Closed beta impressions of Age of Conan, Players vs. Everything Filed under: Betas, Age of Conan, Game mechanics, Previews For a day and a half I’ve tried out different classes and played through the various starting missions to serve up some Age of Conan playing impressions including AOC Power leveling process. I’d like to give you a quick and dirty version which is done by Funcom.

The truth is this game is worth your money. I’ll talk about the aspects of the game that everyone is talking about as well as I haven’t seen discussed much yet. It's also important to note that I've been playing with the closed beta client -- not the open beta one. There is a serious difference. I should mention that when I wrote Friday's article, I hadn't yet played the game and I was basing my arguments largely on the claims of people who had had bad experiences with the open beta client. I hold the opinion about making games with outlandish system requirements, but I think Age of Conan fits fine on many systems. Keeping all of that in mind, I’ll show you what I think about this game.

Graphics, Load times, and Stability The very first time I started the game, I did have some framerate issues and stuttering in character creation. I also had to restart the client when it froze loading the newbie area for the first time. After that, however, the game was as smooth as silk for me. I took five different characters to level 9 or 10, I didn't have one single crash to desktop, and I can literally count the graphics bugs and problems I saw on one hand. Loading was on the long side, but it got better each time I entered a zone, and it's not much different from what you'd see in any game with load times. My gaming machine is good but not top of the line. I run a 1.86GHz dual core processor, a Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb video card, and 2 GB of RAM. Not too fancy, by current standards. You can buy my video card for less than $150 these days.

I didn’t have any issue with that setup and the game looked gorgeous. Whatever problems open beta has, they're not there in the proper client, so don't make your purchasing decision based on the open beta reports of poor stability. Environments I particularly enjoyed about the environments was the use of vertical landscape. Instead of the zones being largely flat, you have a lot of sweeping hills, ruins hanging over large areas, and climbable ladders. For the most part, if you can figure out a way to jump on it, you can run across it. This leads to some very interesting ways to pass through zones, especially if you're a rogue class and have advantage of the hide skill. It makes the game seem very dynamic.

You're actively moving around, using the landscape to your advantage, and thinking in three planes of movement instead of just two. Another thing It's hard to make a good analysis of Age of Conan's environments based on the little bit of the game world I've seen, but so far I'm very satisfied. All of it is very well done and consistent with the Conan lore. A large carnivorous plant would summon a few demon minions to help him and eat you. So the most important thing is, the world of Age of Conan feels genuinely dangerous. NPCs and Dialogue I love the dialogue system that the game uses to give you your quests and let you interact with the NPCs. Boring, one-way conversations from quest givers in MMOGs are something that I've complained about at great length in the past. Fortunately, Funcom took a page from games like Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect, and gave many of the NPCs dialogue trees!

This is a feature I've wanted in MMOG's for a long, long time, and I think it goes a long way towards creating a more immersive game experience. While NPCs that have quests for you do bear the trademark "!" symbol, you have to go through a series of dialogue options to get their quest. It's a two-way conversation, and you get to pick your responses from several possible options and see what they say based on your choice. If you don't want to read all the text, you can click through it quickly and just get the quest, but if you enjoy the role-playing aspects and like chatting NPCs up, it's there. Whether have a quest or not, NPCs also talk to you. They give you information about the game world and make the towns seem more alive.

Most of the players are very excited about the things that Funcom does with the dialogue system. The possibilities are endless! Combat As for the combat system, I'm undecided. That's where my second issue comes in: since your 1, 2, and 3 keys (and eventually Q and E) are taken up by the basic attacks, all of your combos or spells have to go on the 4-0 keys that follow. However, the keys taken up by your basic attacks are the prime keyboard positions for all of your most important skills in other games. This means that the skills you use most are suddenly on the far more awkward keys, requiring long-time MMOG vets to get used to some new hand-movement or learn to activate their combos by clicking.

Try to farm some Age of Conan gold for your further needs. Why do we have five keys wasted on just generating the basic minimum of "white damage" and activating combos that you need to press a button to start anyway? Since you can just macro the combos with the right hardware (making the directional attacks even more pointless), I think that the designers might want to go back and do a little more work with this. Frankly, we should be able to kill our enemies without needing to resort to special skills, or just have the skills activate automatically as part of the attack chain if we have to work as hard as we do. I think the designers may have been going for a fighting-game style chain system, but it's far more of a wannabe hybrid between the two systems that ends up feeling a little awkward.I think I preferred having just one basic attack, given the way the rest of the system works -- it accomplishes the same ultimate purpose. Missions The missions (or quests) in Age of Conan is pretty the same as you expected. Go here, kill these, bring back 20 of their doodads. Go here, collect these, and watch out for demons. Go here, talk to that guy, and come back.

However there are definitely some missions that you are very interested in and quite pleased with, just like me. When I was playing one of the Rogue classes, I had one mission where the whole point was to use my hide skill to sneak into position and eavesdrop on a conversation. It was a very spygame-like experience. If I got spotted by the guards, I was quickly overwhelmed -- there were just too many. Instead, I snuck past most of them, killed a lone guard at the bottom of a ladder and gain some AOC Gold, then snuck past a series of rooftop guards until I was able to drop into my eavesdropping position on a nearby building. It was very original, and it's exactly the kind of quest I'd love to see more of. In another mission, I was sent to talk to a representative of the local evil-doers. Merely talking to him completed the mission, and you could either sneak past all of his guards or kill them on your way in. While speaking to him, you have the option to fight him or not. You complete the mission either way, and the choice is up to you, based on what you say to him.

At the same time, you are leveling your character; you wouldn’t believe that it only takes 250hours for Age of Conan Powerleveling, what a favorable time length for a MMO player! Conclusion So about my final decision after spending so much time playing with the closed beta client is very simple. The game is stable, gorgeous, exciting, and excessively fun. Funcom has an awesome game on their hands. 2004, I was beta testing a game called World of Warcraft. So I am telling you right now, you are not regret to begin with this game. To sum up, Age of Conan is everything I was hoping for and then some. I hope I'll be seeing all of you in Hyboria.