Age of Conan

[Fallen]

Anyone play it? I was thinking about giving it a try.

[Taernath]

I played it years ago, but never got too into it. It's alright I guess, but the melee combat system is weird. I heard Funcom mismanaged a lot of aspects to the game, like at launch, everything past the intro area was largely unfinished, and there were massive balance issues. This caused it to burn out fast but not quite die, though some of this might have been fixed since. It's been F2P for a while.

[Maerit]

I did play this game at one point.

Pros:
- From level 1-max is pretty fun single-player if you like the Hyborian mythology and less fantastical / more gritty lore.
- The action combat is pretty good, but some newer games are doing it better.
- For a game pushing 8 years old, it has really pretty graphics and a really nice world
- They did a fairly solid job keeping to the R.E. Howard works
- Raids are actually different than normal MMOs. You don't tend to babysit healthbars because healing is all AoE/heal-over-time which means you can focus on doing mechanics and dealing damage (or tanking). Most fights are gimmick fights like beat the enrage timer, CC lock stuff, tank swapping, kiting, making sure to watch personal debuffs and whatnot.

Cons:
- Practically no population left. Expect this to be basically a single-player game until you hit the point of raiding
- Content drizzle. This game barely gets any updates, and all the content is extremely old at this point.
- Bug fixes can take years (which is why 75% of the population quit within the first year after release).
- Cash shop galore. Pretty sure you have to buy your entry-level raid gear now because no one bothers with the entry-level raids required to get into the raids anyone even does.
- Grind-fest at cap. You have to grind out Alternate Advancement points if you want to do anything useful at cap.
- Class imbalances are rampant and constantly fluctuating, but it can take months for them to be addressed.
- NO CROSS-SERVER TECH!! This basically means all group content is manually formed, can take hours of sitting around waiting for players to be "ready" for whatever - or has to be meticulously scheduled.

PvP experience:

This is more of a side rant, but PvP in this game was my main draw originally. I played on PvP servers, and the intense open-world action was awesome at the early stages of the game. Now it is horrible. PvP never happens because there's no population. Probably 80% of the players are on the PvE servers. The other 20% barely leave the confines of raids and towns on PvP servers, so you're lucky to bump into anyone in the open world.

Getting PvP levels is tedious to say the least. They implemented some horrible system where you farm resources in an open-world PvP zone and sacrifice them, then get PvP experience (somehow) for this exercise. It's either do the "Shrines of Boring" or be cannon fodder for months in the mini-games to earn enough PvP ranks for the gear before you can actually matter.

In the early days PvP happened all the time. Sieges were one of the biggest draws to AoC, but they rarely happen now. They were 48v48 in the past, you're lucky to get 16v16 now and that might happen once a month if you're in one of the "bigger" guilds in the game on the right server (never happens on the actual PvP server).

The mini-games pop maybe once per hour during peak hours on the PvP server, but they are always accessible on the PvE server. The problem is that there is a large Russian playerbase on the PvE servers that apparently use 3rd party cheat tools (speed hacks, wall hacks, teleport hacks) and Funcom is not interested in policing their game, so they basically ruin what was once a really fun PvP mini-game. Of course, in the past 8 years the company has released a grand total of 1 new PvP map for mini-games, so they obviously don't care about PvP at all.


In summary:

If you want to have an immersive single-player adventure in an R.E.H. world with really cool quests and fun combat - try the game out and do not pay a single penny. There is absolutely no value to subscribing to AoC until you hit the level cap. You will have access to every leveling zone, and every ability as a F2P account. Alternate Advancement doesn't come into play until you hit the cap.

I would say exactly the same thing about The Secret World also. That game is incredibly fun. The quests are super interesting, often puzzle based, and the modern mythology lore of the game world is very interesting. Plus, the meta game of combining all your active weapon skills with any combination of passive skills is very appealing to folks (like myself) who really get into game mechanics and min-maxing. However, there's zero reason to pay-to-play TSW. It's a single-player MMO. The end-game content is dry and unappealing. Worth a single play through, but after that you can claim victory and uninstall.

[Fallen]

Perfect. Really appreciate the summary, M.