So, the period of reviews has begun for Age of Conan. AtomicGamer serves a review calling it the "best MMO since WoW":
More information.Just because you can run WoW at 25fps, though, doesn't mean you'll necessarily be jumping for joy in Conan. The system requirements are about as brutal as a two-handed mace crushing a skull into little bits, or at least it might seem like that on your three-year-old laptop or $500 budget PC. Just about any CPU that's either dual-core or the equivalent of 3GHz or better should be fine, and while 1GB RAM is the official minimum, I'd consider 2GB to be a much better starting point - and if you're running Vista, consider 2GB the flat-out minimum. Once the CPU and RAM are at a decent level then a solid video card is the biggest measure of the game's performance, especially if you start turning up draw distances, screen resolution, antialiasing, and more in the game's Video Options. The requirements list an Nvidia 7950 GTX under its recommended system, but I'd say that's closer to being a bit above a good minimum. If you're trying to play at high resolutions with the detail set to High, don't even show up without an 8800-level card.
But once you get that together, you will know where that upgrade money went. Conan has fantastic textures and plenty of great art, with sprawling cities and interesting NPCs (many of which have decent and/or amusing voice acting attached). It also comes at a cost of hard drive space as well, though: Age of Conan is almost 25GB fully installed. But that's miles and miles of high quality textures all over everything, and as long as you have the machine to be able to see it all, you'll be duly impressed with how the game looks.