Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Waste of time"

I started playing Age of Conan a while before the release - with early access. Around that time I was tired of WoW, it got repetitive, so I was eager to try a new game. Given the hype, it had to be good... right?

Right, I receive the key code, find out I have to pay another 5 euros for Early Access. I think, "no biggie", and I paid. Anyway, since I didn't have my CD yet, I was told that I could download the game. Nuhuh. The Early Access starts may 21st, but not for me, apparently. I had to wait 3 more days before I could download the game. After that finished downloading, which took almost 8 hours, I started the install. 3 hours later I was happy and fired up the game. Of course, there were patches. However, these patches were almost as big as the game itself. So, after literally spending 14 hours on patches, I was finally able to play. I login, create a nice Guardian and start playing.

I found myself in a beautiful world called Tortage. While I was enjoying the view, I was interrupted by the lovely system message saying the servers would go offline in 5 minutes. This happened A LOT during the first 1-2 months, especially Early Access. I told myself, it's ok, it's the release of an MMORPG, they're all buggy. The difference with AoC was that it would never move out of the release. They didn't fix anything.

On to the content. Level 1-20 is fun, good gameplay, nice questline. There's even voice acting! So after hitting 20, having a lot of fun, I went to the 'real world', where there's no more single player. Things went downhill very, very fast from there. Imagine a nice village in a valley. Somehow, there's a small wooden door between the village and the valley. Not a village gate, no, a small door which my Guardian barely fit trough. I thought to myself, okay, odd, but okay. Oh and the voice acting disappeared out of nowhere.

Anyway, when the loading finally finished (it took ages even on the best PCs), I entered Conall's Valley, only to be greeted by a couple of high levels who would kill me in 1 shot. I thought okay, pvp server comes with a price. However, they had a nice friend standing at the resurrection shrines. You resurrect with about 25% HP, and you get killed again. And again. And again. Not a very nice greeting for a new player, but I was used to it from WoW.

So after playing in Conall's Valley, which was graphicly stunning, by the way, for a while, I noticed that the quests were getting more and more repetitive, and the bugs were getting worse. Up to about level 40 you have the generic quests, much like WoW. After that, you simply started running out of quests. The basic settings for leveling was like this:
Quest: Kill 20 Vanir XXX (this was repeatable, and the only available)
Setting: 2 camps, each with 5 Vanir
Players: about 25 per instance

You can imagine that doesn't work. Anyway, I fought my way trough and even discovered a small bug that helped me level up to about 55. I went to some new zones and I thought the problem was gone. Something was gone... quests. Now there was the lovely way of leveling that uses the Villas in the Noble District. It was an instance based on your level. These villas were pretty much the only way to level up from 60 to 80. You literally had to grind this XP, in the villas. The villas were exactly the same, every single time. It was mind numbingly boring.

Instances. They fixed one or two in the end. But in the first 2-3 months? Nope. You'd have encounters bugging out, suddenly resetting in the middle of a fight, or respawning not 1 second after they had died, and so on. We spent a whopping 5 hours on normal Black Castle, which was so horribly bugged. Same for raids at level 80 - bugs, bugs, bugs.

They fixed some bugs, but all they did for about 5 months was fix the early content, up to about level 30. I think right now the only way for 60-80 is still villas. They didn't even fix the very extreme bugs, like the sound bug, which caused the game to crash whenever you entered a certain zone with sound turned on. So, no sound. Right, they didn't fix that. Instead, they fix some minor bugs with a monster that's slightly oversized.

Combat system. It was supposed to be great, but it's actually horrible for melee classes, mostly in PvP. To attack, you had to use a combo, pressing directions. There were about 4-5 button combo's, taking about 10 seconds to complete. Anyway, once you start a combo, you can't move, or it will end and not attack. So, you have to stay put for 10 seconds, giving any sane player more then enough time to step out of your radius and causing you to miss. Casters, however, didn't have this problem. They simply cast a few spells using the combo and their insane attack range to kill a melee player long before they could even think about hitting it.

Concluding, AoC was hyped up, but it failed miserably. It has a lot of potential, but the development does nothing with it. It remains to be a nicely wrapped piece of crap.