Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Is King Conan worthy of your monthly tribute?
The odd thing is that, despite the fact that Age of Conan is blatantly unfinished, we don't have any reservations in saying that it is one of the smoothest MMO launches we've ever seen. That may seem a contradiction, but it's not - rather, it's a fairly relevant criticism of how the MMO industry treats its early adopters in general. Conan, at least, has a stable - not to mention incredibly attractive - game engine, gameplay that works, and servers that stay up.
Hell, it's even got an endgame, for the small number of hardy souls (i.e. the long-term unemployed) who are touching the level cap already. The quality of the raid content hasn't really been explored in any depth yet; there are concerns about boss battles degenerating into massive melee scrums backed up by healers spamming area-of-effect spells, but it's equally possible that guilds simply haven't grasped the strategic aspect of the game yet. Only a little more time will tell on that front. However, for those at high levels, the options already exist for guilds to create their own keeps and so on - a hardcore, resource-hungry activity that may well keep people busy for long enough for Funcom to shore up any faults in the rest of the endgame.
For the majority of players, for whom the journey to level 80 will be more sedate, Age of Conan a somewhat unpolished and occasionally rough experience - but like Conan himself, this is a noble savage.
It's hugely impressive to look at, with enormous, sprawling vistas that look better than anything the MMO genre has previously turned up (although at a cost - you'll want 2GB of RAM, a dual-core processor and a mid-range graphics card for this, at the very least). The lack of any consistency in the world is disappointing, admittedly - compared to the free-roaming of WOW, it's inter-zone loading times are a huge step backwards, but it's forgiveable for the epic beauty of the zones and cities.
Age of Conan is also, crucially, enormously good fun to play. Great combat animations and fast, exciting gameplay are two things MMORPGs haven't traditionally been noted for, and Conan provides them in spades. For fans of lore, the game is also a goldmine, being absolutely full of great dialogue, interesting quests and solid background material.
We can, in some areas, see trouble ahead. The player economy concerns us, because there's no obvious gold sink in the game, and thus no apparent mechanism for controlling runaway inflation - which could kill that aspect of the game stone dead. The endgame, right now, is unproven, simply because not enough players have reached it yet. Even one of Conan's strongest points could be an Achilles' Heel of sorts - the intense nature of combat means that this isn't a game you can play with one eye on something else, as you can with levelling, gathering or doing daily quests in WOW.
In the next six to twelve months, Age of Conan will live or die on how successfully Funcom can address these issues. Right now, though, the game as it stands is a rough diamond - very good, bordering on great thanks to a regular stream of comprehensive patches from Funcom. Yes, King Conan deserves his tribute, but the peasants will be watching closely to see what moves he makes to secure his throne.