Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

I, like so many other people, was looking forward to playing and enjoying this game. Even though i knew i would eventually have to upgrade my computer this game was the thing that made me fork out around $740 for upgrades and repairs. When the game came out i enjoyed it for about 20 levels. These early levels you can play solo, and i enjoyed that along with playing with friends.

But unfortunately, that's all the good that can be said about this game. I realize that launching a huge game like this is difficult, but it still buggy and laggy today. That is even fine, but the game is constantly getting patched to fix bugs and glitches that should of been taking out in alpha or beta state. While the graphics are pretty nice, the worlds are plain ugly. After 4 days of playing this game all my friends and family have moved on. It took me a week before i could not take it anymore. I had high hopes for this game, witch added to the excitement of the first few levels of play.

Upgrading my computer was the only good thing that has come out of me buying this game, now i can play real games a lot smother.

The launch of a Massive Multiplayer game is always problematic. Coping with the sheer number of players, server load, different configurations and humans doing what we do best - namely the unexpected - can cause serious problems for any game.

However, two months after release, Age of Conan is still an unplayable shambles of a game that's riddled with bugs, broken content and elements that simply don't work. I'm not talking about trivial bugs like miss-spelt names or items being the wrong colour. No, what we have here is a "game" that physically refuses to work. It's currently impossible to play for more than 30 minutes before a recurrent memory leak causes your entire system to lock-up. That's not good.

So what are Funcom doing to address this? Not a lot. Instead of fixing such major issues, they're instead playing around with the character balance, boosting some classes to the point of being God-like whilst lowering the abilities of others to make them as effective as a wet tissue. Not that any of this matters, of course, because it's impossible to play this mess of a "game" anyway.

Then there's the fact that the game was billed as a Direct X10 title. Not true. It's an unoptimised, flabby mess of a game that struggles on even the lowest of settings on a reasonable games machine. Be prepared to spend most of your time watching a 2 frames per second slide show if you crank your graphics up beyond even the most basic of settings. Even on high-end machines, the game still suffers from some terrible pop-in, poor frame rates and generally bad performance.

Credit where credit's due, the game looks pretty amazing. And the combat system is interesting. But beyond that, this is a perfect example of how not to launch an MMO: from the lack of content to the ineptitude of the Live Team to introduce fixes without breaking the game, to the lack of anything to actually do except kill creatures ad infinitum.

Put simply, don't waste your money.

I dunno why people keep bugging around with this being a messy game full of bugs. That's a long time ago, and now it's flawless game play for those who have a decent PC. After finishing the tutorial, which actually is plenty of fun, you can access three worlds with outstanding design, the game is pure eye-candy! I tried to play wow earlier, but it does not come anywhere near this, e.g. the quests are designed to be a little challenging, and not too repetitive, like some quests in other rp-games. I must admit that on some of the servers, there is too much of pvp in inappropriate places, e.g. before the entrance to a cave or something, so I chose to play in an pve server...

I too have played this game at start and have quit after 3 months of release. Reasons being, the game was buggy, there wasn't enough content and most of all i had a crappy PC.

2 months ago, i received an e-mail from Funcom, announcing the arrival of an expansion. I got so excited, i purchased a state of the art PC and re-subbed.

My favorite pass time in life are MMO games, I played lots of titles including: WoW, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings... but i can tell you with a straight face, nothing comes close to AoC.

This mmo is so underrated now, just because of a bad release. But the developers came back and they made giant steps with this game, with lots of issues resolved so far.

The graphics are awesome (paying on a 40" LED Phillips, ATI 5970 GPU, I7 980 CPU and 12 GB RAM), the soundtrack is the best soundtrack i ever heard in any mmo; the composer did an extraordinary job.... i can listen to the music over and over only to love it more and more. Combat system is fresh and innovative and gameplay and immersion are great.

Funcom just released the long awaited expansion, and it is nothing less than a work of art.

Now on the negative side, the game still has some bugs (majority gone though), the engine performance needs more optimization and the pvp mechanics need a look at.

I am so happy the developers did not give up on this game after the terrible release, they are doing a great job... kudos to them.

i give this a solid 10/10, once the bugs are fixed it is an 11/10.

I've been playing this game since the Early access and seen all the problems that the game has had. I am very glad I stuck with it so I can be enjoying the error-less and well entertaining game it has become since this latest patch. Please, if you are considering buying into AoC, don't pay attention to these other 2 reviews. Yes, at launch this game was buggy but now only being 4 months old, the game is nearly flawless and should have World of Warcraft fan-boys shivering in their shoes. The graphics are top notch and the game-play is just too darned exciting. Say goodbye to letting mmos play the game for you, this one is all you.

Heads Will Roll!!