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.