Age of Conan Player Diary Level 1 - 20

With the basics of the game explained in the previous entry, I can now move onto a more detailed account of my adventures in Age of Conan. As mentioned earlier, you first emerge from the water half-drowned and clutching only a broken oar. You then have a few moments to sit back and enjoy the graphics, and twiddle with the settings, before you speak to the quest NPC in front of you.


The area looks fantastic, and really needs to be seen firsthand - the screenshot really doesn't do it justice. Determined to try the combat that everyone had been talking about for ages, I picked up my broken oar and ran straight into the nearest group of pict savages I could find. The combat system really is excellent, and while it is easy enough to learn you can't help but feel it's going to be tricky to master. Essentially your 1, 2 and 3 keys are bound to directional attack buttons (it doesn't matter where you're standing relative to your opponent, so long as you're facing him and in range). Both you and your opponents also have directional shields, which reduce the amount of damage done by attacks from that particular direction, and those are shifted with the Ctrl button - though by level 20, I still haven't really learned to use them. You can also dodge in any direction with a quick double tap of the appropriate direction key, but as a ranger I have to stand still to use my bow and thus I don't do that much.

All this is made more complex by combos, which are like the class skills in any other MMO. They appear on your hotbar and you click them (or press the appropriate hotkey) to trigger them. Then a series of directional attacks that you have to complete comes up, after which your character will perform the selected attack. To start with, I was mostly just mashing the keyboard, but as I've got more into the game I've calmed down enough - but sometimes I can't help feeling I'm losing time on my autoattacks by not repeatedly spamming directional attacks in combat that often, especially if I'm using a fast-firing weapon. The combat noises and animations are both superb but, in the early stages of the game at least, the formula doesn't depart much from traditional MMOs. Instead of running up to an enemy with my shadowknight and pressing the same series of keys every battle, from level 6 upwards I just pressed 8, to select Pierce Shot, then 1 and 2 to set off the combo - which does enough damage to kill pretty much anything within a level or two of me instantly. However, there is more of an emphasis on fighting groups of creatures rather than single monsters, as individual ones go down quite easily, which makes things more exciting and more realistic too. So, while the formula is basically the same as in other MMOs so far, it's done much better and is much more enjoyable for it.


So, after battering half a dozen savages to death so I could learn the combat system, I actually got on with what I was meant to do. A conveniently-placed damsel in distress is in front of you, begging you to free her from her chains by forcibly taking the key off the slavemaster on the beach nearby. Getting quests is very much like it works in other MMOs, except the quest givers and the quest targets are marked on the map, which makes the whole process considerably more simple than in previous MMOs. Though I do somewhat miss the days of EQ1 where quests could be decidedly cryptic and could sometimes take hours, the genre has moved on since then and now quests are less about lore and entertainment and more a tool to steer players to various areas of the world so they don't miss out on content. Age of Conan has taken this to its logical conclusion and virtually holds your hand throughout the entire process, though in a convenient rather than patronising way. It proved suitably easy to free the girl, and then she agrees to follow you back to the nearby town, Tortage.

What follows is a linear fight down a long path to the city, designed to get you familiar with the controls of the game and to help you gain five or so levels. You also become familiar with the game's appalling voice acting, which is delivered in the conversational cut-scenes you have with NPCs. It's not quite as dire as the faux-Scottish accents of some of the dwarves in EQ2, but generally the NPCs sound like a borderline-retarded Russian putting on a silly voice (it makes you wonder if Blizzard actually own the only competent voice actors in the MMO industry). Thankfully the voice acting ends after Tortage, but it does make you wonder why they bothered with it in the first place.


Getting back on topic - once you complete your little journey to Tortage, you find yourself zoning into a communal multiplayer zone - it turns out the previous area was a single-player instance. Ahead of you is the city of Tortage, but at this point you'll have to twiddle your graphical settings again because the communal zones perform considerably worse than the single-player instances. Anyway, there's a couple of errands you have to do to get into the city, and then it's on to standard MMO fare - running about, questing and killing things, to level up. The city of Tortage is beautifully modelled and textured, and the entire zone looks like it's come straight out of Pirates of the Carribbean. However, there is a twist in the tale, as Tortage is actually two different zones. Bear with me, because this takes a little explaining.

The first twenty levels were initially intended to be a single-player tutorial that would be skippable by subsequent characters, but this has changed somewhat along the way. This is definitely a good thing. Initially you weren't even going to choose your class at the start of the game, but you'd specialise into an archetype at level ten and then into an actual class at level twenty. This will sound familiar to veterans of EQ2, as the launch edition of this game pioneered this approach before eventually (and wisely) dropping it in favour of the standard character creation method. This transition left some unresolved issues in the early game of EQ2, but happily Funcom have done a better job with Age of Conan on this count.


The relatively elegant solution they have come up with is to split the newbie town of Tortage into single-player story mode (nighttime), and the standard multiplayer mode (daytime). These can be switched between by speaking to one of the NPCs in the inn that will act as your base for your time in Tortage. For the first twenty levels, whether you play with other players or not is entirely up to you. The single player missions are actually pretty good, and there's a different set of quests depending on your archetype. Rangers are part of the Rogue archetype, so my quests involved quite a lot of sneaking about. This means there's actually four sets of quests, and as you'll presumably play a different type of class for your alt characters, it means Tortage won't be as repetitive as it could be. The quests also do quite a good job of subtly introducing you to your class skills, which can only be a good thing.

Overall, though, I still have a few gripes with the zone. There's a chronic shortage of vendors to sell your loot to, as well as no vendors who actually sell bags in the town. Worse, there's no vendors in the single-player nighttime missions, and I found myself switching to daytime just to sell things, and then having to come back. As you have to zone to change from one mode to another, and then zone out of the inn to find a vendor, and then zone back into the inn and then shift mode back to night-time again, this is a pain in the ass. They should put a vendor in the night-time version of the inn. If there's one there already, he needs to be made more obvious. The layout of the quest givers I also found a bit irritating. They were dotted all over the place, which meant you'd spend half your time running around the city to hand in various bits of quests. I much prefer quest 'hubs', with four or five NPCs in a little outpost with all the quests. Once you're done with that hub, the game steers you onto the next one. Tortage reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate II, in that after a couple of hours of play I had about 20 quests going at once and no idea which monsters and NPCs were involved in which quest chain. Also, sometimes NPCs standing right next to each other would give out quests of completely different level ranges, which just to me seemed a little odd.


The rest of the Tortage zone involves several other zones, some public and others instances that you will encounter in your single-player exploits, and they range from a volcano to a desert island. Generally all look very polished, and the monsters are all very well animated and there's a good variety of different types. The only I really had with the communal zones is the community. While I admit I'm pretty sheltered, having played EQ2 as my most recent MMO, the game with probably the most mature and helpful fanbase in the MMORPG universe, it seems like Age of Conan attracted an awful lot of the WoW-kiddies. It might be because I'm playing on a PvP-server, but the General chat was just an uninterrupted stream of newbies spamming questions that could be answered by spending ten seconds either reading the manual or the extensive in-game tutorials, or by people just generally being assholes.


This failed to improve when I left the immediate proximity or Tortage to do some quests on Whitesand Isle, at which point I became PvP eligible. While I'm used to playing on PvP servers and thus I'm quite used to occasionally getting picked off when I'm hunting, the amount of griefing in the game surprised me. One of the issues is that the respawn point is unprotected, and you only have ten seconds of invulnerability before you become fair game to everyone again - by which point you'll be on about 1/3 health. Higher-level people camping the graveyards and just insta-killing everyone that spawns is infuriating, because there's nothing you can do about it at all. Funcom need to make the areas around the graveyard PvP-ineligible, so people can at least gate back to town if they're getting ganked too much. On a similar note, people also like camping the entrance to zones and killing anyone who tries to zone in, over and over. There's no material gain to PvP yet, so the persistence of some of the griefers is remarkable.

Another issue is the rather steep increase in power between the levels (at level 16 I was attacked by three level 13s and managed to kill them all), which means that newbies really get shafted if they try to go hunting in the multiplayer zones. I imagine things will improve as the zones get less populated, but still. I much prefer the WoW system of PvP-realms, where you can kill anyone of the opposing side pretty much anywhere. There's no confusion there - if you see a red name, you try and kill them, and if it's a green name then they're friendly. In AoC everyone is potentially hostile and, as you can't really just attack everyone you meet if you ever want to level up, things are less clear cut. This is almost certainly the intention, but it makes stuff like grouping up is quite hard. Trying to talk to someone is as likely to leave you trying to pull a throwing axe out of your face as it is to find you a group. Generally you'll just find higher level players one-shotting you just because they can (I'm not complaining, I do it myself), but a few people seem to have made it their mission to ruin things for everyone by camping the graveyards and generally griefing.

Overall, though, the first twenty levels were really good. The single-player storyline is pretty cool, the zones look fantastic and the combat is superb. If you've got a good enough PC to run it, I wholly recommend it - and I'd recommend it even more if they put a vendor in the Tortage inn. It's also worth noting that playing on a PvP server is quite a commitment. If you found PvP servers too much to handle on WoW, I wouldn't touch the AoC ones with a barge pole.

Age of Conan Player Diary Introduction

Age of Conan is probably the closest anyone will get to a WoW-killer at any point in the next couple of years. There are plenty of MMOs coming out, but few have garnered the attention and hype that Funcom (the company behind Anarchy Online) have with their latest effort - in fact, over a million people signed up for the beta. So I preordered it, and I'll share my experiences with you. I'll start with a general introduction to the game, which should explain the basics about what makes this game so different from the crowd, before I go into details about zones and my experiences.

First up, the install process takes AGES, which is not entirely surprising when you consider Age of Conan is taking up a grand total of 25 gigs of my hard drive. I think my CD-Rom drive is a bit slow because it took a good couple of hours to install for me, but most people report it finished in under one. After that, the obligatory patching process starts. Despite having the game installed and running before it actually hit store shelves, I was still subjected to a 700 meg download, at which point I just left my PC on and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was all done, but if you do run out to the shops and buy this game please be prepared for a wait of at least three or four hours before you can start playing. That being said, there was no drama with the downloads and after 48 hours of play I've experienced only minor server issues (a 3 minute queue last night, and the occasional random disconnect), which I think is quite impressive for a game on launch weekend. Well done Funcom.

Okay, so onto the game itself. Once you've logged in and chosen a server (I picked Wildsoul PVP) you get to the nitty-gritty of creating a character and your first look at the vaunted graphics of AoC. Mighty impressive they are, too.

I started by choosing a gender, race and class. I went for a male Aquilonian Ranger, mostly because I was interested in playing a range DPS class and, as AoC has optional first-person targeting, this seemed an ideal time to try a Ranger. There are a total of 12 classes to choose from, and this figure was initially higher before Funcom merged several of the classes. In my books, this is a good idea - Everquest 2 suffered from having too many classes, as many of them were too similar and PvP balance was a nightmare. The twelve in AoC seem quite distinct from one another and hopefully will have sufficiently different playstyles to keep people interested once they've got sick of playing their first class.


My only concern is over the fact that AoC contains three 'tank' classes. Judging from the experience of playing a tank class in EQ2 (which had 6), one class will be judged as the best tanks, and thus tanking will be exclusively done by them in high-end groups and raiding. This leaves the other two classes out in the cold, as they're taking up room in a group that could be better filled with devoted DPS classes. Funcom appear to have addressed this with at least one of the tank classes, the conqueror, by giving him a whole lot of group buffs. However, the Dark Templar, who is a sort of necro-tank much like the Shadowknights of EQ1 and 2, looks somewhat left out in the cold at this stage. But we'll see how it pans out.


The character creation interface is very detailed, much like the one in Everquest 2 except with far nicer graphics (needless to say, both are light years ahead of World of Warcraft), or at least it is once you click the 'Advanced Options' tab at the top of the screen. Prior to that you've only got a few sliders, and a series of preset heads and hair types to choose from. The advanced options lets you customise all areas of the face and body, allowing you to create a character who looks truly unique. I went with a fairly clean-cut young man, without too many scars or tattoos. Then I gave him his name, Markell, and then sent him off into the world of Hyboria. You get a little cut-scene of you semi-drowning, before you wash up on the shore of an island and start playing.


This is pretty much the first scene you see and, believe it or not, the screenshot doesn't do it justice. Age of Conan looks phenomenal, end of discussion. The water effects are simply beautiful, the texturing is superb and the modelling is fantastic. The trees and foliage in particular look as though a lot of attention has been spent on them, and it really pays off. Compare this to Stranglethorn Vale in World of Warcraft, and we can see exactly how far gaming has come in the last four years. The ambient sound is very good, as is the music and the sound effects, and the subtle things like the shadows all contribute to a stunning world. Funcom haven't so much moved the bar as propelled it into another field entirely. Bear in mind too that this game is shipping WITHOUT DirectX10 support - the dev team wanted more time with it to polish it or something, so it should be looking even better in the near future. And these screenshots are taken on Medium-High settings, so those with better PCs than mine will find the world looking better than this already.


Problem is, all of this comes at a price. For reference, I'm running an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300, 2gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256mb graphics card. My PC isn't top of the range by any stretch of the imagination; it'll run Company of Heroes on Max settings, EQ2 on about medium and will just about handle Crysis on Medium. When I arrived in Hyboria, I had to turn a few settings down - I switched off the water reflections, and the shadows, which kept things running nicely. But it turns out the first five or six levels or so are an instance, and when you get into the real world performance drops off. And when you reach the first town, it drops off again. And when you get out of the newbie starting areas and into the real cities, it drops off even more. My machine was chugging along at about 2-3 FPS in the capital cities, on the lowest graphical settings. Alarmingly, turning down the texture settings and all that didn't seem to help a lot, so it was only by turning my monitor resolution down (which looks UGLY) that I could get around the city at a playable 5-8 FPS. And that was on off-peak times. On peak times, it is literally unplayable, no joke. If your computer is worse than mine, DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER buying this game. If it's about on par with mine and you're not willing to upgrade, I wouldn't bother. I'm looking at buying a new graphics card and CPU right as I type this.


Onto the gameplay - the major innovation of AoC is supposed to be the combat, so I eagerly sprinted up the beach and started cracking pirate skulls. Initially it was overly frantic and downright confusing not to have autoattack and instead having to manually aim every strike, but you quickly get into it and soon you're wondering why someone hadn't thought of this type of combat earlier. Of course, a player is not simply limited to his three directional attacks, as you quickly unlock combos as you level up. These are just like the special abilities in all other MMOs, except that when you select one it is not instantly activated. First of all, a series of moves you have to perform with your directional attacks pops up, and it's only one you've pulled those off (if you mess up the combo is lost) that the move actually takes place. The more powerful a move, the longer the required combos, so you can't simply run into combat and spam your most powerful ability to insta-kill everything any more. It's a nice touch, and I imagine it will have a great deal of ramifications for PvP combat. But, tactical considerations aside, the combat is great.


Most of this is due to the frankly awesome sound effects and animations of the characters, something that has been given remarkably little press in the light of the stylised fatalities that occasionally appear when you strike a killing blow. They are entertaining enough, but the meaty sounds when weapons meet bodies and the fact that people fly backwards when you shoot them with a powerful crossbow adds far more to the general experience. You actually feel like your attacks are powerful and they look like they're doing real damage, instead of the rather more detached combat of EQ2 and WoW, and I love it. There's little downtime, too, because any class is capable of resting and rapidly regaining HP and Stamina/Mana if they are out of combat. Fighting in AoC is exciting and satisfying, and I'm really not sure I'd be able to go back to WoW or EQ2 even after a mere 48 hours of AoC - it really is that much better...

The GUI was much less of a hit with me. It looks good, I'll grant Funcom that, but the functionality is poor even compared to WoW and far below what's offered by EQ2. Communicating is unnecessarily difficult, and the chat window is obtrusive and difficult to customise. I still haven't worked out how to add people not in the same zone as me to my friends list, or check if they are online. Inviting people to a party is cumbersome, and the group UI is poor at best. The inventory window looks nice, but when you try and check the stats of an item it often displays half of the stats window offscreen, and as you can't move the inventory windows you can't drag them away from the edge of the screen to rectify this. That been said, the map features are excellent, as they provide detailed and zoomable maps of the locations with quest NPCs and quest objectives clearly marked. It makes getting around and finding quest targets nice and easy, and essentially makes sites like Thottbott relatively obsolete now. But overall, the GUI is terrible, and I hope Funcom upgrade it soon.

Onto the player diary for levels 1-20.

Age of Conan, then...

The escapade with Everquest 2 has ended for the time being. Other commitments in my life took over just as Choraz reached his homeland, somewhat ironically cutting short his journey just before I actually got to do what I'd been looking forward to for the entire time I was playing EQ2 - actually exploring Kunark again (I got as far as the dock, and the monsters immediately around that).

And now, with my finals at university passing in the next week and me having a little free time on my hands, I decided to pre-order Age of Conan. I figured that I'd end up buying it anyway, so I thought I may as well get the in-game Rhino mount that came with the pre-order from Play.com. And now I'm sitting at my desk, typing this while I revise for my exam tomorrow. Age of Conan is now installed on my computer, which took the best part of two hours, and it is now downloading a 95 meg patch which should take the best part of an hour. But the servers are down for the next four hours anyway, as the official release date is not until tomorrow. I can't play it until 5pm anyway, when my exam is done, but rest assured I'll be firing the game up pretty quickly after getting home.

You can expect an in-depth blog of my experiences in Age of Conan, much like what I posted for EQ2 over the last year or so. I will probably pop back to Everquest 2 and have a look around Kunark for a month at some point in the future, but for now I'm going to be concentrating on Funcom's latest effort. Let's just hope Conan proves to be all that it's cracked up to be.