Well, the game has been out for a month received a lot of patches and far more complaints. So is this Vanguard 2 or is this just the normal problems every MMORPG goes through.
Funcom is also the company behind Anarchy Online, and the y have admitted that they handled that game very badly indeed and that customer support was not what it should have been.
Has Funcom learned its lesson?
No.
So how bad is it?
Dark and Light was so bad that it still doesn't work with ATI cards.
Vanguard was so bad at launch that not only did it crash constantly but people kept getting stuck in game and needing customer support to get out of it.
Compared with that, Age of Conan is fairly decent. If anything I am reminded of Star Wars Galaxies, lots of promise, some daring attempts at something new but lots of missing content and basic elements not working as they should. Oh and the engine pushing your hardware to the limit.
But both SWG and Vanguard had one thing that AoC does not and that is SOE's customer support. In Vangaurd if you got stuck once again you could at least count on a GM to help you in under half an hour. Customer care requests in AoC just ain't answered at all. No in half an hour, not in half a day, they simply do not seem to have any staff at all. Countless reports of people being in cue for a day and the cue simply not moving.
A fictional walk through to the bugs
Create your new character, select a female in a see through bikini with freckles. Awake on island without freckles and a purple bikini. Get told to free a damsel in distress, be amazed to find that you as a poor girl attack slower with daggers then a male.
Well you are a woman so of course you do 25% less DPS then a male, that is why you got boobies although what happened to you nipples? Surely a girl your age has bigger ones?
But no fear, take out your aggresion on the enemies with this wild new combat system that sees you hitting one of three keys depending on where some ugly graphics are hovering beside your enemy. If | is the enemy and { is a shield then do attack from the right or left in this case {{{|
Oh yes, from the right how good. But don't worry, in game the shield can be above as well. Challenging yes?
But there are combo's right? Yes indeed, select a skill and a list popups with the direction you got to attack in. At later level you got to press more then one in the right order.
What you got to press stays the same so yo can easily create a macro for it. Offcourse combo's that end with an attack direction where the enemy isn't shielding do the most damage but is this really all there is?
Yes, this is the new combat system that was supposed to change the way we play MMORPG's. Lets just say that in practice it really doesn't.
Casters, you just select skills, only at level 50 do you get spell weaving. If you can be bothered.
Questing
You might get the impression from your first quest giver that there are different paths to take, perhaps an alignment system or a seduction system. Sorry, no. A handful of quest givers refuse to give you a quest if you say the wrong thing but there is no global effect to this. Also while plenty of female NPC's will flirt with the player, regardless of their sex, none actually put out. Once you leave Tortage voice acting also dies out. The questing stories are more intresting then in WoW and the chat options make it slightly more intresting then just reading some text in a quest window but by and large, this is just another MMORPG.
In fact the option to choose various responses makes it all the clearer how on-rails the quests are. When for instance a NPC wishes to sacrifice a slave girl to rescue a loved one you can say "so what let him" but are not allowed to follow through on that. You WILL walk the straight and narrow even in the world of Conan.
A welcome addition to the genre is that quests and their locations are very clearly marked on the map. Might take some of the fun out of questing but at least the chat channel isn't filled with people asking for directions. Well it is filled but not overflowing.
Grouping
Funcom is NOT Blizzard, this is NOT just another MMORPG so they don't have a LFG channel. Instead you are supposed to use a tool to find people and invite them blindly. What, you think inviting people blindly is rude? Why yes, so do most players. Anyway, the tool is bugged, showing people that are not online, not showing those who are online and whether they actually have LFG turned on is a crap shoot. Days after I switched it off I finally got someone asking me because they found me.
Even if you find a group, the whole game is instanced so you might be in the same zone but in different versions of it. Finding the right one was only recently partly fixed, after months of beta.
Then groups disband for no reason, if you Disconnect through one of the inevitabl crashes you are kicked but shown as grouped and can't be re-invited.
Looting
Funcom promised 1500 different armour sets. Well, there are a lot of armor sets in the game. On the NPC's. For players only a handful of different sets drop, all with seemingly random stats meaning you can easily find an item at level 10 that you keep to level 42.
Inventory space is split between quest items, resources and loot but the actuall space and amount of loot is so unbalanced that half way through any resoanable quest you will be leaving loot lying around. For those with out an extra bag from the Collectors Edition or Pre-Order things must be really bad.
Graphics
Here the game shines but at a price. Tortage is generally a mess, the graphics too busy/noisy to give a good impression. If it all was a little bit smoother it would be okay but if you constantly have to wait for NPC's to be loaded or if the NPC you are talking to constantly is in low-res textures when he was in high-res outside chat... well again, it sounds like Vanguard. Blizzard sure got it right with WoW by using an engine of Today for the computers of Today!
In variable you will get a memory leak leading to things like the map no longer loading, time to reboot because a crash isn't far away.
Continue on the main land
Tortage is now behind you and the most polished part (forgetting the ruins and the countless bugged NPC's for a moment) is now but a distant memory.
On the whole the mainland looks absolutely gorgeous and if you are willing to explore there are plenty of quests and most of them are even interesting enough to bother to read. Yes you will be collecting a lot of flowers, yes 99% of the population seems unwilling to do their own job but that is standard RPG fare.
Just be ready for Everquest 2 style cueing for a boss. Respawn rate is slow, although the game thankfully doesn't have EQ2 style (respawns only if you killed X, pushed Z and it is a monday). Grouping is rare although it makes the game a lot more fun. Depending on your class you can either bother to try find other weirdos who think multiplayer means playing with others or just steam roll through the content on your own. 99% is solo friendly.
A fair few quests are bugged, mobs not spawning, items not dropping, broken scripts etc etc. If a quest ain't working out a quick trip to the forum will set you right. Fixing them seems not a priority at all with Funcom. Don't bother contacting a GM, they ain't there.
Sometimes you will fall through the land, just use path of asure (bind location) and if you are stuck falling log out, wait a bit and try again. Don't bother contacting a GM, they ain't there.
You will also be gold spammer, don't bother contacting a GM, they ain't there.
Reporting bad names on the RP servers? Don't bother contacting a GM, they ain't there. I am sure you getting the idea by now.
Fast travel
The game is basically a series of zones connected through each other with big "hub" cities in between although some hubs only have 2 exits. The stygia capitol connects to the stygia quest zone and to the Aquilonian capitol. What this means that the main areas are in long line of each other and when a quest send you to Khemi to Cimmeria you got a LOT of walking to do.
Yes walking. Horses ain't available till level 40 and you won't be able to afford on until much later. Fast travel is ONLY available in the form of a single spot you can bind to and then only in certain areas.
The suicide express is making a come back to make travel across zones faster.
Why Funcom didn't implement a fast travel system is hot ly debated topic. The cynics think it is because nobody at Funcom ever played the game, or indeed any game, so they never saw the need. Other think they just hate gamers with a passion.
Maybe you are not supposed to travel? Possible but then remember that Stygian's can be soldiers and the rest can't be mages so you would have entire zones missing an entire class if people did not go outside their own area.
Crafting
At level 20 you can pick up some harvesting skills each giving you a quest to collect twenty items. Fair enough and fairly easily done. When you deliver them you get another quest, to collect a single rare item from the same source. When they say rare they mean rare. 50 attempts? Nothing. 100 Attempts? Nothing. 200? 400? 700? Nada. It is entirely random and even the biggest optimist's think it is 1:100. Be smart and only select those skills you need for you crafting proffesion.
Crafting starts at level 40 and the items make you have you have wonderful flashbacks to Tortage and your loot because they have the same stats. Just these crafted items can only be worn from level 40 instead of level 10. Yes they suck. You can upgrade them with jewels but the stats of jewels are pretty bad as well. Only an extremely unlucky player who didn't complete any quests will have need of crafted armour. It is not even as if the look is any better, you can buy all crafted armour with the same stats from NPC's at only slightly higher cost.
There are also some small trivial bugs like hovering over a gem equipped item crashing the game instantly. Hardly worth making a fuss about, a bug that always happens to everyone in a critical part of the game could after all hardly have been spotted in beta could it? Just contact a GM to fix... oh wait, no GM's in the game... (to be honest this has been fixed, 3 weeks after launch).
DX10
This is the first DX10 MMORPG and many will defend it as such. Shows you all about fanboys you need to know since the game right now only supports DX9.
Conclusion
As you might gather I am fairly negative about this game.
So first some positive things.
- This is the first western MMORPG with a mature setting, there is nudity, there is violence, good people die and evil people do not. You can not always safe the day.
- The graphics look amazing, from your own character to the world itself to your mount, this is the most beautiful MMO to date.
- If you tweak the settings and have a decent machine it does actually run at an acceptable speed. Nobody ever said this wasn't going to require a monster machine.
- The quests are often well written, interesting and you can if not be an asshole at least make some nasty remarks.
But now the negative.
- The game crashes constantly due to memory leaks.
- Corruptions occur with mail, your character, your bank, basically it is a bit of a crap shoot what the game will remember. Most of this is improving but mail and your bank should just work. Bank/mail wasn't even available on launch.
- Quests/instances are bugged leading to content you are unable to complete.
- PvP balance is completely missing. MMORPG's are always difficult to balance because of the large number of different combo's players can be but this is setting a new low.
- PvE balance leaves a lot to be desired as well, although a lot of players are mature enough to play the class they want to play, not just the hot one of the week.
- Patches, patch notes that weren't posted until hours later because they had to be translated making it clear the patch notes were NOT finished at the time the patch was finished and it went into testing. How long was the patch tested? Early results seem, not at all.
- Proudly announcing spelling fix for a class when the bug that females of the class do 25% less damage goes unfixed since launch.
- GM support in game totally absent, not just slow but cue of petitions not moving for hours. Petitions deleted after four hours automatically might be the only reason the cue moves at all.
- The "mature" setting means little more then some fatality moves and naked breasts. Their is no evil path and no sex.
Most damning of all
All of the above, and there is much more damn the game enough already BUT AoC could still be something if not for one simple fact.
Funcom is NOT a newcomer to the industry. They are the company behind Anarchy Online a game that suffered an equally atrocious launh and subsequent lack of customer support in handling customer complaints.
With promises of lessons learned customer approached AoC and found out that Funcom really has not learned a single thing.
My recommendation
AoC has a lot to offer BUT take a lesson from history. Read up on Anarchy Online. Why buy AoC now when it is so likely that soon enough you can play it for free.
There are other MMORPG's on the market that are more polished and upcoming MMORPG's that are more groundbreaking.
Apart from the "mature" setting AoC really just is another game in a long list of could-have-beens.
If you absolutely must, be ready for a bugged game with no working customer support and a player base that is slowly but surely going to waste away as they give up or are drawn in by other games.
Yes, there is a possibility that Funcom can turn things around. The initial sales have been extremely succesful, reports of 1 million copies sold, so they might have the money to fix things but... history to often repeats itself. AoC and AO, perhaps The Secret World will be better, third time is a charm right?
Stay away unless you absolutely must run around in the nude!
