Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

What's the first comment someone comes across watching some videos of the upcoming or new mmos? "WoW clone!!!" -5.. :p
Anyway this comment is not far from the truth, for most of the mmos out there, after all..
When Age of Conan (AoC) was released I was playing Warhammer's beta and was waiting anxious for it to be release.. By this time I hadn't eyes for anything else.. But then when Warhammer was released it just failed due to numerous gamebreakers, like bugs bad performance etc.. and while it was more appealing to me than going back to wow.. I didn't had another option.. (just to be fair, all this problems are part of a dark past and fixed by now)
By this time AoC had some major problems and lost it's big numbers.. I wrote it totally off as an option..
Then Aion was to be released.. and I pre-ordered the Collectors Edition.. by playing through to lvl 30 i realised that it can't satisfy my thirst for something new something alternative, not wow like.. none the less it got too grindy after 30..
I still can't understand how someone considers grinding to be a game mechanic -.-...
Anyway with no game to play and me denying to go back to WoW for a second time.. and tbh a bit tempted by the 5$ price.. I gave AoC a chance.

First I was a little bit cautious.. I didn't want a Warhammer dejavu again. I was positive surprised.
By the time I reached Tortuga, the first noob city, I was asked to join 2 pretty active guilds. Then the city was alive too, people running around constant pvp, Minigames, AoC's battlegrounds, starting every 5min.

The first quests you get to do are in a offline/ non mmo environment where you have to get off the beach and into the City. At this first stage you might think where the hell is everybody but as I said the game changes from solo to multiplayer throughout your first levels, so it might take a bit till you realize how alive this game is.

Then, you just have to love the rpg aspects of this game. You might have played the Gothic series, it's a favorite of mine especially the first two games, that's what AoC reminds me too.
All characters are talking to you, telling you through a conversation what you have to do, quests are interactive, your action triggers another story part i.e. you might change the blood of a ritual with the blood of a sinner leading to the explosion of the local volcan etc etc..

The fighting mechanic is unique. At first you might think it's hard to play, maybe inaccurate, compared to the wow clones out there.. But it's not.. It's a whole new gamestyle you got to get used to.. no auto-attack, no 1234 nukes you really feel more active in this game... if you think about that everyone is moving in PvP you realise that this game is more skillbased than anything else out there.. right positioning, breaking the combos of your enemy by moving at the right moment, triggering and doing your combo abillities this all requires a lot of training and skill..

That's as much as I have seen till now.. **Soon To be Continued**