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 - Conan Hyborian Adventures is a hitI find it hard not to give a five star-rating for this product. There are reasons to rate it lower, yes, such as the fact that the launch was not smooth, there were and still are many glitches with the game, and there were promises not fulfilled (directX 10). But there is so much more to this game than your regular MMO that originality and ingenuity alone makes this game a five-star. The combat system is incredible. The realism of models, scenes, textures and animation makes you feel totally immersed. The label rated "M for Mature" is extremely attractive for adults. The world has great and established content. The classes are balanced and unique. The list goes on and on. People tend to judge things for what they are, but they miss the point of what they can be. There is an enormous potential with Age of Conan. Funcom has put so much effort in making this game graphically appealing and at the same time open-ended that it's no wonder AoC is a hit and will eventually replace the likes of WoW, LOTR and SWG. If you are looking for the next step in the MMO evolutionary scale, this is the game for you. Rating:  - This game had great potential but appears to be all hypeI really gave this game a shot even with all the usual problems you can expect for a game at launch. 2 months in and they are still sending out patches that break many more things than they fix. Performance is a major problem for me and I have a custom built machine that is only 3 months old. My main problems continued to be the constant disconnects, crashes to desktop, memory leaks, horrid customer service petition system, high latency due to east coast only servers. I am very disappointed with this game and will avoid funcom products in the future. Rating: - Awesome game.Ground breaking is all I can say about AoC. The combat is no longer a snore and bore fest. The graphics are amazing. Anyone who complains about this game has not read any of Robert Howards works. I find it amazing to see places in game that I have read about through Howard's Conan stories. A definite good time is to be had with this one. Rating: - System RequirementsThe system requirements for this game are pretty high. The graphics are nice, but they aren't worth all the memory you have to give up. Unless you are a hard-core gamer who loves mmorpgs, don't bother. This game is not for the leisure-type player. Rating:  - The potential is there, but...It's tough to sort through the various folks on both sides of the AOC fanboy vs. hater crowds, but here's my take after having played the first month and then quit. In a nutshell, AOC is like a St. Bernard puppy- it's probably going to grow up into something awesome, but right now it spends most of its time falling over and leaving messes on the carpet The good 1) The graphics require serious horsepower, but they do look good. The general feel works well for the mythos- a bit dark and dreary 2) The sounds and music are well done 3) The classes and combat have some nice ideas behind them- directional healing, combo moves, active shielding, etc. Combat is not simple button mashing 4) The initial storyline in Tortage is very well fleshed out with the nighttime quests, decent voice acting and the rest. 5) Writing- the quest dialogs are generally nicely done and some of the quest lines are quite funny. (Check out the early "What happened to my friend" quest in Khemi) The bad side of the game really comes in two parts: fixable and not-fixable. Fixable 1) Bugs, bugs, bugs. Some of these are near game killing, such as the female avatar attack speed bug. Female melee characters have different and slower animations than the males do, so they do less damage. Funcom took over a month to even admit this was a real bug, and now a month and a half into the game admits it's going to take at least a month to fix. This isn't the only issue, but it's a good example of how the game was rushed out the door. 2) Incomplete. Want to be an alchemist? Good luck- a lot of the materials simply don't drop yet. Interested in how your stats affect your performance? Well, they don't, at least they didn't while I was playing. (May have been fixed in a recent patch) Virtually all of the nice voice acting on quests goes away once you leave Tortage. 3) Lacking content. Compared to other MMOs, there's a shocking lack of stuff to do. There's exactly one instanced group dungeon (Sanctum) by level 40- compare to something like WoW or LOTRO which has quite a few by this point, and Sanctum is quite small. By the mid-40s you've probably run out of quests and are reduced to grinding 4) Very, very easy. Quest targets and areas are marked out on the map already. Virtually everything can be soloed. The few epic mobs in instances require no strategy at all- simply run in and start hitting them. There is so little penalty for death that killing yourself so you can resurrect on the other side of a zone is the preferred method of travelling. Non-fixable 1) Instancing. In retrospect, this is what really did it for me. Each area is a (rather small) instance that can only be accessed by a couple of travel points. Worse, there are multiple instances of each area that reduce the total population of the zone to 50-100 people max. This just kills the immersion- there's very little sense of a huge world that you can travel in or of crowds of people all playing together. When you want to group, you all need to run to a rez point and sync up so that you are in the same instance of the zone- you'll probably never see the people otherwise. Other MMOs simply "feel" epic in scope- Conan feels cramped. Even capital cities like Khemi feel somehow limited, especially since you know you can't really swim over to that island you can see in the distance- it's just scenery. 2) Crafting. The gathering portion of the crafting system is just horrible- a few, fixed resource nodes per zone that regenerate the resource slowly but have no indication at all of their status. There's nothing at all fun about running an entire zone to the four sandstone nodes and find that all of them have nothing in them. Worse, to level up gathering you have to get a "magic drop" of a rare resource which can often be impossible to find. Endlessly frustrating and not fun in any way. I'll probably re-up in 5-6 months to see what's happened. There's a core of a really good game here, even with the instancing, but right now it's just not worth the monthly fee.
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