Good and bad things about Age Of Conan

hishadow

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I don't think any game have given me more conflicted feelings than this one, but anyway here's my bullet-point list...

The good:
- Absolutely ruthless melee combat. The joy of getting a fatality with your mace, forcing your enemy down on their knees and cracking their skull open never gets boring.
- Character customization. Top notch. Ability to create truely unique characters (or maybe not when you've put all the sliders to the min/max, hehe).
- Art direction. Well, they did have ALOT of source material to work with, but alot of what ended up in the game it quite good.
- Music and sound, mood-setting throughout the game.
- Quest design for early levels. Many complained that this essentially ruined quests in later levels, but I still found many of the latter quests interesting.
- Early exploration. While you're on foot for the first time, the game does give you a sense of adventure.
- Healers.

The bad:
- No sandboxing. In the early levels this won't bother you much because your busy questing and exploring the world for the first time, but as you progress through the levels and aquire your first mount, you start to notice how small the disconnected areas are (actually duplicated areas when too many players enter an area). Some friends of mine stopped playing early on because of this and in retrospect I agreed this was a bad choice (Warhammer Online also gave the same feel, even though they didn't duplicate areas). In my opinion a warning-sign for future MMORPGs.
- Too large in scope. PVE, Raids, PVP, all at launch. It had to break somewhere, and it broke everywhere.
- Graphics performance. To get the full appreciation of the art you needed the latest and greatest in hardware. I did have it, but the game still made my hardware kneel under the pressure of streaming the enourmous datasets for the game. But in all fairness, nothing close to Ultima IX, hehe. Maybe they should have opted for an optimized less graphical-fidelity (I'm thinking amount of polygons/shaders/textures since automatic level-of-detail cannot (yet) substitute an artist)?
- Dungeons and bossfights. Maybe just a result of the number of dungeons being shipped, but also because fightning in general can be a bit simplistic (lack of auxiliary abilities).

The ugly:
- Bugs. Well, they come in different varieties and sizes with C/C++.
- XBOX version. How the hell are they even going to patch this thing? :D I'm pretty sure the decision to make a console version resulted in some stupid design choices/constraints.

Oh well. Atleast I had "some" fun playing this game...


 
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Joined
Mar 30, 2008
Messages
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Location
Scandinavia
I just got back into AoC. I don't have as much time to play as I like but I am finding a lot of improvements since it came out (almost anything would have been). Combat, Theme, Avatars (one word HOT!), atmosphere, and music are all things I like. Things I don't would be the overly used instances, poor tools for guild management and other GUI problems, lack of leather harnesses and jock straps at the higher levels ...course I see this in every game though.

But playing it now and having fun. Resurected a GLBT guild that had died when the game first came out so that also gives me something to do .. although we could use some company :)
 
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