Still in Paid Beta, and a lot of potential is there.
I don't mean to say it was ALL bad, it just wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. I ran into several bugs, client crashes, server crashes, and all sorts of pleasant other roadblocks that made me want to tear out my hair in a fit of anger and pain.
On to the gravy. The first 20 levels of the game are virtually 'tutorial mode'. The game throws you off of the incredibly detailed character creation ship, and into the very first quest, a quest that takes you through the first 5 levels of your Age of Conan experience. Voice acting exists for every NPC you're able to engage in dialogue with, but I'll touch on that later. After hacking, or spell-casting your way through the quest, you end up in Tortage to begin more questing. There's never a short supply to do in the starting area, and there's even a single-player 'destiny' quest chain that keeps things interesting with a great single-player storyline.
So there you are, below level 20, the first 20 levels are great! Sweet, voice acting in quests?! No shortage of quests?! This game is going be saaaweeeeeet! Right? Ok, maybe not so much. The first 20 levels are probably the greatest part of the game(let's hope that changes. Quickly). Once you leave Tortage, the voice acting for non-destiny quest NPCs...disappears. Instead, you're left with voiceless conversations that render you helpless. Oh well, the voice acting was good while it was plentiful, at least.
To the quests! Quests are nicely done, every quest gives you a mini-,map indicator of where to go for any certain part of a quest. This makes questing quicker, easier, and less painful to do. Quests are the same as any MMORPG of course, so don't expect very many unique quests. And, luckily, you won't have to search through monster poo to get quest items. The biggest problem with quests however, is that there isn't enough of them. 20-47(without grinding, grouping, or instancing) is riddled with quests. But when you hit level 47, things start slowing down fairly quickly. There are a lot of quests, don't get me wrong, but it just feels so much slower than 20-47, and you end up running out of quests in the zone that meets your level.
This brings me to the greatest flaw of the game; the number of zones. There is a painful lack of leveling zones; you get Tortage, the zones outside the 3 starting cities, 20-40, a 40-50 zone, a smaller 40-50 zone, a 50-60 zone, a 60-75(a bit misleading, there are maybe 3-4 level 75 quests there), and 1 70-80 zone. The lack of questing zones, and slowwww quest goal respawns make questing tedious as you climb up the ranks.
Luckily, to combat this, there are villa quests. Villa quests are a set of 5 quests in the Noble District which are on a 5-ish hour cooldown, and offer to the most half a bar whenever you do all 5 of the quests. in order to do them, you simply need to do the pre-requisite quests. Planning your villa quests can make leveling overall that much easier, as you can save your other quests you can only do once for higher levels.
Combat is the most unique part of Age of Conan....for melee. Melee combat consists of hitting arrows to attack in a certain direction, upper right, middle, upper left, lower left, and lower right. Combos are a sequence of 1-4 different directional attacks. After pushing the final attack, the combo goes off, and deals sometimes high damage to the enemy. Combos are cool to watch, but there's the major flaw. in order for the combo to deal full damage, you need to sit through and watch the whole animation, and you're not able to do much else while doing so, and some combos can last a ridiculously long time, and deal annoyingly small damage.
This leads into the fun part; PvP and balance. Melee combat is unique, but in PvP, that's the MAJOR FLAW. Casters are the same as they have always been, one button casts. This right there makes PvP incredibly unbalanced in Melee Vs. Caster combat, although most casters would probably disagree, as you will learn if you choose a melee class. If you're a Melee going against a caster, you're in for a very difficult fight, if you're a conqueror going against anything, quit, and reroll something else.
I haven't had the opportunity to test out sieges, but I've heard from other players that they aren't 'solid' yet. I will do my best, however, to portray it;
"Damn video card, how dare it blow up on me."
The hardware requirements for this game aren't bad, but they're misleading. If you want to play this game and enjoy it, you should expect to have some pretty powerful hardware, if not, you get to enjoy the game on the lowest possible settings, which isn't horrible, but you probably won't be able to experience 30 vs. 30 player sieges.
There is a whole hell of a lot more to cover, but I hardly have the motivation to create the Great Wall of Text to say the same thing over and over again. This game currently isn't exactly great, but it's got so much potential. The main problem is the patches seem to create more problems than anything else, but the game is in paid beta, and has only been out for a month. As it stands now, however, I'd advise anyone to take their time to get to 80, and take it slow and steady.
One final warning, and this mostly applies to WoW people; if you went to this game to find something different, new and exciting, you're going to be disappointed right now. Do NOT let the hype of this game make you think it's a good idea to currently abandon your current WoW ambitions. I'd suggest waiting for this game to at least come out of paid beta.