Age of Conan Reviews & First Impressions

[kenangm]

Reviews of Age of Conan is starting to appear around the world wide web. The overall impression is that AoC is a very good MMO.

AtomicGamer's review is calling it the "best MMO since WoW":

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.

Check out the full AtomicGamer review here.

Gamezone is another site that made a review, and they are also very positive. The final score is 9.4. This 'first part' review is centred on the first 20 levels of content that are the single/multi-player hybrid part of the game:

Every once in a while a game comes along that is bold enough to break the mold of the genre to which it is cast. The game takes some fresh approaches and gives players pause to re-think previous perceptions.

Age of Conan ? Hyborian Adventures, from Funcom, is one of those titles. This massively multiplayer online subscription-based title does some amazing things in terms of combat, rethinks character classes, incorporates a strong story, dazzles visually and is a whole lot of fun to play as well.

In order to do justice to this title, GameZone will be running the review of the game in several parts, breaking it into the major areas of the game. This first review will target the first 20 levels of the game, which amounts to an introduction to the combat system, character classes and general game flow. The next review, which will be down the road a bit (after the next phase has been explored more thoroughly), will take on the next 20 levels of gameplay, and so on. These reviews are at milestone areas in the game. At level 20 the guild experience kicks in. At level 40, crafting comes into play. The game does have a level cap of 80.

Check out the full Gamezone review here.

Eurogamer posted their "Verdict" of the first days playing Age of Conan:

We expected one other factor to be holding us back. After the beta test proved to be an unstable, resource-hungry, slow and jerky mess that required constant patching and server downtime, we feared the worst for the bloodthirsty upstart. Age of Conan would simply not be ready to be thrust upon hundreds of thousands of demanding gamers this week, we thought. We were wrong.

In actual fact, the Norwegian developer and game operator has pulled off one of the smoothest MMO launches in history. We've been playing the retail version of the game since last weekend, and it has been largely bug-free and effortlessly playable, running reliably and at a fair lick of speed. The transition from limited early access to full-blown launch in the US earlier this week went well, and there's no reason not to expect the same in Europe today.

Only persistent problems with players getting stuck in one mid-level zone, Lacheish Plains, have blotted its copybook. It's still hardly accessible - you'll need an ocean of hard-drive space, the latest drivers and Windows updates, some patience with patch downloads, and preferably a ton of RAM and a beefy graphics card, if you want to play Age of Conan. Once you're in, though, you'll get what you paid for. In purely technical terms, we've no hesitation in recommending you play it from day one.
That, of course, is only one of many sides to this story.

Check out the full story here.

[hendricius]

Thanks for the first review. Are you playing it yourself?