Reviews & First Impressions

Auvrea_08 — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:19 GMT

Thats all great but, I'll stick with WoW. Looks like a good game though...

Reviews & First Impressions

Deadage — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:18 GMT

will stick to WoW also....

Reviews & First Impressions

Shadowhunter56 — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:17 GMT

Looks good, I will be waiting until players start to hit the level cap and some of the bugs are fixed ^^

And a trial comes out, I got into AoC beta but the patcher was not working for me =P that would have been my trial but it did not work, I think with a 10 day trial, age of conan would get tons more people to play the game, including myself.

Whenever a new mmo comes out im skeptical if its going to be good or not, usually the trial helps that along.

Reviews & First Impressions

joewep — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:16 GMT

Yeah, my computer wasn't good enough to run beta. WoW it is... for now ^^

Reviews & First Impressions

Heydan — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:15 GMT

:) i wouldnt mind to finally quit wow for something more interesting ;) kinda bored of raiding and cartoonish looks after 3 years no?;)

Reviews & First Impressions

pcmaczone — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:13 GMT

I was in the open beta and had the early play option. Now got the retail but there are still a LOT of bugs to be sorted out. Many people, myself included, can't claim our mounts or other bonus items because the /claim command does not work. The gm's seem to take an eternity to deal with issues. The que has been sitting at 74 for the last 5hrs so don't expect an answer any time soon :(

Graphics wise it's pretty good however I think it's at the expense of game play. The loading time just to get into the game is around 5 minutes at the moment. Once in that's not the end of it. There is a loading screen just to go in and out of the inn and the only place you can switch to night mode (single player) is inside the inn. It's not a seamless world like WoW and you really feel it. There are a lot of places you can see but can't get to because of invisible walls which is frustrating.

Items seem to fill up your initial backpack very quickly and you spend a lot of time running to and from vendors to clear things out. There is supposed to be a "trading post" in Tortage...everyone's start zone, where you can store and sell things to other players but I have not seen it yet.

Oh and maybe I am missing something but there seems to be no way to log out to another character without actually exiting the game. With a 5 minute wait to get back in you can imagine how tedious that is! But that could be just me not seeing the option...the fact though that it's not easily found says a lot about the gui.

A WoW beater it is not. I thought I would be able to cease my WoW subscription and just play AoC but I really think that when my free 30 days are up that will be it for me. Will wait until the Lich King comes out or perhaps Warhammer. I hope they are both better than this.

Reviews & First Impressions

sylvanaar — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:12 GMT

Its going to be a while until this game is ready, the reviewers are being generous. They are deleting posts off the funcom forums now that are critical of the game.

The game needs an interface mod system so others can fill in the gap while they finish developing the game. No mods = slow fixes.

Reviews & First Impressions

pcmaczone — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:11 GMT

Just to add to my previous post. I can confirm there is NO login/logout option. You have to exit the game. What do these game reviewers get paid for ? because they obviously have not been paying attention to detail or indeed what the actual paying customers are saying. This game is way, way short of being retail ready. My suggestion is to give everyone there money back and fix the endless list of bugs BEFORE asking for our money again.

Reviews & First Impressions

mhylle — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:10 GMT

claim works perfectly.

claim does not work if you have not upgraded your account to retail yet.

So far I have encountered 2 bugs. Which is a lot less bugs than I encountered back when WoW started.

And no you do not have to exit the game to logout.
Do /camp and you will be logged out to the login screen. (not to be confused with the character selection screen)

AoC is not a WoW killer, but finally we have an alternative.. :)

Reviews & First Impressions

HalthionAldion — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:09 GMT

Geez Curse, was this article part of your advertisement agreement with Eidos or something? It's not like there's enough AoC crap on the homepage that you have to also post an article also pretty much full of crap.

We all know Eidos is pretty dodgy when it comes to these things (*cough* Kane and Lynch) but I really think you're jeopardizing the integrity of your website with useless trash like this article.

We want the REAL word on the street, and at the moment all I'm hearing from known AoC players is that it's no where near ready for retail release.

Shape up, Curse.

Reviews & First Impressions

Athrapy — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:08 GMT

Biased + you obviously never got past level 20.

Reviews & First Impressions

Athrapy — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:07 GMT

Wrong.

If you click exit then wait the timer, it logs you out.

Reviews & First Impressions

hamor — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:06 GMT

I'll throw my thoughts out here:

Firstly, to the people that complain about lauch-day bugs and patches - get off your ******* perfectionist high chair and visit the real world! Every game has launch day bugs when it's something of this nature. It's going to happen, live with it! The mark of a good company is how the respond to the horde of bug reports, how quickly they are addressed, and whether the bugs are truly gamebreaking, or simply annoying or relate to class balance or something similar.

Now that that's out of the way. My roommate bought this a week or so ago and brought it home, only to discover that his computer couldn't handle it. Against my better judgement, I installed it on my PC, which has a much better graphics card, but equal or lesser other components to see if it would work... I've been playing non-stop the last couple days.

My first impressions were of a graphically amazing game (even on mostly low settings), especially the water! The second amazing thing was that every quest I have so far encountered in Tortage City (newbie zone) is fully voice-acted! (I have a level 18 Dark Templar.) The third thing I noticed was not quite so positive, but not negative either, and that's the combat system. Oh. My. God. The combat system in this game is incredibly complex, and I haven't even considered trying to adjust my own shielding or incorporate dodging into my combat...

I am pushing to get out of the newbie zone and see more of what the world is like, but so far I am tending towards liking this game. The graphics are amazing, the theme is obviously more mature (bloody fatalities can trigger when you kill something and you can even take your female characters top off in game), and the combat is intense.

There are many things that need fixing, though, such as many many many graphical glitches and clippings, the lack of ability to bind mouse buttons, and the apparently turned-off banking, mail, and auction house systems. But as I said, it's a very new game and bugs will definitely happen. I did find the invisible barriers in the terrain quite annoying and the multiplayer areas farmed so insanely heavily that it could take hours to finish a single quest. This is by no means a perfect game, but I very much like the departure they have taken from the "standard" MMO, in graphics, voice acting, combat, and theme.

Once the mod community gets into full swing, many of the UI shortcomings will flesh out, leaving mostly just the standard MMO concerns to push on with: class balance, quest inconsistancies, terrain glitches, etc.

It will be exciting to see where the game goes and how the community reacts over the next few months.

Reviews & First Impressions

GreenRose — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:05 GMT

Question: is your ability in PvE combat affected by lag? Descriptions of the ranged-attack-aimer and the shiled system sound like it might be. Has anyone who has tried it played from Australia? - I assume Aussies would be playing on a server in the US, and hence will have 200MS lag at the absolute least (and possibly 500MS). Is the game playable with that?

Reviews & First Impressions

Athrapy — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:27:04 GMT

If you're a ranger you don't have to go into FPS mode.