Age of Conan Comments by Rob Fahey

oh yeah i have my game :D

Not as good as Age of Conan then.

Not as good as Age of Conan then.

Heh. :)

I reinstalled it last night, and logged in for the first time in a year or so, and I immediately had fun again simply slicing my sword through mobs. It might not have the scope and charm of Warhammer or WoW, as Rob says, but there's imemdiate, visceral fun to be had. As opposed to all other MMOs, it's satisfying as an action game. And boy, is it ever pretty now. It's just so far ahead technically of anything else (bar EVE maybe, but including Aion).

Whether I make any long-term commitments will of course depend on other factors.

It's like this with all MMO's, shouldn't come as an suprise. It takes a while before they really get the game to were it's supposed to be.

@UncleLou

It might be more technically accomplished, but Aion is more beautiful. Its one thing to have the tech, but useless if you don't have decent art direction.

I'm in the process of installing a years worth of updates to AoC as i got one of those welcome back emails. Looking foward to seeing if post 20 has a better feel about it and if its been brought more into line with the Tortage stuff. Which i actually enjoyed.

I really don't like Tortage. It's my least favourite starting area in any of the many MMOs I've tried. I don't really like the whole single-player thing in my MMOs, break my immersion somewhat.

But I could see the attraction though, some of the classes are quite novel, and the gameworld is certainly nice to look at. It just isn't for me though, but I'll give it a chance for the free month. I might change my mind :)

It might be more technically accomplished, but Aion is more beautiful. Its one thing to have the tech, but useless if you don't have decent art direction.

I don't like the art direction of Aion at all, admittedly - it's generic asian pastel-fantasy kitsch, in my opinion - now AoC isn't much better, either, but certainly not worse.

"Hmm. I grabbed one of the free keys and registered, but I see no sign of a download link on the AOC membership web site. Anyone? "

I only found it once registered, but I pre-loaded it from another site. They say they give you a couple of extra days to account for the download if you use their site, but other sites like gamershell.com have it should you want it from somewhere else.

Having that tattoo actually done on her face would seriously hurt.

I''m not a MMO kinda gamer, but there's still 557 keys left... 9 comments here... that does not look good does it?

I don't like the art direction of Aion at all, admittedly - it's generic asian pastel-fantasy kitsch, in my opinion

Have to agree there. I felt like I was on some LSD trip playing that game. Had to uninstall or puke. The creature design is rather nice though.

Will try Conan again.. got the 2 week email. Seems like a much better game now.

So it wasn't an 8 - best get back and review a whole load more games?! :P

P.s. FIFA 09 says "hi" ;)

Bit disturbed by the "it's not as good as WAR or LOTRO" comment, which is, one one hand, completely unsuprising, but having played and left both of those, this is probably skippable too.

sigh.

wherefore art thou, new MMO of my dreams:(

Hmm, got key, but not sure I want to have a look yet and start the timer ticking.

Don't like having to give the renewable subscription details for trying it either in truth.

@Krusty

you can cancel your sub soon as you've signed up.

Might give this a chance once I get a better computer then. Loved Anarchy Online back in the day...

10/10 for cleavage

I got my key and will be giving this a go sometime soon! ;)

Reads like a 6/10, scores a 7/10.

I think the review nails it though - I gave up because I got bored with it, despite trying a variety of classes. It's just too shallow and simplistic to be a real AAA class MMO. I think it's obvious from the retention rate that I'm not alone in seeing that, as the current population is, what, about 10% of the box sales?

"Unlike most modern MMOs, Conan doesn't have a contiguous continent that you can just walk across - in fact, it doesn't always even have geographically continuous zones with load delays between them."

This make me cancel my download! I do not want see any loading screens between content other them the ones in WoW! Blizzard did it 4 years ago there is no other MMO that was able to do it later!!

WoW wasn't the first. Sheesh. I see nothing wrong with load screens, this also allows them to add new areas in between if they want to. Which they couldn't do if the land was all one area.
Heck, even LotRO has load screens between some areas.

It's a review of Age of Conan as it stands today, this week - of the experience that you'd have if you played the game with fresh eyes.

The first thing you'll notice is that the number of servers is altogether more modest than it was originally.

Good work there. So going in as a complete newb you notice there are less servers. :D

Can I have my Darkfall re-review now please?

"Can I have my Darkfall re-review now please?"

So it can get a 1/10?

Yes, where is the Darkfall re-review?

Just so we can have another comments thread that upholds the best Ballardian traditions of deriving entertainment from wreckage.

There is not going to be a Darkfall re-review.

And this review was actually really good. Even though I've only tried the trial on for a few minutes I'm certain this game is not for me. I'd rather stick my guns to WoW and Lotro a little while longer.

I had two major issues with AoC when I played it - one, the travel from zone to remote zone got very tedious, with interminable sequences of walk->load->walk->load... two, the balancing of the underlying game system was atrocious, there were significant changes as you levelled, but items would alter very little, crafting was plain broken, and you had some big tuning gaps where you got super-characters (Tempest of Set for a long time had an AoE which could stun for as long as its recharge time for example).

It sounds like they had a go at fixing the gear influence problem, but more to the point, it ultimately didn't really feel like Conan to me, there was just something missing that meant it didn't have that barbaric flavour. There's nothing here that'd make me go back to AoC, tho i might try Aion when it comes out...

"but to me it still feels like a technological step backwards and breaks the world up too much, making it feel like a selection of game levels."

Nail on head.

"his WotLK review was simply horrendous."

What was wrong with it? WotlK is an incredible game. The DX10 update is really tempting as I shelled out on a fairly nice machine last month. What does put me off though is a 30-40 gig download.... I'm sure it was on Play for £6 a few months ago so I'd rather have it for virtually nothing off there.

Cool story, bro


:)

No seriously. Not a bad re-review. I'm gonna try AoC out now. I loved the melee combat so much that merely sneaking around and killing people is reason enough to subscribe. ARRGH I really need to get my gaming rig built. playing AoC on laptop is fail in so many ways.

Btw, walking in AoC has always felt awesome. By walking I mean walking, not the automatic jogging you always start in when you play MMOs. LotRO for example has horrible walking.

"I - foolishly - scored the game on its potential"

Don't you guys have some standards on how to review a game. I'd think "review for what is there, not what might be" would be one of the basic ones.

Well I think AoC rocks!!!

Nice re-review. I always liked that Eurogamer owned up to some of it's mistakes, and to be fair it seems your review on the "potentials" wasn't that far off considering the similar scoring. ^^

I'm about to give it a second try myself as I've finally been able to get it to run! On advice from one of my twitter pals I altered the atmospheric particle (like removing fog and smoke which my card hates :( ) settings and now I'm able of getting 40-60fps out of it on my rusty old rig even in the captiol. \o/

EG's AoC Players - Making Darkfall Players Look Rational Since 2008.

Excuse me for being pissed-off at Funcom for their lies.

But you go right ahead and keep chugging it down if that's what you gets you off.

NERDRAGE

Point proven.

Indeed.

Having sunk about a week's worth of playtime into AoC and Darkfall recently, I can easily say that if today's AoC is a 7/10, today's Darkfall is 8/10 or better.

The (free?) expansion is looking incredible.

more like age of crashes..
cant even get this damn game to install keeps getting appcrash during the patch download . and the technical support cant do shit about it ..

egpaidlol

Monkeyrude wrote:

"EG's AoC Players - Making Darkfall Players Look Rational Since 2008."

To that i would reply:

Monkeyboy - Making most internett trolls seem objective an rational since may 2008.......

Did you get a key 1Semen1? Have you played it yet?

I think you should.

Monkeyinfant:

It's time to let it go. Move on in life. Play your beloved LOTR. Let people that enjoy AOC do so in peace.

You bougth a game, did'nt like it. It's not the end of the world.

You are off course entiteled to continue your trolling, it's your rigth. It is getting rather pathetic though.....

So you haven't played it yet, 1semen1?

You must have, because otherwise it would be silly to dedicate so much of your time to one single pursuit on this site: namely, looking for my comments on AoC then posting replies to them and doing nothing else here BUT that!

So how did you like it? I'd like to discuss it with you and see how your views of the game vary from mine (and as you'll now see, a lot of other Eurogamers who also didn't enjoy it) so we can get a better understanding of each other's point of view.

Monkeysad:

1: Still haven't played it. Same reason as before. No time in my life for a MMO at the moment. To much work.

2: Finding your comments in an AOC thread is not hard they are all over the place.

3: You haven't played the game since july/August last year making you opinion obsolete.

4: Most of your gripes with the game is long gone. I'll give you one thing though. The basic design with zones and instansing is still there. If you don't like that fair enough. It doesn't make the game bad though. That is a matter of taste. I probably wouldn't like that myself.

5: Why do i single you out? You annoy me with your singleminded bile. Never liked trolls.

AOC will have its place in mmo's history, the biggest screw up. It will never be the game they promised, not even close. As soon as the new MMO's start to come out, AOC will have no place in the market. Shame to see such background potential thrown away.

Vanguard was without doubt the biggest screw up in mmo history. AoC comes in 2nd place.

So you haven't played it yet 1Semen1?

I think you should before you comment, otherwise you make yourself look foolish.