Kelly Wand"Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures" review (the first week)
May 28th 2008 02:03
Excerpt from page 50 of the "AoCHA" game manual, regarding Stygia - "Rulers, warlords, beasts and demons have risen up between the dunes to make Stygia their rightful home. While the faithful control and hold mastery where walls built by slaves will keep the wilderness at bay, there are countless stretching miles of sandy wastes that give Stygia a thousand and one places to hide treachery, death, and -- for the bravest souls -- adventure!"
"Age of Conan" is roughly equal parts guilty pleasure. Or at least it feels so after the first three or four solid days of play. My shoulders and back hurt, which indicates I must be enjoying it, but I also liked "Pirates of the Burning Sea" for over two weeks, so you can't trust anything I say. I see the shoulder-ache as part of the RP. Likewise, the absence of banks, extra bags, tradeposts, bar fighting, minimap fundamentals, crafting, city-building, siege battles, and the nipples the designers keep swearing exist somewhere in this supposedly M-rated universe. Except for the nipple-lessness (cavemen were edgier than we are culturally), these omissions all add to the prehistoric atmosphere, in a way.
Since Conan would have, I play on a PvP server. Kids playing cloaked assassins lurk everywhere, ganking at will and shouting "Bitch!" Really takes me back to when I wanted kids. You can ninja-loot other people's kills (the catch being that you have no extra bag space yet to store stuff in; the developers are "working on" that). There's never been faster leveling in any MMO, including WoW. My necro has a pet called a Mutilator, which looks kind of like Joan Rivers if you peeled off her skin. The designers promised that they wouldn't waste your time having you beat on rats and squirrels for the first ten levels; instead, you kill apes and snakes.
The quest designs and dialogue are excruciatingly bland, although so were many of Howard's narrative set-ups. His poetic gifts tended to leap out in his action sequences, and that's sort of how the game is too. Though the combat mechanics aren't nearly as intricate as the manual tries to make them sound (especially the spell-casting), it's quick and brutal and, in a good way, nerve-wracking. Combos are almost too easy to chain, but compared to the traditional vanilla MMO auto-attack, it's at least French vanilla.
The art style is strangely lovely; its jungles shimmer with humidity and the subterranean ruins give good supernatural dread. The manmade articles look primitive but careworn. These weapons and armor don't give off purple auras; they look sweaty and functional and dented. The combat noises are crunchy and squamous and layered with M-rated agony; for the first time in an MMO, you feel that man-eating plants and ghouls actually have nerve endings of their own.
Yet perhaps the game's most frustrating element is that regardless of nationality, every player character shares the same cliche origin tale, escaping the same slave galley, washing up on the same Tortage shoreline...Plus we all "forgot" our skills and feats and have to re-level it all back up...If only I could forget all my previous MMO experiences, those dozens of levels and hundreds of wipes, ah then I'd really have something to look forward to.
"Age of Conan" is roughly equal parts guilty pleasure. Or at least it feels so after the first three or four solid days of play. My shoulders and back hurt, which indicates I must be enjoying it, but I also liked "Pirates of the Burning Sea" for over two weeks, so you can't trust anything I say. I see the shoulder-ache as part of the RP. Likewise, the absence of banks, extra bags, tradeposts, bar fighting, minimap fundamentals, crafting, city-building, siege battles, and the nipples the designers keep swearing exist somewhere in this supposedly M-rated universe. Except for the nipple-lessness (cavemen were edgier than we are culturally), these omissions all add to the prehistoric atmosphere, in a way.
Since Conan would have, I play on a PvP server. Kids playing cloaked assassins lurk everywhere, ganking at will and shouting "Bitch!" Really takes me back to when I wanted kids. You can ninja-loot other people's kills (the catch being that you have no extra bag space yet to store stuff in; the developers are "working on" that). There's never been faster leveling in any MMO, including WoW. My necro has a pet called a Mutilator, which looks kind of like Joan Rivers if you peeled off her skin. The designers promised that they wouldn't waste your time having you beat on rats and squirrels for the first ten levels; instead, you kill apes and snakes.
The quest designs and dialogue are excruciatingly bland, although so were many of Howard's narrative set-ups. His poetic gifts tended to leap out in his action sequences, and that's sort of how the game is too. Though the combat mechanics aren't nearly as intricate as the manual tries to make them sound (especially the spell-casting), it's quick and brutal and, in a good way, nerve-wracking. Combos are almost too easy to chain, but compared to the traditional vanilla MMO auto-attack, it's at least French vanilla.
The art style is strangely lovely; its jungles shimmer with humidity and the subterranean ruins give good supernatural dread. The manmade articles look primitive but careworn. These weapons and armor don't give off purple auras; they look sweaty and functional and dented. The combat noises are crunchy and squamous and layered with M-rated agony; for the first time in an MMO, you feel that man-eating plants and ghouls actually have nerve endings of their own.
Yet perhaps the game's most frustrating element is that regardless of nationality, every player character shares the same cliche origin tale, escaping the same slave galley, washing up on the same Tortage shoreline...Plus we all "forgot" our skills and feats and have to re-level it all back up...If only I could forget all my previous MMO experiences, those dozens of levels and hundreds of wipes, ah then I'd really have something to look forward to.
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