Muckbeast

Age of Conan is a hot mess – my review.

As I noted in one of the comments, I have also taken a few writing jobs elsewhere. Occasionally I will link to the articles here and then open things up for discussion. I recently had a 4 part review of Age of Conan published , and I am not spoiling much to tell you the review is far from positive. In fact, I’d say my review is downright savage, but that’s hardly my fault. Age of Conan is a disaster of almost epic proportions. Bloated, inefficient code (32 gig install, and it runs poorly even at recommended specs), terrible design choices (the much hyped combo system is a wreck), bugs, and missing features are just a few of the problems. In my review, I did not even have time to address the weak PvP or the rampant sexism.

A few choice selections to pique your interest. On the system performance :

I tested this game on three different machines: one far above recommended specs, one right at recommended, and one somewhere between minimum and recommended. The top machine ran the game passably, but still had long load times and frequent framerate drops. But on all the other machines performance was atrocious. In major cities the FPS monitor literally dropped to SPF (Seconds Per Frame). That is not hyperbole – that is fact. Before Age of Conan, the only place I had heard of SPF was on sunscreen.

A snippet about combat – specifically the utter failure that is the AoC combo system :

4) If you are moving at any time during the completion of the combo, the combo fails. Yes, that is right. This is a melee combo system that forces you to stand still. It is like having a long, interactive casting time that has to be maintained with additional keypresses. It also makes kiting a melee player extremely easy for ranged attackers.

A bit about healing and support:

For some reason, the Age of Conan developers seem to think nobody wants to actually play a healing or support character. They seem to think everyone wants to deal damage and kill things. The complete and utter failure to acknowledge two major types of gameplay is absolutely mind boggling. If you like healing or support, you really should avoid this game completely.

Then I move on to a variety of other general areas of gameplay , like questing, guilds, role playing (lol), and loot:

If you like your questing to involve absolutely zero thought or effort, then you will love this system. If you fondly remember a day when quests in games required the firing of at least two synapses, you will find this system an abomination.

ROLE PLAYING

None. Next!

Finally, I summarize things , try to point out a few positives (the hardest part of writing the review) and give a score.

Age of Conan is not the worst MMORPG I have ever played, it is just a very bad one. I would expect a lot more from a modern MMORPG developed by a company that actually has MMORPG experience.

Please click on the links and read the whole review. Then feel free to share your own opinions of Age of Conan here, or tell me where I went wrong (or right).