The Age of Conan is upon us!

A WoW killer it is not, but Age of Conan still stands tall-blood-bathed and bare-breasted-amidst a sea of second-place MMOs.

Hand it to FunCom: They took a leap of faith. Up until the May 20th release of Age of Conan, massively-multiplayer games hadn't dared step into M-rated territory, much less flaunt it with gore-spattered gameplay and shameless sexuality.

A fantasy MMO of swords, spells, faith, and bloodlust, Conan pits its players against the villains of an ancient and barbaric Earth. As King Conan wrestles with the consequences of his ascension to the Aquilonian throne, you-an escaped slave, cast ashore amidst the debris of a violent shipwreck-are given the chance to build your name and memory from nothing, helping to shield the King from anarchists and warmongers.

That is, at least, how the game begins. Although its latter levels require grouping for quests and its end-game content is wrapped entirely around PvP combat, your earliest experiences in Conan are soloed. You'll spend your first five levels in an instance all to yourself, and for most of the first 20 you have the option of playing the game in single-player mode.

Night and Day

The benefit of this system, according to FunCom, is twofold: New players can break into MMO-style gameplay without having to worry about other players, and can play a story that wraps entirely around them. But in practice, the single- and multiplayer experiences are so vastly different that migrating from one to the other nearly breaks the game.

Conan matches the single-player/multiplayer shift to the time of day. If the sun is shining, you're in multiplayer mode; if the moon rises, you're playing alone; and you can switch between them at will. The night-time quests are more inventive than their multiplayer counterparts, and sometimes even involve scripted events, but they're inherently alienating-in such a massive world, having no-one around can get mighty lonesome.

If you try daytime questing during your first 20 levels, you'll eventually realize that none of the early quests require grouping, either. A cloth-wearing priest can easily solo a level 20 "group" quest that is supposedly designed for multiple players. While this certainly isn't a problem on its own, Conan changes the face of the game soon after, ratcheting up the difficulty once you leave the starting area of Tortage.

Grouping becomes a virtual requirement, and the concept of story starts fading away. With an early game that trains players to think alone, it's a disorienting transition.

Comments [11]

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LIVINGLEGEND69

why would they launch a unfinished game. it seems like it had a lot of things going for it

JPThunder01

LIVINGLEGEND69 Posted at: 06/10/08 at 5:41 AM PST why would they launch a unfinished game. it seems like it had a lot of things going for it
It's a trend in MMOs to release a game that's basically unfinished and have paying customers test it out for them and report any bugs for free. That way they dont have to pay as many game testers. MMOs are a total scam and waste of time.

Kyhrel

I agree that they should have polished off the higher levles to match the beginning levels, but no MMO is EVER finished. The day they shut it down is the day it is finished. If you are still playing it at that point...grats you beat the game. To me WoW had a problem similar. I loved playing through to level 60. I could barely stop. Once there it became countless raid after raid after raid to the same dungeon with a group or 40 man raids to try and assemble a full armor set or that super rare item. The larger the raid the more greed seem to play a factor. Molten Core was horrid to my memory. All the arguing over who could use this and that, who could roll on what and why, and whose fault it was we died(lol). I'm not sure how PvP is now in WoW, but OMG the battlegrounds were terrible. The CTF games were not too bad, but the large scale fields were crap. I'm going to try AoC, but I'm really excited about Warhammer Online. WAR!!!!!!!!

Dethskull

IMO Everquest 2 is superior to WoW in every way,any fan of WoW should try EQ2. I have tried WoW and thought it was basically a kiddie EQ2 on very easy mode.

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