The latest Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game hit seems to be FunCom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.  With already an impressive 700,000 subscribers, AoC appears to be a worthy challenger to the MMORPG throne on which World of WarCraft currently sits.  I spent the past 30 days with Age of Conan and my avatar, Bewbs, chomping the bandwidth of my otherwise smooth-running PC, and I’m now ready to tell my tale.  Prepare to hear the lamentations of my womens.

I find myself on a slave ship in a pretty blue bikini.  My name: Bewbs.  My game: a magic-casting Tempest of Set.  I look around, check out my sweet holding cell and awesome shackles– Oh snap!  My boat just totally crashed!  Lucky for me, I survive and wash up on shore, free from my slave master… for now.  So, now what do I do?

A nice man gives me a quest that basically leads me down a series of paths that ends at the town of Tortage.  Along the way, I rescue some chick and kill the dudes that captured her.  She promises to repay me when we get to town and hints at sexual favors.  Sweet, lesbian action!  Or not… That lying bitch completely disappears from the town, or she’s just very well hidden.  Trust me when I say that I really wanted to see where this was going and searched high and low for my “payment”.  By the time I left Tortage 20 levels later, I had still not received my reward.  What a gyp!

At this point, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about.  For some reason, the loot system in AoC involves money bags that are dropped by whatever I kill.  Why the fuck is a gorilla carrying around a money bag, and would a gorilla actually store his bananas in one?  Also, why is it that I can’t loot any bananas from the bunch of bananas sitting next to that tree, which is next to where the gorilla I killed just came from?

It’s very confusing to know what you can and can’t loot unless you mouse over everything.  Lootable chests look very similar to the hundreds of other non-lootable chests, and occasionally there will be some random thing lying on the ground that you can pick up, like a broken bottle, that you would never know you could pick up unless you happened to mouse over it.  Dumb!

I also have a problem with some of the quests and the way monsters respawn.  I had a quest to go get some rocks, but the area where the rocks were was overrun with bats.  I would kill a bat, grab a rock, and the fucking bat that I just killed had already respawned and attacked me!  Not only that, but the rocks take forever to respawn!

The very opposite was true of a quest where the goal is to kill a certain number of a particular creature, in which case they don’t respawn instantly like they do in places where you don’t want them to respawn.  Multiple people trying to accomplish the same quest at the same time often resulted in a lot of swearing, name-calling, and keyboard-smashing, and they took a lot longer than they should.

Perhaps this was done on purpose to help facilitate the Player vs. Player combat –  get everyone pissed off at each other so they’re more likely to want to fight.  Great job, FunCom.  You’ve succeeded.  That’s okay, though, because AoC seems really geared towards PvPers and seems less focused on PvE content anyways.  Not to say that the quests and dungeons are necessarily bad, but they pale in comparison to pretty much every other MMO since EverQuest 2.

Let’s get a bit more technical now, shall we?

The first thing you will most likely notice upon playing AoC is that it runs like ass. Anyone who didn’t purchase a top-of-the-line PC in the past year or so will likely find AoC unplayable. I have a 5.9 out of a possible 5.9 in the Gaming Graphics section of the Windows Experience Index that features in Vista. If you don’t know what that means, suffice it to say it means my PC is a gaming beast. Even with my killer rig, I only manage to eek out 18 to 20 frames per second on high settings.

The problem I have with this is that the graphics are not awesome enough to justify the hit in frame rates you take to get them. Turning down the graphics makes the game run smoother, sure, but then it looks even worse (obviously) and takes away one of the supposed selling points the game had in the first place. The only standouts are the water, which looks watery, and the character models, which have nice skin and musculature (and boobs).

The art direction itself might be a turn-off to some, but a much-needed revolution for others. This is not high fantasy. Even though there are mythical creatures and magic exists, the world is highly grounded in its realism. You will not see glowing lightning helmets and swords that are twice the size of the people wielding them. Trees look like trees, rocks look like rocks. There is no Mushroom Kingdom. For better or worse, this is very much not World of WarCraft.

Even ignoring these visual issues, the gameplay itself is fundamentally flawed.  The combat engine and realism are touted as the next big thing and a feature that sets AoC apart from pretty much every other MMO out there.  Unfortunately, I find them both to be lackluster, and at times, exceptionally irritating.

Instead of initializing an auto-attack and supplementing with your special abilities, AoC makes every swing a special ability.  More along the lines of Diablo or another hack-and-slash RPG, you need to click a button for every single move you make.  This serves to make combat more involved and exciting, as opposed to EverQuest where you click on your auto-attack and then go make yourself a sandwich.

This is a feature that I am both excited and disappointed with.  As you increase in levels, your directional attacks can be chained into combos and special moves.  The idea is great and works pretty well in practice; however, classes that do not rely on melee attacks don’t get much use out of the system, and thus, half of the players in AoC aren’t experiencing one of the main draws the game had going for it.  A better system of attacks should have been put into place to accommodate the caster classes, like throwing mini fireballs or something.

The constant combo attacking also seems unnatural with a mouse and keyboard. World of WarCraft players that have become significantly adept at spamming hotkeys (like Rogues) may be more adjusted to this style of finger finagling, but it just didn’t do me very well. FunCom is planning on bringing AoC to the Xbox 360, and it feels like the interface was designed with a controller in mind. I would actually be very interested to check out the game again on console and see how it compares.

On the realism front, AoC does a few things right, but an equal number of them are so very not right. In line with the realistic combat system, AoC offers a robust collision detection system.  The cool thing about this is that any swing you make will actually damage any enemy that happens to be caught within the arc of that swing.  Yes, that’s right — this system will allow you to damage multiple baddies with one swing of your massive two-handed +1 Broadsword of Level-Grinding.

This realism is also good in that swinging a massive two-handed +1 Broadsword of Level-Grinding actually damages the flesh it collides with. No longer does constant meat-chopping result in a flawless corpse. Instead, AoC is soaked in blood and dismembered body parts — if you really don’t like the look of that guy, cut his fucking head off. The opening cinematic even features a Monty Python-like scene where a dude gets his arm cut off but still decides he wants to keep attacking.

Bonus: King Conan upskirt shots!

The problem this collision system presents, though apparently intentional, is that people always get in my fucking way! Traipsing around town, I would constantly find myself unable to get through a doorway or go down a narrow alley without running into jerkwads that functionally roadblocked my path. I was even asked to give some criminally minded player some cash before he would get out of my way. Thankfully, all I had to do was show him my boobs and he was satisfied.

I also fairly consistently found myself getting stuck on corners and trapped behind tables. I then turn into a spacebar barbarian, jamming the jump key while spinning in every direction, just trying to navigate my way around a stupid bench. This issue is compounded by the low frame rates most people would be getting, and even at a decent 20fps, I still found my stuttering animations helped get me stuck on shit.

The one thing FunCom did to help alleviate some of this frustration is make it possible to shift through people if you are crouching… like a tiger. Crouching makes you “harder to see” (I put that in quotes because I never noticed what difference being “harder to see” made — I still get attacked by enemies from about the same distance). Unfortunately, it also makes you move slower than Stephen Hawking with a dead battery. This is great when people refuse to move (though flashing your tits is faster… if you have tits, that is), but it doesn’t do anything to keep that barstool from grabbing your knee and not letting go.

Along the same vein, I had an issue with mountains, even small ones.  There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to where you can go and where you can’t.  On the beach, I walked up on the rocks, which were no more than 10 feet high or so.  Upon getting to the top, I couldn’t walk down the other side of the rocks.  This made absolutely no sense at all.  I could go back down the way I came, walk around the rocks, and then walk up the other side of the rocks and stand on the same point I was standing before.  I just can’t, for whatever reason, walk over the peak of the rocks. Dumb!

On very large mountains, however, I ran into the opposite problem.  I could walk over the peaks of some areas, only to find myself unable to walk on a flat fucking surface and ending up stuck.  Momentarily stuck, that is, as turning once again into the Spacebar Barbarian would usually lead me to clip through the mountains and fall to my death.  I did, however, once fall about 200 feet and take no damage, but I landed in the middle of a group of enemies and they killed me anyways.  Glorious.

Continuing with the realism aspect, all of the animations in the game have been motion-captured. Again, the poor frame rates take away from the smoothness you should be noticing here, but the mo-cap animations are even present during conversations (which are also fully voiced). Talking to the head mistress at The Bearded Clam (tur-hur!) occasionally results in a slutty, can’t-stand-not-having-sex-this-instant kind of idle animation. Kinda hot, actually.

The animations should be considered a plus for AoC, but they instead detract from the overall experience. Much like Two Worlds, the transitions between the animations are jerky and unnatural, resulting in the whole uncanny valley effect that’s been a hot topic these past few years. Some of it just looks downright ridiculous. It’s strange to say this, but AoC actually suffers from bad acting, and I’m not talking about the voice work. Take a look at this video and see if you notice it (the first minute is just scrolling through the environment, but it gets better):

Being that this is an MMO, a lot of the aforementioned problems could be fixed via patches, which have been coming out on a weekly (if not more often) basis. Age of Conan was riddled with bugs and practically unplayable for about a week out of my 30 days, mostly due to a memory leak that would consistently crash my game after 20 minutes of play. A lot of these issues appear to have been dealt with, or at the very least the game was playable.

The classes themselves are being constantly tweaked. I noticed a few benefits, like removing the cooldown timer on my main attack spell, but some of the other classes were supposedly destroyed. Some people claimed their class is now completely worthless and decided to stop playing the game until it was fixed (but people say that after every patch in every MMO, so take that with a pound of salt). This ongoing change is one of the many factors that makes scoring a game like this significantly more difficult than any regular, non-persistent game.

Ultimately, the enjoyment you get from Age of Conan greatly depends on what it is about MMORPG’s that you’re into. PvP is very much the high point here, so fans of that type of gameplay would be well rewarded for putting the time in required to get to the end-game warfare. Reaching the level cap and then participating in full-scale guild vs. guild combat, fighting over land and resources, is really the heart of AoC. The traditional questing and level-grinding is not done as well here, or at least is not as fun, as the competition.

I do think FunCom has taken steps in the right direction by offering a mature-rated MMO, filled with the blood, guts, language, and sluts, that adult gamers have never had the option to experience before. I’m sure the game will get better over the years as the details are polished and patched, but as it stands now, Age of Conan really only has a somewhat particular audience. My 30 days are up, and I’ve decided not to continue my adventures in Hyboria. With the impending console release, however, I’m excited by the possibilities that may await me should I choose to return.

What does this score mean? Check out our review scoring breakdown.

Tags: age of conan, AoC, bewbs, funcom, Hyborian Adventures, PC, Review

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