Age of Conan

Bought the Collector's Edition which has a very nice art book with over 100 pages. I'll keep updating this post too as I progress. I wanted to try AoC simply because WoW was getting a bit boring. I'll go back to WoW when WoTLK comes out because it's a fantastic game obviously but AoC seemed interesting enough to try in the meanwhile. I'll be making some WoW references here and there just because Blizzard has proven to us they know what people like in an MMO. Those of you wishing to express negative whines about WoW need not bother replying, the sales speak for themselves and you're the minority. Everyone has their own opinion of WoW but clearly it's a successful game, whether you like it or not.

This is about AoC however, so I'll try to stay away from WoW and try to express my views from a game design fundamentals sort of perspective. It'll be hard because WoW does so many things right.

Good points:

- Some very beautiful sceneries. It requires a bit from your system to ramp up the graphics but if you do then you'll get to enjoy some amazing surroundings. The problem is that it's inconsistent and at times you'll be looking at some very ugly walls.


Some nice surroundings.

- Story. The beginning grips you instantly and the entire storyline in Tortage is very nice. You get to know the problems of the people and help them out. You learn how they are related to each other and what their likes and dislikes are. They have personalities (partly thanks to the next point I list) and seeing their names fight alongside you in the end is very rewarding.

- NPC speech. The NPCs in the starter zone (Tortage) are voiced well. After that the minor NPCs only communicate through text. More story-centeric characters have speech still though. Anyway, the starting zone NPCs are interesting and have very varying accents. Their voices suit their builds/faces and some of them you may find annoying and some downright sexy. Captain Phoenic (can be found on top of the broken ship, drunk at night or sober during the day, near the path to White Sands Isle) had an especially interesting voice. The guard at Tortage's main gate is voiced especially well too. Having said that, some of them seem to have accents like they're from Uganda but their faces don't match exactly. But we've had enough stereotypes in games anyway so it doesn't matter. Redrik sounds like Erling Ellingsen. But maybe it's just the strong Norwegian crappy acting :)

- Fighting is fun but supposedly not for all classes in the beginning (Bear Shaman). I don't know how each character progresses, and I probably never will since I don't plan to play that long, but the more hands on approach seems cool. It's like you're playing Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero but fighting at the same time. Like Patapon but not as cute. These kinds of combinations bring a lot more to the table if they're done right, for example you could find counters to certain attacks and make attacks faster if done in the right order (lower left attack followed by an upper right attack). But Funcom hasn't focused too much on them in the PvP sense so this isn't an online Street Fighter by any means. I wouldn't expect MMO lag to allow such a system yet anyway. But even though characters also have collision detection, there are so many instanced areas lag isn't as big a problem as in other more open worlds. Then again, collision itself is a problem in some situations, like blocking doorways. More on that later.

- Resting. You get an ability called rest that you can use when out of combat. The ability has a 5 second cooldown which means you can use it pretty much whenever you want. It's like eating in WoW, all your stats replenish at a faster rate, except you don't have to pay for anything!

- Interesting areas. The areas that there are are mostly pretty nice. They flow well (linear though, very linear) and have moody places. However some paths come to dead ends and you wonder what the hell that was about. Maybe it's a place for future content, maybe not, but in a more open world you don't really mind blocked passages as you do in a game where you run down a linear path only to find there is no treasure at the end of the rainbow.

- Loading screens. They're very elegant and nice to look at and the design of the surrounding UI (bars on top and bottom, with info box on top left) is very simple yet to the point. It has 2 bars, one for content loaded from the server (yellow) and the other for content from your HDD (red), which is very nice. It also vanishes nicely when it has loaded your content. The only weird part about it is the picture with Conan looking at the player with a serious gaze. It's a slightly intimidating picture that gives an uneasy feeling and I wouldn't have included it. Obviously not everyone will care but Conan's head should be turned away from the player looking into the distance.

- Some interesting quests. The quests try to differ sometimes like making you talk to some people to find who the real thief is (detective work) or run through some checkpoints in time (sort of like a race), but ultimately it's the same "Go kill 10 boars" and after you run back the NPC says "Go kill 10 big boars", meaning those big guys next to the ones you just killed. And reading the quest text is quite boring unless you really want to get into the world so I just clicked through selecting the first option always knowing that it would end up with me getting a quest marker on the map and the conversation being over. Having said that though, there are some really funny conversations to be had so I wouldn't say the NPCs are boring, just that maybe taking away OOC chat and your UI drags you away from the gameplay itself too much and players tend to want to click through fast (I questioned people on general chat about this and nearly everyone skips quest textes, choosing the first option always). There's one very good thing though, and that is that if you are required to gather some kind of drop from mobs, they always have a 100% chance to drop it. 8 wolf pelts = 8 dead wolves. After the grinds you end up doing in WoW this was a VERY welcome change. There's a catch though, let's say you have to kill Rats for 10 Rat Teeth. Well, to make the quest last longer with this new system Funcom has situated 10 Rats in between a group of 40 Snakes. Along with the other people farming the area, it'll end up taking longer than you thought getting those Rat Teeth simply because you can't find 10 Rats.

- No repair costs. Enough said. However, feat respecs cost and it's not like you can be a damage dealing tanking class, you'll need to respec in order to do the other task like a professional. Note that the lack of real group and raid experience at this point still leaves me a bit open on this subject. Have to see how the game works at the later levels. Maybe.

- Quest map shows exact locations where to find what you're doing. No need for outside websites. Although, sometimes it's a bit odd and you don't see the end location of a quest but that might be just another scripting problem when making the quest (more on scripting later).

- Music. I'm glad they provided a soundtrack with the Collector's Edition because the music in this game is quite enjoyable. It was odd to hear a female voice actually singing (not any words, but singing nonetheless) but also very refreshing. The sound effects are also quite good (in addition to the voice overs as mentioned above). There is one funny thing though, when you play the soundtrack CD on the computer and look at the file info (through Media Player for example), the first track's artist section says "Blizzard.com" whilst the other tracks say "Knut Avenstroup Haugen" (the name of the guy who made the music for AoC, most likely including the first song). Somehow I don't think Blizzard.com made the first song and someone's been visiting rival MMO developer websites during development of AoC.

- Fonts. Yes the fonts are great. Clear, stylish, work well in different sizes, portray the world well, and so on. After you install AoC you also get a truetype font called Hyborian which you can use in Photoshop for example when you want to create your own Conan fan art, website or whatever.

- Funcom is updating their game. They really do want it to work. There are updates every 2 days (well, it's just the beginning, we'll see how well they keep it up) which might be annoying in a way because you have to download the newest patch always (I've downloaded an additional over 900mb now since installing) but they seem to fix issues that are annoying me. The newest patch added more familiar colors into the chat frame ("from other MMOs" in their words, which means "from WoW") and a few more tweaks. The chat still needs work (mainly the ability to customize channels better) but it's getting better. I doubt they'll get to fixing the more serious bugs in the game engine anytime soon though, and that's a letdown. More on those bugs below. At least they fixed a lot of the game since beta.

- Dying. Yes, dying. Because when you die you get resurrected at one of the checkpoints that you have to find for yourself. In an open (albeit slightly linear) world it works very well. You get a small debuff for 30 minutes but you can get rid of it by fighting your way back to where you died, assuming there are repops of course, and clicking on your tombstone that got left behind on death. Not everyone knows about this and they complain about the debuff on death but this is far better than paying for repair bills and being forced to run back to where you died. There is a downside though, and that's the fact that you can cleverly use dying as a means of quick travel too then. You get the debuff but it's not really that troublesome. Therefore I suggest making the debuff quite a lot more powerful. Another way of teleporting around, this time without even getting a death penalty, is by changing your instance. You can't pick the checkpoint you spawn at and it doesn't always spawn you on the closest one (I don't understand the mechanic in it really, I think it's bugged) but at least it gets you past repops of elite mobs after you've completed your quest and don't want to fight your way back through. Cheating or clever use of game mechanics, you decide. They won't ban anyone for it at least, although a change might be coming. Update: Instance changing has been fixed so that if you want to change instance you need to be within 5 meters of a resurrection point.

- Monster design is very nice. There are some very interesting designs and player characters are also fairly good, keeping in mind this is a low fantasy setting and thus strives a bit more towards realism. However, you don't have a lot of choice towards armor and thus classes at the same level tend to look similar to each other.

- Guild towns are a nice addition. Currently the areas mostly have just some foundations built for towns but the system is nice. You have instances of the world area (surprise surprise) and in each instance a guild can buy a certain area and build their town on it through vast amounts of minerals. That's why mineral veins are always empty though as I explain later. I'm eager to see the reality of how fun guild towns will be when people get them up and running fully and some guild warfare starts.

Bad points:

- It's not really an open world. First of all, everything is very linear. The first 20 levels are obviously meant to be like that but even when you get into the open world you're restricted to moving in a certain direction. There are maps and only a few exits for each map that have specific routes and loading screens between them. In addition to that, everything is instanced and you might not find your friend even though you're standing in the same place (so many people keep asking in chat about this, you have to actually change instances through a menu to get into the same one as your friend). It's like a linear RPG with servers for people to play together. The world itself is quite small too spread between around 8 adventure areas (where you kill enemies and level up with quests), 3 main towns (which vary in size a lot), 3 gathering areas (these are huge and boring with almost no enemies. they're meant for guild towns though so who knows if it'll be cooler later on), the dungeons (probably over 20 smaller instanced areas known as dungeons ranging from totally boring simple 1 texture caves to broken quests in broken dungeons to some OK designs) and Tortage itself where you start the game from. People like open areas more so I'd definitely go for a more open world experience. You can block progression easily with higher level monsters at the borders of new regions (those who REALLY want to see that region will try to find ways through, but even though it'll limit most people you'll want to give the player freedom). People seem to think the game only really begins when you get out of Tortage, I don't really get it because Tortage is a lovely zone. Leveling alts through it might not be as fun but at least there are 3-4 different general paths per culture/class, I forget which one it goes by. I don't really like the linear design though. What adds to the feel of this not being an MMO is the day/night cycle. Realtime is much better for these types of games. Now it's going at a 3x rate.


That's the entire world. You can only travel to the locations with icons and not really freely.

- Bigger bags cost a hell of a lot and the item tooltip doesn't even say how many slots you get.

- Items. I understand the desire to not end up with +34482 strength at the level cap but starting out from 0.1 is a bit awkward. It's clearer to have whole numbers so why not do that. Also, some items require a higher level than the one you currently have on and yet have the same stats. It's like they didn't create enough stat progression documents to describe exactly how much items are supposed to be worth at which level. These stat progression documents aren't shown to the player obviously (just like iLvl, item Level, isn't shown to players by default in WoW) but they are a very good basis to see what stats you should have on items. Every stat should have a value and each level item should have a max value. You could stick as many stats as you want on the item but they can't go over the max value of the item level.

- The 3 main towns after Tortage are pretty terrible. Tortage as a starting zone is obviously built to be perfect all around which it mostly it without any half-assed graphical areas, but then you get into the real world and start finding where slacking came into play. The Stygian town of Khemi is absolutely terrible. Old Tarantia could look a lot better too with some better use of colors and textures, not to mention overall aesthetic design. Conarch village is a village, not much to it. The 2 settlements apart from Conarch have a good flow, meaning you get from place to place well. But Conarch is too linear and makes you run a bit too much. Sort of like Darnassus in WoW but even there the design is nowhere as linear as any given town area in AoC.

- System requirements to get decent graphics. I had to upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM to not go through loading hell each time I entered a town, but that was because of the high requirements for Vista x64. The graphics are sweet if you have everything on full, if you have everything on low.. I don't know how you could enjoy this game. I'm not one to hail graphics over gameplay but the gameplay here is a bit iffy overall. I liked the route Blizzard took with WoW once again where they conciously decided to cater to a wider market. WoW STILL looks amazing. But I'm not whining, AoC runs fine on my system even though it's got Vista. It's just a design decision and I think Unreal Engine 3 looks a lot better than AoC and runs at much smoother framerates due to excellent optimization.

- Inconsistent design. Keaira or Keira? One of the lead characters' names was spelt differently in two places in the game's printed documentation. OK you might not think it's a big deal and it usually isn't but it's one of the main characters and things like this ring warning bells for me. Why? Because if something like this isn't settled among the team so well that everyone has it burned into their mind then how will the other areas be? And my fear proved correct, the inconsistency issues are found throughout the game. Graphics varying from extremely beautiful to Everquest 1 quality. The production values are nowhere near the quality of Nintendo games or, obvious comparison for a lot of people, WoW for example.


Some areas are simply lacking in every way.

- User Interface. It's not very good. The health bars and maps are good enough but setting up buttons isn't very good (for example, if you assign the "3" key to a spell that was set to the "F" key and then try to set another spell to the "F" key it won't let you until you press Apply to set the previous change and thus get rid of the F key being bound before) although that can be fixed, setting up chat windows isn't good (there was a chat patch that helped a bit), you can't move around objects enough, some buffs are shown in different places (top middle and bottom left) whilst all debuffs are bottom left (they're too far apart), groups can't be managed well, guilds can't be managed well, and so on. There will be mods and changes will come to the management issues but with another famous MMO out that shows you exactly how you can do it well, I find it odd they wanted to reinvent the wheel and while doing so forget to implement some features altogether. We have yet to figure out how to make a raid group too. A GM said "I don't know, try to make groups of 6 and then the leaders of each group invite each other"... difficult much? Also at level 40 my Guardian got 2 extra attack directions (lower left and right) as do some other classes, and it completely messed up my previous settings on its own by removing my buttons configurations on the spots where it wanted to set its own new buttons. In addition to that the control configuration window's button numbers don't correspond to their locations anymore on the action bars. This isn't a bug either, it's just a very twisted and overly complicated way of going about the issue of having new general attacks.

- Combos and Abilities don't have enough information. This ties in with the above point. Things aren't clear enough in general. You get a new Combo when you level up and start wondering how you're supposed to use it when the tooltip says almost the exact same thing as that other Combo you just got as well and no numbers for damage are anywhere in sight. So you have to test it out yourself.. for ages. Because these things don't just become clear magically with one test. There is also a lack of general terminology, which should be vital to games of these sizes (read: MMOs). What I mean is, some Combos have tooltips saying stuff about killing wild hogs or whatever when in fact the Combo has nothing to do with wild hogs, it's just trying to be closer to lore, the Combo works on any monster. They should be more to-the-point.

- Icons. I'm talking about the small square graphics used for combos, abilities and spells. They look good mostly but they're not very well spread out per class. There are lots of different color schemes to them but it would make a lot more sense to mix colors within a class so that the icons don't end up looking like each other. In this case they've tried to make it consistent so you feel like the icons all belong to the class you're playing. WoW already proved that it's not needed (for example Shamans having Earth, Frost and Flame Shock spells that are all very different in color but mildly similar in design). What happens in AoC is that it takes an unnecessarily long amount of time to get used to your spells and you can't keep track of them as well. Use the same type of design for similar effect spells (like categorised self-buffs that you can only have 1 of at a time out of 3 for example) but not the same color, use varying types of angles for the pictures in the icons and not just "a person shouting" in different colors even if drawn a bit differently. Icons should also have very clear lines and not try to be too artistic with oil paintings or something like some seem to be in AoC.

- Stable servers compared to WoW on release? That's what the people are saying at least. But what they don't seem to understand is WoW is an open world only restricted by realms. There are no loading times and instances are only there to limit mob tagging by other groups and to enforce cooldown on the possibility of good loot. Of course AoC is more stable, it's like playing a game of Battlefield 2 (technically speaking).

- Very buggy engine. I'm talking about stuff such as:

.. You can walk through rocks at numerous locations where a level designer forgot to turn on clipping for the static mesh. These aren't small stones, I'm talking about huge rocks that you're supposed to walk on to reach another location.

.. Textures and NPCs not loading fast enough (this was an issue in WoW too and isn't necessarily a bug though). Some better algorithms for loading in range characters could be worked on.

.. Characters and terrain lighting changing from very dark to very light in one flick when you move a bit in some direction.

.. Nighttime being so dark you have to turn off all the lights in the room you're playing in. This is a bug because when you go into your Video Settings and switch your Shadow Resolution to something else than what you currently have it at, all of a sudden you get moonlight in the game. However, this disappears again after a while and everything becomes very dark. It's playable but a lot harder than needed and many people complain about night being too dark.

.. Shadow "stripes" across the land sometimes. It's like the whole world turns into a zebra, half bright half dark. Tends to happen only in certain zones and it doesn't exactly cover ALL the land, some parts are left out as if the stripes just end in a straight line. It tends to happen when you get on your mount in those areas. Probably something to do with the lighting changing sometimes too.

.. Overall artistic design is nice in some parts (Tortage ofcourse because it's the starting zone, although the sprite leaves of the trees look odd when you look up at them and turn around) but it's not consistent and thus some other parts look like they're glued together from unmatching components. Sometimes textures bug in the terrain too like in the second picture below.


Regular in-game screenshot.


Custom highlight/shadow filter applied to show how much the trees differ from their surrounding color palette.


A simple edit showing roughly how it should look like.

.. Females' breasts jumping around sometimes during cut-scenes. For a game where you can set your bust size, it's sure odd they didn't focus on cut-scene breast design!

.. Quest and instance bugs. Running through doors that are supposed to be locked but have no clipping, falling through the world and dying, quests chains only progressing partly but then you get stuck, etc. Some quests don't work at all.

.. King Conan is the main character in this game (wouldn't you have guessed!). His castle's door is labeled conans_castle_zonedoor when your mouse is over it (which is obviously similar to the doodad tag in WoW, meaning temporary). The NPC in front of his room has a quest for you but you can't talk to him and probably that's why you can't go in to see Conan. Once again, this is the main character in the game we're dealing with.

.. Problems in NPC conversation scripts where you could end up in loops that amount to nothing. These are easily fixable but nothing they'll consider priority for now. There aren't too many though. QA and level designers/quest designers/scripters should be more careful.

.. I got a debuff once that had the following effect: "movement speed reduced by 35% for 15 seconds". Problem was that it never counted down the seconds. I hadn't disconnected either because I could fight monsters and other people were running around the place (and not just in straight lines). And after a minute or two the game caused a BSOD and my computer rebooted itself.

.. NPCs turn to face in some other direction during cut-scenes making them look like they're not really talking to you.

.. Other players (or your own minion) standing between you and an NPC during cut-scenes so you don't see the NPC. This is easily changed by simply removing all other player characters during cut-scenes. Funcom chose to do character conversations in a more traditional adventure game manner than WoW which has simply windows with text and you click "OK" and the quest is yours, so therefore they need to consider the pros and cons of such a decision.

.. Having the camera point to an NPCs crotch during cut-scenes, or other weird place. I don't know how their system works but focusing the camera always on the NPCs face wouldn't hurt in addition to the above point so that NPCs don't turn to face other players that start talking to them for some reason. Sometimes NPCs move around a bit, for example you start the conversation when the NPC is sitting down and then she stands up during the talk, the camera never follows and suddenly you're left looking at someone's chest. With bugged breasts jumping all over the place.

.. The characters' technical side of the animations are also terrible and interpolation once again doesn't work well. You can see problems in animation when you get off the boat in the beginning of the game and Kalanthes comes to greet you and gets down on one knee. He flips from his standing animation to his kneeling animation in 1 frame without anything happening in between often (not always, but the animation is still quite bad). The animations themself are OK but for example trying to jump up a hill makes your jump animation bug at times so you get stuck in the falling frames for a few seconds while on the ground already.

.. Almost every single NPC you talk to has texture overlapping issues. Mostly due to clothes/gear not sitting on them very well. Clothing/gear also causes problems with your character. Sometimes my Herald of Xotli loses her hair after transforming back from the demon form and with certain chest + legs combinations of armor she loses the upper parts of her thighs due to the texture not loading for the pants. Possibly because the chest item is considered a dress and usually in those you don't see legs, but some of them are shorter and the legs get chopped off maybe because of some animation or mesh overlapping that might occur with longer dresses.


Long hair is gone and parts of legs missing.

.. Collision detection. It's a good and bad thing. With collision combined with NPCs loading on your screen late, it's not very easy to use autorun to go through areas because you get stuck in invisible people. However, they have put thought in NPC patrol routes so that if you're standing on one and an NPC comes towards you, it'll pass through you. This prevents two things, 1. you won't be pushed aside and into any problematic areas and 2. pathing won't get messed up because the AI doesn't understand where it is anymore (if it's not done right). Or then like some idiots tend to do on PvP servers, completely block a resurrection point with mounts so resurrected people can't move away while others gank them. They could remove clipping from your character after resurrecting by adding it to the resurrect or game join buff you get that gives a limited invulnerability. This is another example just copied from WoW (no honor gain when zoning) but not implemented fully. But I don't know, maybe it's meant to be like that and that's why I hate PvP. I wish there was a more sensible PvP mechanic (like the one explained in my post about the next big thing).

.. You can swim up waterfalls. Oh and swimming in general. You can't press "jump" to move up, you have to aim up which sucks. But then again there aren't any underwater fights so you don't really spend a lot of time there. There are however underwater pickups and it's hard to target those with the water making such an odd wave motion it's hard for you to keep up with the item with your mouse. In all honesty though I haven't really seen any good underwater systems. God of War's way simplifies it a lot but also makes underwater navigation easy. Super Mario Galaxy absolutely sucks at underwater sequences. I think it'll only work after you are given a tight control scheme like WoW and a true 3D perspective (like 3D glasses) so you can judge distances. It's a lot easier to judge distances on ground than in the air or swimming without true 3D.

.. You get stuck on obstacles. Your character just stops and doesn't keep running (hopefully to get past it by sliding a bit). Also, try running into a wall. You either start sliding very fast to the left or right. OK, it's not that big an issue but wait till you get out into the wilderness and climb up a mountain, then on the path up there's some weird little edge in the terrain and your character goes running off the cliff. Oh, the game does have a mechanic that stops you if you're running directly down off some jagged terrain, although I'm not 100% sure if it's a mechanic or a bug again, but it doesn't always work. So down you go and you die. The fall mechanic itself is quite OK, if you fall from a slightly high place you move at a slower pace for a few seconds until recovering from the fall (although you do get the cripple debuff a bit too easily and it lasts too long from smaller drops). It's like you hurt your leg, which is quite cool. But fall from too high and you die. And this fall height is fairly realistic, so don't go thinking this is WoW again.

.. You can't see people in your group on the minimap. Through a recent patch sometimes you see single people as blue markers but other times you don't see anyone because it seems they're too far away (which should be exactly the reason why you want to see them anyway to know where they are!). Apparently your team mates also disappear if they're on the map on top of an area marked for a quest with the circle.

.. Sometimes the camera continues moving in some direction even though you're not moving the mouse but still have the left mouse button pressed.

Lots of things like this break complete immersion. I realize MMOs never really have problem-free launches but this isn't a server issue, this was fixable before it went live and there are way too many bugs for even fanboys to try and justify it (oh they do try) with "launch turbulence". Maybe Eidos pushed to hard for a release. Why not take note of how other MMOs do it right?


Water looks nice in some parts..


..but not in others.

- Gathering professions suck. The mechanic is so that you have mineral nodes (such as a tree or some rocks) and they replenish themselves over time. There are two problems in this: 1. the nodes don't change place this way and thus 2. the nodes are always empty because people farm them to death. WoW's mechanic of having random nodes pop up around various maps was and is much better. You need to gather only 1 type of mineral in the beginning to get the profession itself. At least you can get all the gathering professions in the game. Just one primary job (or whatever it's called) at level 50 though.

- After level 40 you get a mount (if you pre-ordered or have enough gold, 1g for skill, 2g for mount, and at level 40 you have around 40 silver usually which makes the currency a bit odd at first). The rhino I got from pre-ordering is useless. I would think it should move at least a bit faster than running on foot, but no. It even uses up the same stamina you do while running and thus you can't run very long with it. I know they're making the mounts different but isn't the main point of getting a mount later in an MMO to make travel faster?

- Money. Gold, Silver, Copper and Tin. The only reason to have Tin in the equation is to make Gold even more valuable (which was the case in real life back in the day). At level 40 people generally have 40 silver, as stated above, but that's roughly the same % ratio you would have in WoW at level 40 compared to what the mount costs there. The problem is HOW you get the money. Farming instances. This just seems dumb. The best way is to level past the instance level and farm the bosses for silver solo. The whole value of money is a bit off too, there's not enough income change when you level up.

- Instances/dungeons. Apart from the whole world being instanced, there are also different types of dungeons. Public and private. Public meaning it's just like the area you entered from, open for everyone. Private is your own instance that you can enter alone or with a group. The thing is that some of these have normal monsters and as such as soloable (weird concept but something I was long wanting for WoW as well) but then there are those with elite monsters (that is unless you chose the elite version for the soloable instance).. it all gets quite confusing. The quests are marked with an icon with 3 people next to each other referring to it being a group quest which still doesn't clarify if it's for a dungeon or in the game world itself, apart from the subcategory where the quest is. But that's not always accurate either and I've had quests show up in the wrong instance tab. The quest log is messy, you don't even see which quest you have completed other than by clicking on it and seeing what your next objective is (I guess their logic is that since you haven't gone and returned it yet to the NPC that gave it, it's not completed). The quest log has a map too which is a good idea and as said somewhere above showing your quest goals on the maps is a good idea but sometimes that doesn't work either and there's nothing really where the X points to.

- Moving between places is a bit boring and slow. With the linear worlds it's not really an option either. You go in one of two directions and that's that. Mount doesn't really help.

- Low fantasy. It's not a bad route to take and some find it interesting but low fantasy mostly doesn't interest me. There's some debate over the distinction between low and high/epic fantasy but I find AoC's world more closer to the term "realistic" than WoW or Warhammer Online due to close to real-world environments and the clear lack of non-human player classes. Obviously there are monsters in the wilderness and supernatural things going on but that's why it's still fantasy. Anyway, the Conan world isn't the most interesting environment for many people and not having distinct sides for PvP takes out the drive to kill the other team members a bit in a lore sense. In WoW you have the horde and alliance and you can always go after "that annoying cow/gnome!", but here you're all human.

- Huge install. At around 24gb of data (and requiring more during gameplay) you need quite a bit of space for the game. With 500gb HDDs costing 75 euros it's not that big a deal but it's still a huge amount of information and comes on 2 DVDs. I guess there's a lot of high quality textures not to mention the speech and music. The world itself doesn't feel that big compared to WoW but that's not a fact, just a gut feeling.

- 15 euros a month for something that doesn't feel like an MMO is too much for me to continue past the first free month. At least for this. WoW is 13 with VAT so what's the big deal, I know they don't NEED 15 euros a month to keep developing AoC.

The game seems fun in it's own way but it's buggy as hell and inconsistent. Production values aren't very high and it's lacking a finesse. The world is as interesting as a low fantasy setting with Conan could be. But I'll have to keep playing to see how it works out in the end. It just seems too linear and not like a real MMO.

I know that comparing to WoW now isn't smart since one of the games has been out for 3 years whilst the other is 3 days. However, I've always looked at things from a design perspective, being more critical towards games, and I will say with complete confidence that apart from server issues (in which these 2 games cannot be compared anyway due to technological differences) WoW was much more stable and bug-free on release. Sure it had its flaws just like any game of that magnitude but it never felt like you just wanted to go "awww come on!" when you realized you couldn't climb a flight of stairs because every time you got to the top you fell through them back to the bottom. Polish is what AoC is lacking and it seems like they should focus more on having a professional lead designer and lead producer working on the job, 1 person per job, instead of people here and there making their own design decisions and implementing them without a lot of testing. Or maybe the lead designer and producer should do their job (harsh, I know). Don't blame the QA guys for all this, it's not just bugs. Maybe the development tools weren't that great or the makers of the tools didn't give enough tutorials, who knows. I hear HeroEngine was used, to what extent though, no idea. Can't really get into too much detail in this area since it's all speculation when you don't actually work for Funcom.

Some more interesting AoC adventures:
AoC Screen 1 - Sounds like you're walking on water here.
AoC Screen 2 - Swimming in air.
AoC Screen 3 - Climbing in air.
AoC Screen 4 - Zooming into your character.
AoC Screen 5 - A dungeon that looks like it was made by some amateur fan.
AoC Screen 6 - The entrance to a dungeon. You can't get much more insignificant than this.
AoC Screen 7 - The striped shadows bug. Notice how it ends at the top right in the mountains as if stopping into a wall.
AoC Screen 8 - A secret passage in a dungeon consists of a vine on a wall that can be climbed, which leads to nowhere and then causes you to fall through the world and die.

I doubt AoC will manage to keep too many subscribers because after you've seen it for a few weeks it gets a bit boring. There are still people praising AoC on OOC chat (general channel) but they're around level 15, so I think many of them will drop out later. Fun game for a while if you can look past the insane amount of bugs and linear world. And yes, WoW has been out longer but AoC came out NOW, why not take notice of what they did right and use that instead of leaving things like they were during the stone age of MMOs. The reason AoC has sold this many copies in the first place is definitely not because it's about Conan, but more likely because of the first time MMO players from WoW that want to try another MMO.

I think I'll go check out what mah cousin Roman is up to.

Update: Here's some end-game experiences from the known guild Nightmares Asylum who have been playing AoC recently, trying to get some raid content down.

Fura writes on AoC forums:

AT the moment there is 4 zones that is considered raiding zones.

Vistrix Lair - Dragon Encounter - Seriously bugged - Zone Crashes after a period of Time - Dragon can be next to the raid and just disappear - Dragon can just run off at any time and reset - Trash mobs just reset at any time they wish. No loots drop - no quest items will drop either - its totally unplayable

Yakhmars Cavern - Worm Boss - Zone Crashes very often - Mob can be next to you and just disappear - loots flash on screen for a second and then disappear - no quest items drop to complete quests - Encounter can be exploited.

Kykilys Lair - Mobs frequently bug out once pulled and return to full hp or just run back to their spawn points - zone frequently crashes. You can get the mobs to fight each other and semi-exploit the place.

Black Citadel - 1st Boss bugs out on second stage of the fight not allowing any advancement into the place.

The most annoying bug in the world is raid members crashing which they most frequently do and then the raid and their guild does not show up until about 30-40 mins later once that happens they auto disconnect.

Raid formations is just plain stupid and a leader cannot move any people in the raid around in groups.

raids dont even end up in the same zone instance most of the times.

So the citys are not working, the pvp system is not working, the hi end raids are most defiantly not working, the ui way off from being finished, there are serious game breaking bugs still in this game and I feel that its even worse than most betas out there. and were paying for this.....? Shouldn't there be some kind of law preventing them from false advertising a game as they were boasting about high end raiding, massive pvp, great crafting etc... and none of its in the game. isn't this false advertising or something?

I cancelled my subscription already and have been doing casual AV in WoW again. PvP is so much more fun there even with all the whiners.