Updated Age of Conan Impressions
There are plenty of places to get more AoC impressions, so I’ll try to keep my impressions/review brief (update: failed) and personal.
The best one-word description of AoC is “haphazard”. It’s in the feature list: they have mounted combat but no auction house. It’s in the mechanics: melee combat is innovative, fun, and obviously iterated; spellcasting is dull, repetitive, and generic. The game is technically advanced, but features no auto-config so you’ll spend quite some time optimizing your rig and your video settings. The starting area is advanced well beyond WoW, but there’s only one: if you like to level a few alts to determine your favorite play style, prepare for pain. Itemization is a work in progress: there are quest and dungeon rewards here and there, with whole dungeons and level ranges with nary a decent weapon. Some classes embody Conan (specifically, the Barbarian class), while others feel like piles of somewhat related abilities. Many of the skills and feats are broken, but AoC charges a respec cost to change them– okay, that last point was all negative.
Age of Conan’s primary accomplishment is the revolution of melee combat. While AoC’s spellcasting classes were a huge letdown from my high level WoW mage (20+ keybound abilities that I use almost every arena battle, versus 1 nuke button), the Guardian is sheer twitchy goodness. In a single battle, you might swap weapons several times to enable different moves, activate different special moves plus their combo strikes, switch stances mid-combo to increase damage on the final swing, and run around while doing all of this to optimize enemy position for area of effect strikes (i.e. most of your strikes). In the most striking demonstration of this, WoW has three stances for a warrior– AoC has three sets of three stances each, for a total of nine (three of which can be active at any given time).
Addressing a pet peeve of mine, AoC has successfully de-emphasized healbotting. Most healing classes have one big heal on a several minute cooldown, and the rest of their heals are heals over time. This means you apply your HoTs and then get to fighting.
Finally, AoC’s art direction is a welcome change of pace for any WoW addicts. You’re still running around in a swords and sorcery setting, but you’re clobbering picts instead of orcs, and living in a city that looks much grittier and more human.
AoC might be a great game in a year, if their drive to release the XBox 360 version doesn’t distract too much from much-needed improvements. Is it going to tempt people to ditch my WoW subscription? AoC’s largest hurdle may simply be its WoW-derived model: I have a hard time seeing any game tempting me away from a virtual life without level grinds, significant respec costs, and bad pick-up groups. Funcom isn’t the only company emulating the aspects of WoW that both I, and Blizzard, are already leaving behind.