Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2785 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Eidos
• Released on: 2008-05-23
• Number of discs: 2
• Platform: Windows XP
• Subtitled in: English
• Dimensions: .33 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Amazon.co.uk
Based on the events and characters of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a fantasy themed massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that immerses players in a dark, expansive universe filled with ground-breaking brutal combat, dangerously intoxicating magical abilities, and the social and cooperative game features that MMORPG players crave.

The MMORPG finally matures

A troubled King Conan on his throne. View larger.

Test your metal in close combat. View larger.

Straddle War Mammoths & Killer Rhinos. View larger.

Lead your guild in player vs. player battles. View larger.

Explore the pleasures & pitfalls of the Hyborian Age. View larger.

Set in the later years of Conan’s life, after he has famously become king by his own hand, the game centers around the fragile state of Conan’s rule in Aquilonia. Surrounded by enemies and hostile nations, Conan’s rule hangs by a thread and in the end, it’s up to players, either singly or backed by their guilds to turn the tide for or against the embattled king.

Massively Multiplayer Gaming for the Adult Player
One of the most highly anticipated MMORPGs in recent years due to the strength and familiarity of the Conan franchise across a variety of major media, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is the first of several releases planned for the franchise, all of which are aimed at an adult audience. Firmly rooted in the savage, bloody, violent and sexy Hyborian universe, players can expect a graphically beautiful game blended with gritty gameplay that is true to both the barbarian hero from Howard’s writings and the Schwarzenegger influenced version from books, movies and comics.

Available Cultures and Classes
Although Age of Conan contains a wide range of peoples, its playable cultures are currently limited to Aquilonians, Cimmerians, and Stygians. Within each of these players can choose from a selection of archetypal character classes, although available classes and subsequent subclasses are not necessarily the same within each culture. For example, archetypal classes for Aquilonians and Cimmerians are Rogue, Priest and Soldier, while Stygians are represented by Rogue, Priest and Mage. Further differences exist within subclasses for each. See the basic breakdown of all three cultures below:

Aquilonians: Internally divided, but united against their barbarian neighbors, the Aquilonians live lives on the edge. Their kingdom, with its prosperous cities, enlightened culture and religious freedom, is known as the "Flower of the West." Yet for all this and despite the power of King, Conan I, it is a land where culture clashes and unrest are always a threat.

Cimmerians: As the Hyborian Age comes to an end the northern barbarian clans of the Cimmerians know that the end of their time is drawing near too. King Conan I of Aquilonia is himself a Cimmerian, though not typical of his people. Although his life has been filled with wanderlust, his Kin care nothing for what occurs outside their clan territories.

Stygians: Masters of the magical arts and ruled by their consuming worship of the serpent-god Set, the Stygians excel at occult and diabolic lore. They learned long ago that true power lies in knowledge and in pacts with dark powers. This single-mindedness has allowed them become the only culture to harness the secrets of the Mage class and power that comes with it.

Modes Singleplayer as well as Multiplayer
Unlike most MMORPGs, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures includes a significant singleplayer experience as well as deep overarching multiplayer gameplay. This is an atypical MMORPG feature, but one that has a purpose. Players enter the game as a lowly galley slave with no memory of his/her past, and over the first five to 20 levels of singleplayer action build the skills necessary to survive in the game's multiplayer levels. During this time you will traverse a variety of rich environments including jungles, deserts, mountains, valleys, dungeons and cities packed with NPCs, beasts and monsters, before eventually leveling up and moving back to your chosen culture’s homeland. Because the only character-related choices that players have to make at the game’s opening are their looks, clothing and culture, this singleplayer mode is important in deciding what class and subclass to pursue and thus the level of impact your character will have in greater multiplayer portions of the game.

In-game levels 20 and above are strictly multiplayer. 20-40 introduce players to guilds. 40-60 deal with large scale combat. 60-80 have the player interacting with King Conan and levels 80 and up represent end-game play. Here gameplay changes as social aspects of MMORPG gameplay take over on a large scale.

Real-time Combat That Takes Queues from the FPS
Traditionally MMORPGs have utilized a mix of auto and turn-based functionality in their combat systems, but Age of Conan dispenses with that, instead drawing inspiration from FPS/action games. Firmly rooted in the brutality of the Hyborian universe, game developer Funcom has devised an action-based system that not only provides the sense of actually being in the fight, but also requires the player to participate in it. That means no simple targeted attacks. Players can attack and defend from nearly any position in real-time, whether on the ground or atop a mount, while standing still or on the move. It’s a recipe for carnage and one that fits right into the world of Conan.

The combat system in Age of Conan comes in three forms: drunken brawling, mini games like CTF and massive Player vs. Player battles, which lets you engage in siege combat to defend or attack a city. All are easy to learn, but difficult to master, providing hours worth of play and replay value and are the core of this new cutting edge MMORPG.

Customer Reviews

Promising, but incomplete
I've been playing since the start of open beta, through early access and now have a level 76 character on a pvp server, so I have experienced the majority of the available content.

There are things which I love about this game and there are things that I dislike immensely, let's start with the good. Characters and combat are really fun, the combo system works really well, and for spellcasters no need to stop and target, as long as you are facing an enemy your spells should select the target.

The graphics are very impressive, notably in the first 20 levels, White Sands Isle is particularly nice with sun bleached sand and rippling azure water. however later areas lack some of the polish of the early zones. A zone like Thunder River is still impressive, but seems visually to be a bit more rough around the edges. You are given a fair amount of choices when designing your character, and there are more sliders than you could shake a stick at, however a few more variations of skin tone and hair colour would have been nice. I also really like the design of the weapons and armour, they are stained, cut and dented. Even the lower level items look good on your character, I have a level 20 assassin who is wearing flip flops, how cool is that :D

There are three resource zones where the majority of gathered items can be collected by players, I actually found it fun expoloring these zones as quite often mobs of your level will spawn while you are collecting. This leads me on to what you are collecting for...

Guild Cities, this is what has kept me motivated to continue with the game, your guild collects resources and then starts building a city in an instance of one of the resource zones. So far my guild has managed to build most of the fist tier of buildings, you get a good degree of choice in where to place the different buildings, and it is always nice to see them being raised from the ground. When I say a city, I really do been it, these things are big, maybe 2/3 of one of the capitals from WoW.

The clases also seem very fun, I have been playing a Priest of Mitra, which I have found has some intersting and clever abilities and is a real pleasure to play. I have tried out most of the classes at lower levels and they all seem interesting. Also if you enjoy playing a healer type class you should really enjoy the three priest classes, they are all unique and can all also do a fair bit of damage, which is a nice change from other MMOs.

Sounds good so far? Be prepared here come the negatives...

There are alot of loading screens, each zone is a seperate area that has to be loaded, this sometimes gives me an impression that I am playing in a series of, admitedly large, room, rather than being part of a seamless world. I used to play World of Warcraft and looking back I really enjoyed the fact that you could travel the entire length of a continent without seeing a loading screen, Conan does not make me feel the same way.

There is not enough content in the game yet, meaning you will have to spend much of your time in the later levels grinding. To be fair to Funcom they have stated they know this is an issue and are adding additional quests in the next few weeks.

The big selling point of this game for me was the Siege Warfare, this has not been implemented yet alongside many of the end game raids and dungeons.

Ther are many bugs such as extremely long respawns on quest items, mounts going slower than a walking player, quests that cannot be completed, graphical glitches, crashes etc. Age of Conan definitely feels unfinished.

Personally I will take a break from the game and come back in a few months when hopefully some of these issues have been resolved, I do think it has the potential to be a great game, in a few months time.

Such a shame
I have played AoC since the day of release, I have a level 80 Ranger on a PvP server.

If you have the PC system to run AoC well, it looks absolutley stunning, the graphics and sound combined are both very well done and brilliantly realised throughout the various zones.

Gameplay wise, it is similar to most MMO's with the exception of the much vaunted combat system. The combat system is slightly different to what we have seen so far in other MMO's, does take a *small* amount of timing/skill to use properly and overall is more fun than the usual mindnumbing keybashing.

The starting area which takes you through your fist 20 levels of the game is very well done indeed, the storyline is good as well. It is polished and done very well.

On the whole, with some of the recent patches, levelling up to 80 is not too bad at all now, there are generally enough quests to do in order to get you there and not very much grinding required as such, if you take advantage of the quests on offer. Any grinding you need to do is really only in the 70+ range, and not a lot of it. What grinding you do need to do can easily be done, and fairly quickly in the Villas in Noble District.

Overall, despite the bugs/crashes getting to 80 is fine, fun most of the time, and worthwhile overall.

The game fails really, most noticably, when you reach max level of 80.

There is nothing to do, even on a PvP server. Currently the much delayed PvP "patch" which should have been in from the very start anyway, has still not shown itself, and has been delayed by 2 months or so. Reading the information available about what it will be like if/when it does come, is not very promising as well, very restrictive and unrewarding. I hope this changes before it goes live, or it will kill the game off for many people, me included.

This is the real problem with AoC, the developers Funcom, have an absolute gem of a game here at it's basics, but they have failed to correct quickly enough, the myriad bugs, incomplete and broken classes, no PvP system, and high end PvP (Battlekeep encounters) are also, quite frankly, boring, broken pointless and bugged as well.

It is a recurring theme in the game with little to no content at high levels, and having been touted as a strong PvP game, well, not having any PvP system in place from the start and still not having one over 2 months since release is incredibly poor.

The class balance is very poor, crafting is poor, itemisation is poor and there is no economy as a result. What little economy did exist has been broken by the developers in the last 2 patches.

Also, due to the way gemcrafting works, and the failure by Funcom to address these issues quickly enough, it has completely skewed World PvP as well. Players who have the time and resources are now using fully gemmed gear which basically allows them to 1 shot kill any other class in the game, ruining any semblance of balance to PvP. It also ruins their own combat system, one of the positives of the game, as tank classes run around 1 or 2 shotting everything with no combos required, just normal swings doing insane damage.

The way FC have handled gems is bizarre and totally against what 99% of players actually expected and wanted and expressed. They do not listen to the actual players and make some very very odd decisions about where they decide to fix things, and more often than not break more than they fix.

I would say this game had, and still has really, the potential to be truly incredible, however it has been badly let down by the developers, there are too many bugs, memory leaks, lag spikes and crashes, PvE Raiding is poor, PvP is meaningless, itemisation is a joke, and crafting is bland, boring, and mostly useless, with class balance non existent. The UI is primitive, guild management poor, no alliances, no options and what options there are, they are restrictive.

The top end game which was supposed to be Battlekeep sieges again is very poor. All these things should have been addressed by now, but they have not, and while they may get around to it at some point in the future, for many players it will be too little to late. They will have moved on to another game or back to a previous one. Many already have. It may be worth looking back in on AoC in a few months time, but the way things have gone so far, I have my doubts, and that really is a shame because I was looking for soemthing different than World of Warcraft to give my money to. At this point in time, AoC is sadly not it.

Age of Conan
I really wanted to like this game, hence my playing it for 2 months and reaching level 75, but having spent most of that time waiting for the developer to fix the problems, (which they promised to do, but utterly failed to deliver on), I finally gave up in disgust. The vast majority of media reviews are based on the first 20 levels, and should not be trusted, as those levels were over-designed to produce positive media reviews. The problems kick in beyond level 20, and there are three main problem areas:

1. The game was still in a beta stage when it was released, and contained game breaking issues of a technical nature for many players, (regular crash to desk top, regular lag spikes, regular memory leak, etc). Subsequent patches did not address or fix these crucial problems. The developer are however aware of these technical problems, and promise to look at them.

2. Numerous quests were broken, the crafting side was broken, the PVP combat was broken and/or unbalanced, etc. Subsequent patches did fix most of the broken quests, but the crafting side remained a joke, as did the PVP combat, despite a huge number of patches aimed at balancing the different classes.

3. There is a huge lack of content between levels 60 - 80, and nothing to do when you reach level 80, as the end game itself, (siege wars, raiding, etc), are all broken or pointless. The developer promised to add new high level content within a month and fix the broken bits, but by the time I left, they had not done so, and were a month overdue.

So, basically the game was still in a beta stage when I gave up on it, despite the fact that it was two months after launch. Hardcore fans of the MMORPG genre argue that this type of game needs oceans of time to evolve, and that we should expect huge problems at the birth of any new game. Perhaps, but I don't think any game should be released onto the market in a beta state, and would strongly recommend anyone delay buying this game for at least 3 - 6 months, and even then, they should check forums and web sites to see if the developer has finally delivered a working game.

Regards = Mr Grumpy