of content shifts, 1-25, 25-50 and 55+.
Age of Conan starts excellently enough with a very robust and pleasing character creation feature bursting with options. A far cry from my last MMO indulgence, World of Warcraft. Once into the game your character washes ashore to be confronted by an NPC that sets you on your way with a quest of destiny on the island of Tortage. The Tortage content is great, voice acted and the destiny quest line (which is single player and takes place at night) is more story driven than what most MMO's offer. Combat is excellent, the animation is good and the overall graphical presentation is quite exceptional. Age of Conan is a game ready to explode with detail. Sadly this is far from what you'll experience once you hit 25 and finish the destiny chain in Tortage.
At this point you are sent via boat to (continue your quest of destiny) the capital city of your chosen country (Cimmeria, Stgyia or Aquilonia). You will then meet your contact and discover the quest chain does not continue until level 30. At level 30 you are treated to some further development (although minor in comparison with the Tortage content) and your destiny is again postponed until your 40's. During this time you'll find a plethora of standard fetch and kill X/Y quests any WoW player will recognize. You'll dip your toe into, and quickly remove it from, a very badly implemented profession system. You'll also experiment with a pointless PvP scheme. Player versus player combat in Age of Conan is wonderful, but largely pointless. You will discover how small the world actually is and find yourself in other countries looking for more quests. At this point many broken chains rear their ugly heads, usually half way through (resulting in a lot of wasted time), as the quest pool continues to shrink.
One can easily make it into their 50's with the available quests, but will fall far short of the level 80 cap; at which point you may feel a sense of deja-vu if you played WoW during the first 3 months.Endgame is virtually non-existent. A great PvP siege system complete with player controlled cities is in place, but through my experience on one of a few PvP realms I failed to see any kind of activity. Of course Age of Conan is a young game so this is likely to change as it continues to grow.
Anyone who plays Age of Conan can see how additional development time would have greatly benefited the game upon release. Sadly that did not happen, but there is a lot of potential here that will hopefully be realized in the coming year.
Straight up, Age of Conan is a mess. A technical disaster right through to some poor design choices and (most importantly) a forced release, resulting in an incomplete game. No self-respecting developer would ever willingly launch a product with so many areas unfinished, unless the publisher made the call. I'll break it down into what I felt were the three major quality/quantity of content shifts, 1-25, 25-50 and 55+.
Age of Conan starts excellently enough with a very robust and pleasing character creation feature bursting with options. A far cry from my last MMO indulgence, World of Warcraft. Once into the game your character washes ashore to be confronted by an NPC that sets you on your way with a quest of destiny on the island of Tortage. The Tortage content is great, voice acted and the destiny quest line (which is single player and takes place at night) is more story driven than what most MMO's offer. Combat is excellent, the animation is good and the overall graphical presentation is quite exceptional. Age of Conan is a game ready to explode with detail. Sadly this is far from what you'll experience once you hit 25 and finish the destiny chain in Tortage.
At this point you are sent via boat to (continue your quest of destiny) the capital city of your chosen country (Cimmeria, Stgyia or Aquilonia). You will then meet your contact and discover the quest chain does not continue until level 30. At level 30 you are treated to some further development (although minor in comparison with the Tortage content) and your destiny is again postponed until your 40's. During this time you'll find a plethora of standard fetch and kill X/Y quests any WoW player will recognize. You'll dip your toe into, and quickly remove it from, a very badly implemented profession system. You'll also experiment with a pointless PvP scheme. Player versus player combat in Age of Conan is wonderful, but largely pointless. You will discover how small the world actually is and find yourself in other countries looking for more quests. At this point many broken chains rear their ugly heads, usually half way through (resulting in a lot of wasted time), as the quest pool continues to shrink.
One can easily make it into their 50's with the available quests, but will fall far short of the level 80 cap; at which point you may feel a sense of deja-vu if you played WoW during the first 3 months.Endgame is virtually non-existent. A great PvP siege system complete with player controlled cities is in place, but through my experience on one of a few PvP realms I failed to see any kind of activity. Of course Age of Conan is a young game so this is likely to change as it continues to grow.
Anyone who plays Age of Conan can see how additional development time would have greatly benefited the game upon release. Sadly that did not happen, but there is a lot of potential here that will hopefully be realized in the coming year.