Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1686 in Video Games
• Brand: Eidos
• Model: SAGECPUS00
• Released on: 2008-05-20
• ESRB Rating: Mature
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .65 pounds

Features

• First Mature Rated MMORPG - Savage, bloody, violent and sexy; delivering the true essence of Robert E. Howard's original vision. Team up in battle formations and command others in epic multiplayer battles and massive sieges in real time.
• Player vs. Player and Player vs. Environment - Crush the skulls of other players in arena fights, drunken brawls and sieges. Build cities, craft unique artifacts, explore a fantastic world, befriend others and master the use of magic, steel or bows.
• True Conan Experience - Explore King Conan's amazing universe and roam in the brutal footsteps of the world's greatest fantasy hero. Battle terrifying demons and defeat devastating monsters known from 70 years of Conan lore.
• Conan's World - Enter a gigantic and savage world spread across the three nations of Aquilonia, Cimmeria and Stygia. Explore jungles, deserts, mountains, valleys, dungeons and cities.
• Advanced Technologies - Optimized for DirectX 10, Multi-core CPU and featuring Advanced Artificial Intelligence; AoC takes advantage of the Dream World, MMO Technology, delivering extremely detailed environments and real life physics. Works with DirectX 9.

Amazon.com
Based on the events and characters of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a fantasy themed massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that immerses players in a dark, expansive universe filled with ground-breaking brutal combat, dangerously intoxicating magical abilities, and the social and cooperative game features that MMORPG players crave.

The MMORPG finally matures

A troubled King Conan on his throne. View larger.

Test your metal in close combat. View larger.

Straddle War Mammoths & Killer Rhinos. View larger.

Lead your guild in player vs. player battles. View larger.

Explore the pleasures & pitfalls of the Hyborian Age. View larger.

Set in the later years of Conan’s life, after he has famously become king by his own hand, the game centers around the fragile state of Conan’s rule in Aquilonia. Surrounded by enemies and hostile nations, Conan’s rule hangs by a thread and in the end, it’s up to players, either singly or backed by their guilds to turn the tide for or against the embattled king.

Massively Multiplayer Gaming for the Adult Player
One of the most highly anticipated MMORPGs in recent years due to the strength and familiarity of the Conan franchise across a variety of major media, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is the first of several releases planned for the franchise, all of which are aimed at an adult audience. Firmly rooted in the savage, bloody, violent and sexy Hyborian universe, players can expect a graphically beautiful game blended with gritty gameplay that is true to both the barbarian hero from Howard’s writings and the Schwarzenegger influenced version from books, movies and comics.

Available Cultures and Classes
Although Age of Conan contains a wide range of peoples, its playable cultures are currently limited to Aquilonians, Cimmerians, and Stygians. Within each of these players can choose from a selection of archetypal character classes, although available classes and subsequent subclasses are not necessarily the same within each culture. For example, archetypal classes for Aquilonians and Cimmerians are Rogue, Priest and Soldier, while Stygians are represented by Rogue, Priest and Mage. Further differences exist within subclasses for each. See the basic breakdown of all three cultures below:

Aquilonians: Internally divided, but united against their barbarian neighbors, the Aquilonians live lives on the edge. Their kingdom, with its prosperous cities, enlightened culture and religious freedom, is known as the "Flower of the West." Yet for all this and despite the power of King, Conan I, it is a land where culture clashes and unrest are always a threat.

Cimmerians: As the Hyborian Age comes to an end the northern barbarian clans of the Cimmerians know that the end of their time is drawing near too. King Conan I of Aquilonia is himself a Cimmerian, though not typical of his people. Although his life has been filled with wanderlust, his Kin care nothing for what occurs outside their clan territories.

Stygians: Masters of the magical arts and ruled by their consuming worship of the serpent-god Set, the Stygians excel at occult and diabolic lore. They learned long ago that true power lies in knowledge and in pacts with dark powers. This single-mindedness has allowed them become the only culture to harness the secrets of the Mage class and power that comes with it.

Modes Singleplayer as well as Multiplayer
Unlike most MMORPGs, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures includes a significant singleplayer experience as well as deep overarching multiplayer gameplay. This is an atypical MMORPG feature, but one that has a purpose. Players enter the game as a lowly galley slave with no memory of his/her past, and over the first five to 20 levels of singleplayer action build the skills necessary to survive in the game's multiplayer levels. During this time you will traverse a variety of rich environments including jungles, deserts, mountains, valleys, dungeons and cities packed with NPCs, beasts and monsters, before eventually leveling up and moving back to your chosen culture’s homeland. Because the only character-related choices that players have to make at the game’s opening are their looks, clothing and culture, this singleplayer mode is important in deciding what class and subclass to pursue and thus the level of impact your character will have in greater multiplayer portions of the game.

In-game levels 20 and above are strictly multiplayer. 20-40 introduce players to guilds. 40-60 deal with large scale combat. 60-80 have the player interacting with King Conan and levels 80 and up represent end-game play. Here gameplay changes as social aspects of MMORPG gameplay take over on a large scale.

Real-time Combat That Takes Queues from the FPS
Traditionally MMORPGs have utilized a mix of auto and turn-based functionality in their combat systems, but Age of Conan dispenses with that, instead drawing inspiration from FPS/action games. Firmly rooted in the brutality of the Hyborian universe, game developer Funcom has devised an action-based system that not only provides the sense of actually being in the fight, but also requires the player to participate in it. That means no simple targeted attacks. Players can attack and defend from nearly any position in real-time, whether on the ground or atop a mount, while standing still or on the move. It’s a recipe for carnage and one that fits right into the world of Conan.

The combat system in Age of Conan comes in three forms: drunken brawling, mini games like CTF and massive Player vs. Player battles, which lets you engage in siege combat to defend or attack a city. All are easy to learn, but difficult to master, providing hours worth of play and replay value and are the core of this new cutting edge MMORPG.

System Requirements:

Customer Reviews

The Game-killing "Feature"
When I heard about AoC, I was excited about an alternative to the MMO garbage that's out there right now. Lineage II was ruined by botters, UO is long dead compliments of EA, SWG was beaten to death by its devs, and anything or everything that has ever been a genuinely amazing experience in this industry is dead. AoC promised to relieve that with world PvP, mature content, and a compelling storyline. Great. Right? Well, sing us a dirge for poor implementation.

Let's start with the implementation of the game world. You start in Tortage, a large island that plays very much like an interactive movie. The content is rich and engaging but not very liberal--Tortage does not feel like a real MMO. Consequentially, the island and its zones don't give you a good feel for the zones, but they do give you an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of the game. Once you get used to character movement, combat, and NPC interaction, the game is much more fun. But still, until you leave Tortage, it just feels empty, like a single-player game.

After Tortage, you find a bigger, badder world in front of you. This world is more like an MMO than your noob streak was, which is great, because it makes it easier to find people, group up, and socialize. Not so great are some of the "features" that probably didn't bother you so much early on. Age of Conan, you see, isn't really an MMO. It's set up similar to a combination of Guild Wars and EverQuest: the game is heavily zoned AND heavily instanced. The consequences for this, when mixed with world PvP, are incredibly frustrating. Here are a few:

Instanced zones means that a particular zone is allowed a maximum number of character inside of it. When the maximum capacity is reached, another "copy" of the zone is created, so you can have six or seven different instances of your favorite hunting forest. It also means that you have six or seven different places to look if you want to group with a friend who doesn't know what instance he's in. It seriously impacts the social aspect of the game, too, because you will very rarely see the same people in PUGs (pick-up groups) while leveling (which means you won't be making as many in-game friends or allies).

Instanced zones also give PvP gankers or fair-game attackers six or seven different places to run and hide. A favorite tactic of griefers in games like this is to sit at a zone line, gank someone who just zoned in or is on the way out, and then slip through the zone line. Your only hope to track them down is to pray that when you zone through to look for them, you enter the right instance. Good luck! Odds are you won't find him no matter how long you look.

Another frustrating aspect of PvP is fixed resurrection points. When you die in AoC, there are fixed points in the zone where you can revive, but these points are not guarded or secured in any way. Thus, many griefers have taken up the hobby of rez point camping--which basically makes it impossible for you to bring your character back to life until a GM or higher level player intervenes. The staff have deemed this tactic illegal, but it still happens, and often. Support response takes awhile, too, so by the time you get an answer from a GM, the attacker will probably have vanished. Still, even if he gets caught, you could spend a good half hour or longer just wanting to get your character back to life. And this will happen more than once. A lot more. GG.

The graphics in the game, however, are very pretty. The world is beautiful, the animations are smooth, and the item and character models are very well done. Combat is fluid and involved--you can't just sit back and button mash--but this can be a detriment for some people as it is a serious deviation from even active combat games like Dungeons and Dragons Online--nevermind traditional MMOs like EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, or WoW.

World gameplay feels a bit lacking, too, as many previous posters have noted. Your best leveling methods are killing eight hundred million mobs or doing quests, which incidentally require you to kill seven hundred million mobs and acquire one hundred million pelts. I mention this in contrast to games such as Lineage II and, again, WoW, which in their mid-level ranges introduce enhanced encounters such as raid bosses and scripted dungeons. Because AoC is a public world like EQ's Norrath, dungeons are bland (in terms of gameplay--graphically they look awesome) and accomplishments are few and far between.

Consequentially, this game gets a thumbs down from me overall. Even if the issues with mid-game accomplishment and rez camping are somehow fixed, I can't stand this world's heavy instancing. Yes, it is necessary to maintain good performance with an engine as taxing as this game's, but this does not feel like an MMO to me--more like a successor to the Diablo series. My advice: if you buy the game, don't hope on the AoC band-wagon. Play it, see if you like it, and if you don't, stop playing it. Warhammer Online will be out soon, and after it, Aion will be released. I have high hopes for both games. Those of you who are truly enjoying AoC, congrats on your new home. Those who aren't--well--you're not alone. Not by any means.

Bleh - Nothing Special, Let Me Explain
You may not agree with my review but for those of you who want an honest and objective look into it please stick around.

There are several things wrong with this game that make it generally not quite as great as it could have been.

These issues are: easy of leveling, tedious collection styled quests, massive empty zones, problems with resource skill gathering, lack of voice content, few zones, lack of a decent travel system, ease of travel between starter cities, darkness, generally bland armor, dumb AI, lack of a good faction system, guild creation, instance zones, and weapon selection.

I probably have heated a few of you up so feel free to respond to my comments if you disagree but I'm honestly hoping some of these issues are addressed within the next few months as the game begins to grow stronger.

Ease of Leveling:
One of the most unique aspects of the game, I believe, is the ease of leveling I've found within it. I understand that with 100 possible levels there is room to allow quick leveling but when your character can handle 3 or 4 same level enemies at once he tends to level much faster than he probably should. I don't know but this is my first week (I got it Friday) and I'm already in the high 30s.

Tedious Collection Styled Quests:
I understand I can ignore quests altogether but the game seems to focus in on collection and kill count style quests more so than anything else. Why not kill 50 of a certain type of enemy? How about the same quest in a different zone with similarly level enemies? It's just very very repetitive. Not to mention, for the most part, on non-collection quests, you'll be forced to run through dangerous grounds to light something on fire or break something only to find all the enemies in the area are dead from constant farming. Farming is an issue with newer games but I think when you ask your players to kill 50 of a certain type of enemy you encourage it more than anything.

Massive Empty Zones:
For the most part, when you don't find farmers at every corner, you'll find yourself running alone. The game world is huge! It's just most of the time you'll find yourself running through the huge world. For instance to get to a secondary town in the barbarian area you have to run through a zone that has all of the same level enemies but takes nearly ten minutes to run through. It seems like, yeah, it's much larger than games like WoW but it isn't the size that matters but rather what you do with it?

Problems with Resource Skill Gathering:
Alright so you're allowed to gather resources from level 20 on. The thing is the resources only exist in this barren zone full of no enemies (from what I've seen) so you can spend an hour running around and find nothing at all --- no people, no resources. The good thing though is while you may not find one resource you may bump into a different type. With Age of Conan anyone can gather any of the resource types removing the significance of the gather role of resources.

Lack of Voice Content:
When you start the game on the newbie island you'll quickly be amazed to find everyone has voice content. You'll be equally surprised that when you leave the newbie island no one has it anymore. The developers say they're going to add it in over time but I don't really see their incentive given by the 20th level a higher majority of people are likely to stick around regardless of the sound if that's the only thing that bugs them.

Few Zones:
Again, as a mentioned above, there are massive zones but there are also very few of them. This means that as a level 20, let's say, you're stuck going to any of the level 20 zones setup for each of the different starting cities (3 of them). That doesn't leave people who like to explore (or find a variety of monsters) much to do. If you like the idea of running around endlessly looking for an enemy to fight or camping a certain enemy this won't bother you but I think there is something about variety that this game lacks in general. I also found it unlikely I'd be wandering into the higher level zones until I did hit some barrier level that made it easy enough to handle a few enemies. So I'm stuck with 3 choices (which I stick to one because it takes me a half hour to run to any other through the barren zones).

Lack of a Decent Travel System:
Binding yourself to a main city is allowed but besides that there is a general lack of a travel system. There are way points in the game which, when you die, you spawn at whichever you select so people often get themselves killed to save time instead of running. The death penalty is laughable so it's not worth wasting the time running.

Ease of Travel Between Starter Cities:
One of the strangest things about this game is how easy it is to travel between the starter cities. From the minute you leave newbie island you can quickly jump from one city to the next for free making it possible to explore all the cities in the game with little effort (besides a 20 minute walk through the barren cities) almost instantly.

Darkness:
This is more of my own complaint than something that really should be fixed I guess but the game is way too dark and there are no items (torches please) to turn on the lights. I've known scores of people who actually turn off the game during the night-time parts of it just because they can't see anything. The deserts are the worst with this because it just is so dark. I think it's brighter in the dungeons than it is outside.

Generally Bland Armor:
The armor doesn't really stand out. You get a new piece at level 30 let's say and it'll look almost the same way as the level 20 one. The only difference will be a +4 to the armor rating. It just feels like the armor lacks variety and it doesn't have a good way of really standing out. Also 'good' armor pieces fall so frequently from monsters I've come out of a run of an area with 3 or so of the same chest pieces. It's just bleh.

Dumb AI:
I've pulled enemies standing directly next to each other, on several occasion, and watched as the enemies did nothing to alert their friends I was fighting them directly behind them. For the most part there is no real AI and you never really get the feeling it would be all that hard to fix a pull to your liking. Yeah, once or twice a bad pull will happen, but as long as the enemy initially sees you, or walks over to you while you're fighting, they tend to ignore what's going on around them. Doesn't seem realistic.

Lack of a Good Faction System:
I feel like each quest I'm doing is for the few copper they'll give me and not to award myself any form of faction with a group. Just seems like as soon as I kill whatever 50 things they want me to kill next I move on to the next group of 50 things (from the same quest giver) that were sitting next to those 50 things. It's really this tedious and it doesn't make sense why they made it this way. Not to mention most of the different types of enemies look almost identical so there is little variation between monsters besides location and name.

Guild Creation:
There is no real control on the process of creating guilds (which may be alright I guess) so there are tons of one person guilds out there. It just seems like the process isn't as well developed as it should be considering a portion of the game is centered towards it. It just seems like a fancy grouping system as opposed to anything significant --- yeah you can rank people but it seems bland at least so far. Perhaps later on it'll get more interesting.

Instance Zones:
The zones are all instanced including the main cities. This makes the load times really fast, yes, but you rarely see people and it makes group in zone much harder. I tend to group at the dungeon location so I find myself trying really hard to find people with no luck when I need them. You'd think this would stop the camping but it's still there. I can hardly imagine what the world would look like without the instances because the camping would be that much worse. It just seems like to deal with issues like this they need a world with more variety, less collection quests, no instances, and more servers.

Guild Cities:
I've seen that the guild cities are also instances. I'm unsure how this will affect gameplay and will have to keep an eye on it as more people join but it honestly sounds somewhat stupid... Why build a city if it's within a closed environment?

Weapon Selection:
The weapons in the game seem to just get a little better each time and you tend to get rewards with weapons of your level or higher so there really isn't a reason to worry about finding a new one. It just seems trivial.

I don't know the whole game seems like a good idea but it's just nothing compared to some of the others on the market. A little more time developing a stronger system of travel, the trade skills, and other aspects would have made it more interesting. Cutting down on the size of zones in favor of quality of zones would work as well. Hopefully at the higher levels things get more interesting... I just hope Conan doesn't ask you to kill 50 dragons or something tedious like that.

I like the game it's just I don't like it enough to keep paying the fee as it stands now.

Also, one last note, funcom has released mounts with some preorders (or Amazon curved bow from amazon). It also releases other items with orders of things like keyboards and mice... It just seems like it's trivializing its own item system to release items that should be gained by normal processes as a reward for buying from them. It's like they're mixing the cost structures of a pay for play with a pay for upgrade which may hurt the internal game economy depending upon how excessively they continue to do so. Who wants to work hard for an item when you can buy a keyboard and get it that way?

By Crom!! What has happened??
EDIT: I'm editing my review after over a month of playing AoC. This is mainly because the higher in level I get and the more "content" I've explored, my opinion of the game has dropped.

After reading and waiting for months for Age of Conan (AoC), I finally was able to get into Early Access (EA) on Saturday, May 17th.

On Saturday morning, imagine my disappointment when Funcom delays opening the servers by 3 hours! 3 hours?? What am I supposed to do now? Well, I got over my delay disappointment and on the specified hour, I promptly logged in, chose my server (Set) and started creating my character. I had no idea what I should choose so I went with a Stygian Ranger. The character customization is OK in AoC. I spent about 15 minutes constructing facial features, tattoos, scars, hair, and body type. Unfortunately there is a limit to the body and hair styles and there are some of the ugliest facial defaults I've ever seen in my life with one good looking one. Guess which one most people will be choosing? There is a lack of a color palette to choose from as well.

As the intro played, my poor Ranger washes up on the beach of Tortage and is greeted by a creepy old man. Here is where I learned the basics of fighting and interacting with the environment. While combat is tricky at first, I eventually got the hang of it. The main thing I like about combat are the fatalities. I've already had the pleasure of gutting and cutting off the heads of my opponents. I've also gotten some sweet fatality deaths from my bow and arrow. It does my heart good to see enemies fall with an arrow in their throat and blood spewing from their mouths!

This leads me to the "mature" content. Granted, by the end of the weekend I was just level 21 but the mature content is really negligible. The most risque stuff I witnessed was in general world chat (or OOC). Sure, the blood and decapitations are cool and the half-naked women rock, but AoC would get a PG-13 rating instead of an R if it were a movie. EDIT: After a month of playing, there are some topless women and toons which would earn this game an R-rating.

Back to my first day, it was tough. While I had no problems with lag, fps, or any of that stuff (I have a relatively top shelf computer), dealing with so many people scrambling for slow spawning mobs became a chore. Imagine trying to gather 40 hides of crocodile leather and you are competing with twenty other players in one small section of an island where maybe 15 crocs spawn. Remember when I wrote "slow spawning" well, yeah, there you go. I eventually completed these tasks as well as my destiny quests and moved on to my homeland starting area.

As for the environments of Tortage, they are rich and detailed. There is a lot of eye candy and you can move around fairly easily in it though you are limited to specific zones. More on that below. Cons movement wise can be filtered down to a "climbing" skill. I'm not particularly sure why this is here and why it's not user friendly. I have to hit "U" or right click on a ladder or vine to scramble up it. If I don't keep my eye on the chat window and catch the alarm "YOU CAN CLIMB HERE!!" I would have missed climbing opportunities.

Zones. The bane of my existence! AoC is instance/zone heavy. This is a bit disappointing especially since you may find yourself repeatedly going back and forth between them which eats up real time of watching a loading screen. What I would do was gather all the quests I could find and just head to a specific zone (White Sands for example) and stay there until all my quests were complete. I'm sure this is what most people did. EDIT: The more I play this, the more I hate instance/zones. Sometimes they load fast but more often than not lately, they load extremely slow which makes me a frustrated panda and more disheartened.

Anyhoo, toons don't just walk through each other like ghosts but can actually block you. This may prove to be very cool when higher level PVP kicks in as formations would actually mean something. Imagine a bunch of conquerors forming up a shield wall to prepare and defend their battlekeep. God that's awesome. Not to mention that line of sight issues appear to be right on track so far. I can get on high ground and fire down into my enemies without LOS errors or those annoying "evades" you'd always see in WoW. This would make for excellent ambush opps in PVP play as well as full scale battles. I'm really looking forward to it! EDIT: The latest is that full on battlekeep PVP is still borked limiting organized PVP engagements. Another disappointing item that makes it seem that Funcom really did rush this out without completing the Beta.

So far from what I've seen, despite some of the cons I pointed out from my own perspective, this is a fun game. I look forward to discovering more features of AoC as I progress because I know I'm just at the tip of the iceberg! EDIT: As of this date (July 2, 2008), the playability and fun of the game is decreasing for me. Big patches are now being released once a week but some of the updates I've seen, seem irrelevant to the big picture. Fixing the look on an NPC's face over fixing the obvious memory leaks which causes crashing even on high end computers makes me scratch my head in puzzlement.

I'm going to continue to play, but come September, if nothing has significantly changed, I will probably be quitting AoC and moving on to Warhammer Online. If Warhammer turns out to be a stinker as well, I guess I'll head back to WoW and wait for the expansion.