Do babarian's keep their promises?
In the Year 4 after World of Warcraft, the online community is still waiting for a game to break WoW's dominance. On the first look Age of Conan seems to be a promising contestant: It combines great graphics, a slightly action-oriented Gameplay and a more mature backdrop, that should differ enough to attract those players, that either never got into WoW or are already bored of it. The question is if it will be able to deliver on this promise.
On the technical side, there isn't much to complain. While the graphics aren't revolutionary, compared to other online RPGs, in particular Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan is probably the best looking. A victory at the price that low spec machines have to reduce details massivly. Recently developers explicitly stated that they want to improve the performance on low spec machines, so there is hope for those of us who have a PC that is older than a year. The sound is in so far outstanding that Funcom walked the extra mile by recording the voice for the characters you meet in your initial quests, which is a nice touch that sadly ends after you finished the single player missions.
This is probably the single biggest feature Conan adds to the average MMORPG, instead of giving you normal quests to introduce you to the game mechanics, there is a single player mode. Basically these are just special instanced areas that you can activate by talking to certain characters, but they enfold a small story that you can follow up on later in the game and give you a chance to play even when none of your friends are online. While this makes the early game much more enjoyable, you will probably see the end of it after 4 or 5 hours, depending on the amount of normal questing you do.
Another advertized feature was the fast paced combat and Conan actually delivers on this. Instead of just hammering on your mouse or keyboard, there is a slight level of strategy and action, as you can chose from which side to attack your oponent. Later on you can even execute combos that require you to combine certain directions which plays a bit like a very simple rhythm game. Very simple as it is only a few keypresses. That said, the actual way the combat plays doesn't differ from any similar game.
Sadly the same holds for the quests, while one can feel the intend to avoid too much grinding, it appears that this has become a core mechanic that no game can live without. While this is probably what everybody expects, there are quite some rough edges. Group quests are not really rewarding for groups, while trying to perform them alone (even if far above the expected level) is impossible. Not because the AI would be very good in these quests, but simply because it has a multiple of health points than any similar enemy. So you can be bored because you have to play these multiple times as a group or fail badly if you try them alone. Even worse some quests are down right broken, suffer from a bad friendly AI or some enemies have much too long respawn times.
Especially clans were looking forward to Conan because of its promise to support building up guild towns and raiding other guildss town. While this is already implemented, Funcom announced a massive patch for the PvP component, as it is still rough. If your main interest is PvP, you should probably wait a bit or level up in the meantime. Similar problematic is the job system. While it is possible to have a profession, their usefulness is still limited at the moment. While devs intend to work on this, there is no schedule yet for an upcoming patch.
The single biggest motiviation to play AoC is the mature theme, there is plenty of gore and in total the world is darker than most RPGs and capture the spirit of the Conan stories perfectly. As the game got a mature rating in most of Europe at least those servers appear to have a better crowd than I personally encountered in other online games. Speaking of the following - luckily Funcom was more successful with Conan than Anarchy Online, servers seem to be well populated all around the clock and there is always enough players to join up for quests.
All in all it is hard to jude an MMORPG, as all of them get refined over time. Anything said above might be outdated in half a year and until now we haven't even seen a single content update, that would extend the end game. As it stands at the moment, AoC is a good game, that has already been refined after a little bit rocky start. The progress has been noticiable, which should make fans hopeful that Funcom will be capable of keeping them entertained in the future. In the end, if you like games to have a more mature topic and MMORPGs, you can't do anything wrong. The 40 hours I spent in Hyboria were so pleasant, that I for my side changed by payment option to half yearly. The promise for still being a great game then is there, and babarian's wouldn't break their promise, would they?
