Quote:
Originally Posted by JayP
Did you get a chance to try it yet?
Now that I got my new computer running I've been debating whether or not I should pick this up.
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Yes I have! I'll throw down some impressions right here and I will try to expand on anything that anyone has questions on.
Background
I've played EQ 1 (hated it, too much grind), World of Warcraft (pretty much the yard stick for every MMO from here on in) and Vanguard (which had some good ideas, but also some really
bad ideas).
My character (and the only one I've tried so far) is a Female Guardian on some non player killing server (people can't just randomly stab you). She is level 14 right now, which means I've logged probably about 6 - 8 hours of playtime. in the grand scope of most MMORPGs this is almost no time at all.
So note that I have had experience with these kinds of things before, I have never really been overly hardcore (even in WoW) and I've only played this game for an almost insignificant amount of time in relation to how long people play these things (usually measured in
days).
My rig is 2 1/2 years old, so it doesn't have up to date video cards or any of that so I'm probably not even getting most out of it.
Character Customization
Character customization is sometimes a big bullet point for people. It isn't really that big of a deal for me, since most characters end up covered in armor anyway, and so I may not be the best person to ask about this. Regardless of my tastes it is pretty intuitive and easy to come up with someone who looks pretty good. I wouldn't be expecting the ability to make someone who looks exactly like your best friend, but the potential is there for some interesting customizations. Bear in mind when customizing your characters look that the designers wanted to keep things within the Conan universe. This means that certain race/look combinations will not be available due to the designer's insistence that the game be true to the lore. For instance, one cannot expect a Cimmerian (barbarian people) to have black skin and so there is no ability to select black skin for your character when choosing that race.
Graphics/Music
With me running the game on an old rig, I have the settings turned down pretty low. That being said, me actually being able to run a PC game that just came out is pretty good, in my opinion. Even at low settings the game world looks pretty lush and interesting, and there are lots of details so far. From screen shots and looking at my friends PC I can tell that the game will look really nice on a newer rig.
The music is pretty good and fits the theme well. The grunts and groans of combat are nothing special.
Story/Quests
The story and quests at the very beginning of the game are fairly interesting, for an MMO. Each of your conversations with quest givers are actual scripted, voiced-over conversations that you would find in something like Mass Effect which is nice. Even better is that the voice acting isn't complete garbage, like you would find in many games these days. The quests themselves are pretty typical, ranging from "go here and kill these guys and get a key" to "get me 50 croc skins" but also include more interesting, story driven things such as "go talk to this person and get me a vial of virgin blood so you can blow up a volcano". All in all, the quests are (in general) delivered fairly well, and most of the story driven quests are fairly interesting and so far it is only the random NPC quests that are requesting you to go kill local wildlife for meat. I'm sure the occurrence of these quests will go up as you reach farther into the game, if the typical conventions endure.
Combat
Combat is a big deal in MMORPGs as it seems to be the only thing that hasn't really gone forward in any tangible way. Conan's big claim was that it had revolutionized it. The way the combat works is that (in the beginning) three of your keys are bound to a direction in which your character swings. When you click one of these three keys your character will perform a swing with his/her weapon, either to the right, to the left or a downward strike). This means a few things
a) There is no auto attack, you have to continually hit the buttons to do damage.
b) The direction of your attacks has an impact on how much damage you do (i.e. an enemy may be blocking a certain direction) and so you have to make decisions on the fly as to which way to attack.
c) You can actually hit multiple enemies based on how you are standing and which swing you use.
In general it is a good departure away from typical game conventions and it has made combat more interesting for me.
The special moves (at least for Soldiers) are based around a system called Combos. Each combo you try to activate will require you to hit the attack keys in a certain sequence which will then cause the combo to execute. This helps make things more interesting as you are often trying to use the right combo to do maximum damage based on how the enemy is defending.
The animations, the way the mechanics work and fatalities (special kills based on how you finish the enemies that look cool) all add up to make the combat system very refreshing. It should be enough to keep me interested into later levels to see how they handled other aspects of combat (mounted combat in particular).
Closing
In amongst all of the good stuff there will undoubtedly be grind and tedium timesinkedness that plagues the medium. Unfortunately I don't think that this will change any time soon. As such, I don't think that this game will bring anything really new and exciting to the genre to topple WoW. I do think that it is a step in the right direction with their refreshing combat system and more interactive story telling.
All in all, this is probably one of the better ones that I've tried this close to launch and that leaves me very hopeful. If you are a fan of MMORPGs then this is one I can recommend you trying. If not, you probably aren't going to find much to stick around for. As with anything game related, you won't truly know if you like it until you try it yourself, no matter what numbers are associated with the game on metacritic.
Sorry if there isn't a lot here. I should probably get back to concentrating on what I doing for a while. Please, if you have any questions, or just want more info, about anything let me know here and I will try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.
Age of Conan.
