Age of Conan (AoC) the Hyborian Adventures is a new MMORPG that I've recently been playing, now don't worry if you're not a Conan fan, you really don't need to know much of the lore in the game, it is simple to understand the characters from the start.
Conan is a lot similar to other MMORPGs on the market, but at the same time can be much much different. Like many MMOs the main object of the game is to go up levels (1-80) and gain new gear, titles and money, but I've found Conan to be much faster leveling especially from 1-20 where there is a zone designed to slowly let you learn about the game, this also includes a single player story line, which I found quite fun, as you needed some skill (well, with the class I was playing). It required me to block and use the shield defence, i'll explain what these are later. Once out of this low level area you go into the big world, where the graphics are stunning, but everyone seems to want to gank you (I rolled a pvp server). Now I say everyone, but it really can be everyone, or anyone.. In some zones race doesn't mean your constantly allied, you could get ganked by your own guild member if your not grouped with him.

The combat systems rules, simply rule, you choose what direction to swing your weapon starts off as 3 different direction but you eventually get to attack in 5 different directions later on in the game, and do damage by unlocking combos, you click the combo button and then act out of the different directions of swings that it tells you to do unleashing a deadly strike from the combo.
Rangers, the 'hunter' class of AoC, get a really upclose way of shooting so it is nearly FPS, and casters and healers generally target or do conal damage affects. So the melee has improved on other games for certain, takes a while to get used to not auto attacking or tapping one button, but once you are used to it you can become faster and faster at unleashing combos, resulting to more damage. Also you can avoid alot of damage but double tapping backwards to hop back or side step, it gives you a debuff to reduce the chance of being hit. You have a shield system which you can stack around you so that the enemy does less damage on you.


Now some pro's and con's:

Pro's

-Combat system is very intuitive and realistic
-Gore effects are nice, you can do these killing blows which are called fatalities, which kill people in horrible gorey ways
-The characters look very real, many even too real, I do think they jump like idiots though
-Classes arent all stuck with 1 role, IE a Healer can also Damage, as most healing is conal/over time
-Graphics are stunning
-Its big. Very big
-Plenty of options, up to 20 you can play online or offline depending on play style
-Player built keeps, guilds can work together to construct major guild cities where everyone plays a part and eventually you can seige other guilds keeps etc etc
-Pvp is very quick and exciting action

Con's

-Reccomended specs are complete bull**** (3GHZ quad, 8600GTX card and 4gig ram dual channel=20fps on LOW)
-Needs to update every time you log in ('scanning local files-not patching)
-The characters look awkward and seem to run funnny
-Not a great fan of the size of the interface, seems out of place
-NPC's stop talking after the "noob zone"
-Less lore, unless you're a die hard conan fan
-No physical logout screen, only waiting 30 seconds to exit then logging back in
-Instancing doesn't seem as effective as WoW, although that could change, interesting at best for now
-General interface annoyance, like how you arent able to read stats of an item if the item is in the far right of your bag


My overall veiw is: Just keep in mind that it has been out like two weeks, when it took WoW like a year to fix all it's bugs, yet saying that WoW was the very first proper MMO, also take into consideration that we were playing around with level 20 and belows, can't really compare untill I've tried raiding on AoC and such.
So far.. I'm annoyed I picked a pvp server, respawn points are quite far apart and I seem to get ganked at least 4 times a quest by people 10 levels + above. It is alot harder to communicate with people, with the major flaw in my mind that you can't shift click names! Or even see what class they are by mouseover.

Thank you Russel for some of the pro's and con's


Fergus Smiles is a student and MMO PC gamer.

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