Age of Conan: 10% of Hyborian Adventures.
Okay, first thing to mention is that this game has high minimum and recommended specs. If you want to play it at full whack with AA and max draw distances, we're talking a £500+ machine. The game still has DX10 to be re-released and Funcom has promised us multi-core support for quad core processors. At the moment, the game only makes use of 2 cores, so performance will get better eventually.
Also, this game is far from perfect, there are a lot of technical issues but Funcom has proved themselves as being dedicated. In the first few days alone, almost 1 gig of patches and fixes were released and since there have been updates multiple times a week with convenient downtimes (04:00am - 08:00am UK Time on Mondays and Thursdays). In a lot of these patches, Funcom have broken many things aswell as fixing others, for example some quests do not work, there are some objects you can walk straight through etc. But this is normal for a recently released MMO from my experience. NOTE: This game takes up over 25gb of harddrive space so make sure you have enough room!
Even with all these issues and imbalances, the game is still fun in the most part of the levelling experience.
You start the game with a deep and detailed character creation screen where you can choose from the 3 races and good variety of the 12 classes available. Each class falls into one of 4 archetypes;
Priest Archetype: Priest of Mitra, Tempest of Set and Bear Shaman.
Rogue Archetype: Assassin, Barbarian and Ranger.
Soldier Archetpe: Guardian, Dark Templar and Conqueror.
Mage Archetype: Herald of Xolti, Necromancer, Demonologist.
Once you've fiddled around with the customisation you enter the game with a cutscene where you meet Kalantes of Ibis. You are tasked with many objectives on the way to entering the city of Tortage where you are able to fight and explore this rich, beautiful and exotic landscape of the Barachan Isles. Tortage, for me, was an incredibly polished and enjoyable experience which never felt like a grind. The quests are the same format like kill x, collect y and escort z but they are all enjoyable.
After leaving Tortage, I quickly realised that the game in unfinished and with frequent crashes/memory leaks/server crashes I became frustrated. The quests were fun and I found myself levelling quickly through the different areas. But, this game only features a fraction of Hyboria. The map prepared by Robert E. Howard boasts over 20 nations/kingdoms and yet this game only features 3, leaving some of the most vivid and fantastic areas out which were feature in the Conan novels.
At least the combat system in the game works really well and it's easy to get used to and proves to be fun and engaging and a breath of fresh air on the MMO market. I will not go into detail as you all probably know already.
How enjoyable your experience is depends on the class you choose as there are still many issues with character balancing. My Tempest of Set was nerfed in an update whereas other classes were improved and this shows that Funcom is working hard behind the scenes to get the balance just right. The petitioning system in game is substandard. I've only had to petition a few times and I didn't get the help or answers I needed and all I got was an apologetic GM who knew less about the game than me.
There were stages in my levelling where there was nothing to do but grind for example in the late level 40's and 70's. In the late level 70's, you almost always have to resort to getting a group together and grind for 10 hours to get the last few levels. I struggled with finding quests and I didn't want to start in the next area because I was still many levels from being able to complete the quests there but I stuck at it grinded for this minority of a time. 90% of this game was an awesome experience and it didn't feel labourous in this part of the game, but there are some level ranges where it is impossible to level without having to grind.
At level 80, Funcom nerfed the epic raid gear so 90% of the level 80's crafted gemmed sets with full +damage gems in. This caused massive imbalance in PvP and most melee classes could 1 shot the casters and then they nerfed the melee classes making most the players very unhappy. They are also nerfing the gems once again later this month and this has already caused thousands of players to leave.
The endgame aspect of the game is only god if you are in a progressive guild with 24+ level 80's. There is nothing to do at the endgame apart from grind resources for your guild's tier 3 city and raid. The raid dungeons are pretty challenging there are 3 tier 1 dungeons, 1 tier 2 dungeon split into 3 parts and a further dungeon in tier 3. Currently my guild has completed tier 1 to the point where we can clear all the dungeons and bosses in just one 5 hour session and already we are clearing our way through tier 2. The bosses and dungeons are only challenging for a week until the strategy is nailed into your brain and it becomes easy and tedious.
Age of Conan is a game with stunning graphics. The soundtrack is fantastic and the score for the different areas really match the atmosphere and setting. The game implements a new combat system that proves to be more engaging than others in different games.
If you can look past the technical issues and be patient, you will enjoy this game massively.