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10 reasons not to play Age of Conan
In the movie Conan the Barbarian, the eventual governor of California is chained to a giant wheel and forced to turn it. It's called the Wheel of Pain. I'm not sure what it does – Grind flour? Move the island? Spin a ceiling fan deep down in some underground lair? – but it's an apt metaphor for Age of Conan. These days, we don't have Wheels of Pain. We have massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Age of Conan: tedious, repetitive, soul-crushing, each turn always like before, around and around and around, un-new and Sisyphean. Age of Conan isn't a bad design so much as it's a typical design, symptomatic of everything lacking in so many massively multiplayer online RPGs.
And if that's not enough information, you can read 10 reasons not to play Age of Conan after the jump.
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10) The graphics (or, Age of Artwork You've Seen a Million Times Before)
The graphics engine is passable, but the artwork is rote fantasy stuff. The time to lava, or TTL, is under three hours.
9) The combat (or, Age of Ninja Gaiden Lite)
Melee combat is a pretty cool, except that it's situated in a tedious MMO. If this is what has you playing Age of Conan, you might enjoy Ninja Gaiden, God of War, or even Sega's Viking game instead. At least in those games, blocking is moderately useful. Also, cool melee combat is no help to folks with spellcasters. Playing a demonologist, for instance, consists of four minutes of queuing up buffs and then the rest of the session spent repeatedly pressing the Fires of Gehenna hotkey.
8) The quests (or, Age of Traversal)
"Ahoy there, traveler! Could you retrieve the Book of the Damned Souls of Crom's Baleful Wrath from Pashtun for me?"
"Dude, I was just over there because you needed me to kill 18 of those zombie guys. Why didn't you just tell me to get the frickin' book while I was there? I mean, you knew I was going to be there. Also, I've seen that big boss guy in the back. Are you going to need me to kill him? Because if I come back with that damn book and you ask me to go back again to kill that boss guy, I'm going to kill you instead. You hear me? And for Pete's sake, couldn't you at least hang out someplace other than the absolute far end of the map from the place you're sending me?"
7) Did I mention the quests? (or, Age of Camping)
"Hey, are you guys here for the hyenas, too? Yeah? Okay, cool. Should we take turns getting them, or just form a group or what? No, you're just going to grab them as soon as they spawn? Okay, cool, I'll try to grab them, too. Man, this is just like the old days of Ultima Online, huh? You guys remember that one? So, done any good quests lately? No? Me neither. Hmm, I wonder if those hyenas are going to show up any time soon? After this, you guys want to come with me to get the scorpion noses and vulture ears?"
6) The NPC interaction (or, Age of Pointless Dialogue Trees)
You get the dialog options of Mass Effect with none of the actual effect. In other words, lots of reading for no reason. Hey Funcom, as anyone who plays MMOs can tell you, we're just going to skip over this stuff. Stretching it out over six or seven screens isn't going to make us stop and read it, especially when it doesn't make a bit of difference what dialog option we pick.
5) The stakes (or, Age of Death, Where Is Thy Sting?)
Death penalties are a tough balancing act. On one hand, you don't want to discourage players by making the stakes too high and the death penalty too steep. On the other hand, you don't want to play Age of Conan.
4) The first ten hours (or, Age of Oh My God, How Long Is This Opening Area Going To Last?)
Are you ready for twenty levels of criss-crossing the city of Tortage? Sometimes you do go down into a dungeon or up on a hill. Have fun doing it all over again with your alts.
3) The crafting (or, Age of You Shall Not Craft for Forty Levels)
Why does it take so cotton pickin' long before you can pick cotton? Like so many parts of Age of Conan, crafting is a deferred activity. Whereas most MMOs use crafting as a parallel way of progressing your character, you can't do it here until you're half way to the level cap.
2) The lack of a "hook" (or, Age of Dingless Lootlessness)
To keep players interested, there are two things any hack-and-slash game, and especially any MMO needs: a good loot system, and a good character advancement system. Age of Conan has neither. You level so quickly and have such minimal choices upon leveling that the dings go unnoticed. The level cap is 80, but I'd guess only about 20 of the levels is worth a "gratz". As for the loot you find, many players don't even bother picking it up. Heavily trafficked areas are aglow with the sparkle of a hundred twinkling loot bags that no one wanted. It's more litter than loot.
1) Not enough Conan-ness (or, Age of Sandahl Bergman)
In the movie, a commander asks his Mongol troops "What is best in life?" One of the Monguls gets the answer wrong with some nonsense about the wind in his hair. Stupid Mongul. But Conan gets the answer right. "To crush your enemies," he says, "see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women." It's a famous line, and IT geeks like to pass it off as Sun Tzu to middle managers, who then incorporate it into sales strategies and corporate trust-building exercises. Fun times.
Unfortunately, I don't really recall a single one of these things in Age of Conan. Sometime when I attack an enemy with a club, the word "crush" appears over his head in red letters. And the voice acting and writing are pretty lamentable. But the thing that feels the most Conan are the silly female character models. Which I grant you are pretty Conan-ey, but I was hoping for a bit more.
By Tim at 5:09 PM ON 06/12/08
Once I heard the crafting/looting system was sub-par, I knew something was wrong. Sure combat is nice, but when you're grinding away 1000 enemies to level any combat is going to get old. The only thing that could keep you going is the slight chance of some awe-inspiring item, or enough resources to reach craft mastery.
By Azgoroth at 9:24 PM ON 06/15/08
As a formerly dedicated AO player every time my friends discuss AOC, My response is "But its Funcom!"
By Fox1 at 1:33 PM ON 06/16/08
Cool, I was looking for something to reaffirm my "no MMOs ever again, at least until I see the Warhammer 40K game" vow in the face of AoC.
By jryberg at 8:38 AM ON 06/19/08
I'm a 65 year-old first time gamer with a PS3. I bought it for "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune", and I can't say enough about this game. I've not seen a more beautiful looking game for one, then there's the story, the action, the music, the voices...
By millerboy at 11:27 AM ON 06/19/08
Finally someone who knows speaks! Excellent article. Every bit of it is dead on. The only thing I would add is the minimum system specifications are set too high. I have a 3 month old Alienware laptop and it can't play this game at a framerate higher than 6fps. It plays WoW fine. Funcom said they developed AoC for 5 years. There wasn't a personal computer on the planet that could play this game 5 years ago.
By woolf2k at 9:39 AM ON 06/20/08
you forgot the tremendous amount of bugs that block your progress at every turn, ineffectual attributes and feats, and don't depend on GMs cause they are of legend since they are hardly seen. Aweful game.
By Demoder at 2:34 AM ON 06/21/08
10) Graphics are good. Some performance issues on certain hardware combinations still, but they are working on fixing that.
9) The combat system requires you to know what you are doing, not randomly smashing buttons. If you like to randomly smash buttons, AoC is definitly not something for you.
8) Quests are creative. Bother to read the text, and you'll see. Other than that, any quest is "perform task X Y Z, get reward". No way around it.
7) The seventh point is about the players, not the game. This vary between server to server, and time of day. 6) NPC interaction is excellent. Example: NPC's usually hang around their spots.... But some times they can go to the local bar to get a drink, or decide to sit down at the camp fire.. etc. Also, I am pretty sure that your dialog choices DO have an effect. Both for changing how the dialog happens, as well as ending up with different quests. Of course, it's not always feasable for FunCom to add multiple quest versions.
5) Death penalties in AoC place a 30 minutes aao/aad debuff. It's a bit weak yet.. they should probably increment it. Multiple deaths cause multiple death penalties, and they stack. 4) What's bad with a good introduction to your class and your game? If the first part bores you, RPG's are most likely not something for you.
3) Pointless complaining about crafting. The author didn't follow the storyline, I see. As you level up, you remove some of the curse that was placed on you at the slave ship. It's just natural to get more skills as you level up.
2) Not a good loot system? Right! I guess that "all team members share all looted credits" and "you roll by need or greed or pass a roll" when there's something good that drops, counts as "I can't ninja!!!! Bad loot system!". Also, team leader can choose between the "leader only", "roll" and "free for all" loot systems.
1) I have no idea what you are on about. Something tells me you simply didn't like what a MMORPG is like, and decided to bash AoC for it. How much "conan-ness" can you get in a battle anyway? If you enable 'show mature content' (or whatever that option is called), it seems conan-ish enough to me.
You COULD have mentioned valid points, such as:
"AoC was just released. It's full of bugs (none of them that are game-breaking, mind you, just some bugged content that is being fixed via two patches a week). If you want to play a polished game, go try AoC in a couple of months." Or something like that.
By OddjobXL at 4:06 PM ON 06/22/08
I'm actually enjoying AoC but I can't put my finger on exactly why. I am playing a Barbarian so I get the best exposure to two of the better systems, stealth and melee combat, and he can solo fairly well when needed.
I dunno. I'm usually very picky about my MMOs (though not always for reasons that resonate with anyone other than me) and Conan isn't exactly the visionary experience I was hoping for and tend to seek out.
But, and though most of them could be stuck in any fantasy MMO, the places and the feel of the setting is pretty good. There are times I definitely get into an adventuring/mission running groove and get lost in the hiding, ambushing, fighting and occasional pushing of the odds or dealing with unexpected adds.
If you want Conan out of AoC I'd say solo as a Barbarian for a while. Haven't messed with PvP or done much grouping yet but the solo experience, and occasional chance alliances while adventuring, are holding me.
Sure there are better fighting games, better MMOs (Eve Online's got brains and beauty but she's an icy bitch too while LoTRO stays much truer to the lore of the IP) out there. Putting it all together though in a Hyborian context, however shallow compared to deeper approaches, is still managing to hold me.
For now. But I've been saying "for now" for the last two weeks and I only end up putting more time in!
By Yerich at 7:34 PM ON 06/23/08
...on the other hand, I've skipped all previous MMOs, well unless you count being Flagshipped, and am really enjoying AoC as my first MMO experience (PvE). Re: Quests. Quest are always going to be similar in games, at least some of the quest text is pretty deep in Conan-lore. While most of Tortage is the same for all alts, there are some different destiny quests. and I enjoy reading the details. I have found only a few quests where players have been stacked up awaiting respawns. Having a blast!
Yerich:
...on the other hand, I've skipped all previous MMOs, well unless you count being Flagshipped, and am really enjoyi...More »