Jun 27, 2008
Age of Conan: The Ultimate Review
by windshell
Ever heard of Conan? I’m sure you did, no matter if you’re not passionate fan of Robert E. Howard who created the most popular barbarian of all times. Especially if you’re playing the recent popular MMORPG title Age of Conan.
If you still don’t play it, or if you didn’t hear about Conan, then this might be a useful review for you.
I already wrote a couple of articles about this popular MMORPG, but what I missed is full review, which will explain some things regarding gameplay and technical side of the game.
So let’s start.
As in any other MMORPG, the first step you have to take is to create a character that you’ll lead through the game.
Character Creation, Races & Classes
Character creation gives you a solid number of options. Players have standard Male or Female choices, 3 races and 12 classes which are included in 4 Archetypes. Races are Stygians, dark desert dwellers from the south, Cimmerians, barbarians from the north and Aquilonians, advanced and cultured race placed in the middle. If you just want to start game quickly, you can just pick your name and your Class. There are 4 standard types and 3 subtypes in each.
More on AoC Classes here: http://www.realpoor.com/articles/Best_Classes_in_Age_of_Conan_a118_f0.html
Character Customization
Besides choosing standard Archetypes, you can also choose to customize your character. The character customization is very advanced. It goes in two tiers. The first tier of customization allows for variations of body size, voice, tattoos, skin and eye color, hair and facial hair style. To enter second tier of character customization, hit the customize button again and you can specifically change body aspects like chest size, hips, arms and legs sizes and complete face structure in order to get your unique character.
Once you finished building your character, you are ready to enter the impressive world of Hyboria.
World of Hyboria
The lands of Aquilonia, Cimmeria, and Stygia are both expansive and impressive. Imaginary world of Hyboria is stretching out in fields and climbing up in huge mountains, with many settlements and towns inlayed like jewels in crown. Since the game follows the Conan books, you won’t find many monsters here. All races, both friends and enemies, players and NPCs are humans and they look realistic and impressive thanks to the advanced graphics.
So if you expect orcs, dwarves, dragons or other creatures, maybe the AoC isn’t environment for you.
Quests
Quests are separated on standard PvE and PvP. PvE quests are obligatory until level 20, but you can focus your gameplay on PvE at later stages as well. As in other MMO games PvP is core of the gameplay and the part that is the most fun.
However, there are bits on both types of quests.
PvE
Players start their Age of Conan adventure as a slave which survived a shipwreck on the island of Tortage, where the players have to spend the first 20 levels, working with other players to defeat a madman and the priestess that gives him a power. The level cap in the game however is 80.
Age of Conan splits the single and multiplayer portions of the early game into Night and Day. During day time, you'll find the world full of fellow adventures with whom you’ll work together through tasks gaining experience and loot. While during night, you venture out alone into specifically-designed encounters aimed at your level and class. At night, quests more directly involve you and your role in the world, giving you a sense of individualism.
Once when you reach level 20 and leave Tortage, your real adventure begins.
PvP
Point of reaching higher level is of course to enter the full potential of the game. In other words meet, hack and slash other players in PvP, where you can attack anyone that isn’t in your group.
Some PvP features include ranking system which increases with PvP kills and decreases with PvP deaths, awards for highest ranked PvP players, there is no substantial penalty for dying at the hands of another player. That means that you lose no experience, nor do you resurrect with debuff.
Furthermore, it's possible to successfully fight players up to five levels higher than you alone and much higher in a group. The only number that truly matters is the number of players you have on your side.
Thanks to this, PVP combat is transformed from a resource-draining nuisance to a fun diversion, although spawn-camping will most likely get on your nerves, except if you are a camper. Also, low-level PVP kills award no PVP experience.
The game is broken up into instanced zone, but it's not one unified persistent world. Tortage island may look small, but when you enter the world of Hyboria, you’ll find that cities are huge, overpopulated with citizens and that the wide open adventure zones are impressively designed.
Combat
Combat in Age of Conan is very different than in some other games. The game adopts a far more action-oriented approach to combat and the general pace of combat is sped up significantly. However, a tight user interface makes the fast-paced combat easy to learn, and the options to customize the controls are welcome. Melee attacks in Age of Conan are not bound to an auto attack key and special moves are more complex, where the player has to continually hit one of three attacks—left, right, and overhead—to attack the target, and stringing together these attacks in certain ways results in damaging combos, known as fatalities.
More on AoC fatalities: http://www.realpoor.com/articles/Age_of_Conan_Fatalities_by_Classes_a115_f0.html
Mature Content
Fatalities are one segment in Age of Conan that raised a dispute over the content which is suitable for mature audience only. For the first time in history of MMO games, there is a lot of nudity, nipples, butts and swearing, but vivid decapitations, dismembering and crushing, that include even drops of blood on the screen, most of all gave this title a Mature rating.
Requirements: Flaw or a Plus?
Aesthetically Age of Conan is for sure the best looking MMORPG currently on the market. However, players need a beast of the machine if they want to play this game smoothly. Announced system requirements are:
Minimum configuration (1024x768, detail reduced)
OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz or equivalent
RAM: 1GB
Video card: NVIDIA Geforce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9800
DVD-ROM: Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive
Hard drive space: 32GB
Recommended configuration (Up to 1280X960, most features on)
OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Service Pack 1
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz or equivalent
RAM: 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or equivalent
Video memory: 512MB
DVD-ROM: Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive
Hard drive space: 32GB
High demanding requirements are the must because game offers breathtaking graphics, more advanced than any other MMO title. However, that includes spending some money for hardware improvements, where the priority should be given to CPU before the RAM and graphics.
Summary
As long as you can meet the system requirements, Age of Conan is top game that every gamer must have. It’s raw, brutal and endlessly fun. Maybe it’s impudent to say that this is a long awaited punch in the face of MMORPG titles, but this game deserves that epithet. Sure that we must grieve for some quids if we want to experience it, but the final result, when we find ourselves in the game, is more than satisfactory.
Funcom has put forth the best effort in Age of Conan and they deserve any amount of success they can get.
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