If you like MMO’s, you’ve probably spent the last couple of years spending the equivalent time on World of Warcraft that you have at work (probably more…) and shed any semblance of personal relationships to avoid distractions from raiding – I know I’ve spent my dues. WoW is to gamers as crack is to… well, a crack head.

Once I kicked the habbit (World of Warcraft, not crack – yet) I swore to myself I would never again delve into such a grindfest ever again. There was still, however, a void… all the good things that came from WoW. Then I hear about a game in development – this ‘Age of Conan’ by Funcom. Anarchy Online was (in theory) a good game… and thus I crossed my fingers, hoping for that level of complexity and originality to carry over into a better executed (and prettier) package. Was the wait worth it? For me – hell yes!

What do people complain about WoW? That the crafting system is shit? That every quest boils down to one equation – kill 11 wolves and bring pelts to a gnome? I think after my first toon hit level 20, I never again bothered to read any quest flavor text – to the point that I even installed addons that sped the text.

Which brings me to what the hurdle for the modern MMO versus stand alone games. With MMO’s, you loose almost all semblance of meta-plot and consequence. Until an expansion is released, you log into the world knowing what the world is going to be… a stagnant snap shot of an otherwise amazing world. When you ‘kill’ a boss, he is in fact not dead. when you get an epic sword, it is not the unique weapon of legends but rather shared by thousands. What makes a classic game? Why do we speak of Chrono Trigger, Zelda, FF VI in todays gaming culture with such esteem? Because they are the total package… plot, immersion, mechanics. These games were epic for those reasons! Why play WoW then? The same reason you played Diablo back in the day – your toon. Thats it. Get gear… tweak spec… flex your e-peen. Thats it. Why else kill Ragnaros for the 100th time? Is raiding that damn fun?

Age of Conan’s greatest strengths are innovation – quest dialogue, lvl1-20 ‘single-player’ introduction to the Hyborian world, guild cities, crafting, combat – almost every aspect is creative enough to be an entertaining experience. I find myself having fun playing, enjoying the world, reading the plot lines from quests. The character is less an extension of my e-peen, and more an avatar I take control of to navigate the world crafted, to help my guild map a chunk of land and power, and to recover my lost memory. I do so in such a visceral world that I still get gitty when my character decapitates his foe and the blood from the carnage splatters on my screen.

The game is not without flaws by any stretch of the imagination. Quests can often be bugged, ‘low’ settings still run poorly on older legacy hardware, ATI driver support is complete shit (I had to manually change a config file to select supported settings to get the client to even run on one of my machines!). PvP still needs worked… right now its a FFA with no rewards/penalties. So pretty much, people gank other people to be dicks. My mammoth mount looks amazing, but handles like… well, a mammoth (I do like that a mount isnt just for speed, however).

For raw score, I’m going to give AoC an 8.5/10 with great potential to increase (or decrease). As with MMO’s, end-game, expansions, and patches may warrant a re-evaluation of the game.

Age of Conan
(www.ageofconan.com)