Age of Conan Review
It seems that World of Warcraft, has a worthy challenger in the MMORPG gaming arena that that is Age of Conan. This role playing game, from Funcom, is set in the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian, the Hyborian Age. As you might expect Age of Conan has all the sword bashing and spell casting pair with excellent graphics that you might expect from a quality MMORPG. It also has a new twist, it’s rated M for Mature which means that cursing is allowed in chats, you may encounter an unclothed NPC or PC and that the blood and gore generated by this hack fest aren’t held back.
review continued below…
Age of Conan is true to the genre. There is plenty of hacking and slashing action if you want it. It’s easy to get into a mode of moving quickly through the game slaying your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women. The features like you see in any top notch MMORPG are there as well such as quests, banks, auction houses and maps with quick travel. Ultimately the game is about building power over time. At this point, Age of Conan gamers are still building toward this so it remains to be seem how this will affect game play.
On the downside, you do need a really kickin’ PC to play this game. For best results you’ll need a fast dual core PC with 4GB of RAM and a really high powered graphics card like the NVIDIA GeForce 8800. The game will consume about 25GB of hard drive space. You probably won’t be playing Age of Conan on your work laptop, that’s for sure. Another downside is that there have been frequent patches and some of these haven’t worked quite right, such as with the recent Age of Conan Error 103 fiasco.
The bottom line is that Age of Conan is really the first worthy competitor to World of Warcraft’s dominance in the MMORPG market. The graphics and the play quality are excellent. The system requirements though are demanding and there is the worrisome fact of frequent patching. However, Age of Conan promises to be a truly fun MMORPG experience in spite of a few warts.
Are you insane. Seriously man. World of Warcraft has NO worthy challenger (NONE!) in the MMORPG gaming arena. And certainly not the Age of Conan. Please!
Okay the Mature feature is a nice addition, who doesn’t like to be cursed at while trying to relax and play a damn video game? And I love blood and guts. However Arnold ruined the whole Conan thing for me.
World of Warcraft rules, and Conan the Barbarian can kiss my ass.
Rhonda
Hi Rhonda,
WoW is showing its age a bit and it needs a challenge to its dominance of the MMORPG marketplace. Every market dominating company needs to have somebody give them a run for their money.
The Age of Conan milieu is an interesting choice of venue. They must have spent a pretty penny or two on the licensing for it. Even though you don’t like Arnie, the films have remained a big cultural influence in paper and pencil RPG’s and MMORPGs. As long as Arnie is in politics though we probably won’t see a King Conan movie that’s been promised for a while. I’ll bet you’re happy about that.
Indeed, WoW is most definitely showing its age and, aside from that, is completely hindered by its repetitiveness. Gets read old real fast.
The graphics - They look good from far and far from good.
Conan’s combat system is enough to out do WoW’s outdated..well, everything. Not to mention AoC’s graphics, crafting etc. WOW is out, AoC is in.. Come to terms with it =) Age of Conan guides have even started rolling out already.
Cheers,
Jay
Hi Jay,
I’m seeing the AoC gold market taking off as well, a lot like WoW. I think that’s one thing that amazes me about these games is that the commerce of them extends so far beyond the game environment itself.
Wow, I just wish I had a computer with 4 gigs of ram and 25 gig to spare, That just shot down my hopes of playing age of conan. Ahhh, I actually liked the Arnold films. I never tried WOW because I know I would be consumed by it. I just can’t afford to spend all my time playing another game.
Hi Jason,
I kind of prefer single scenario games, like Ghost Recon or Call of Duty, that can be over and done in a single sitting over long campaign games. Otherwise, like you said, I can spend a lot of time playing a MMORPG or even just a plain RPG game.
I’m sorry to say that AoC sucks badly.
I was really looking forward to it, to replace wow in my nightly downtime, but it has fallen short by quite a few proverbial miles.
The game is shallow, dull, pointless and repetitive.
The only good points really arn’t that good: the new combo system for the melee classes only (which gets old pretty quickly), the ffa pvp (if you’re into that, mass ganking included) and the apparently awsome graphics (which imo really are not that great at all - it just looks dull, 3.5 billion shades of grey with character/nps animations that look plain bad which destroys any immersion you may have had).
Add onto that the fact that the entire world is broken up into many small instances, which then have instances within those instances PLUS the fact that there is a severe lack of quests (ie. none) between 40-80, and also MANY of the GREAT NEW points of the game (sieges, pvp rankings, pvp loot, loot in general and craft) are all broken or completely non existent.
Sorry again… but the game sucks balls…
Hi AoCIsTehSuks,
It’s always good to hear different opinions.
I’ve heard a number of people complain about the lack of quests and the way Age of Conan game world is broken up into sections. And, as you mentioned, there seem to be a lot of bugs creeping in as the usage of their servers increase. Maybe their extensive beta test wasn’t as extensive as it should have been.
WoW is showing its age, but I wouldn’t really say that its down for the count. Hey, AoC is a good game and it is indeed a strong contender to WoW, but we’ll just have to wait if it will stand the test of time, especially when Wrath of the Lich King is released.