I'm going to have to admit that I got this one wrong. Last month I wrote a column about my waning excitement for the fantasy MMO genre as a whole. In this column I gave Funcom's Age of Conan a backhanded smack based mostly on screenshots and some videos because, based on that information, I couldn't generate any excitement about "just another fantasy MMO." I really didn't expect much from Age of Conan considering Funcom's previous MMO Anarchy Online launched as an unplayable mess. But I have to hand it those guys. They really pulled it off here. From the early levels it looks like Funcom has put together a beautiful and engaging game that spices up MMO combat, seeks to appease story nerds like myself and yet still delivers the MMO experience.
This isn't going to be a full review because we feel that MMOs deserve some time to find their way in the wild. These are strictly my early impressions of the game as I played through the first 20 levels which make up the initial story section. At level 19 you're able to finish the story and move on from the first city, Tortage, but I chose to do all the daytime quests before finishing the story. Working through all the daytime quests I could find and all the story quests took me up into level 21 when I left Tortage for the bigger world.
Visually Age of Conan is one of the best MMOs I've seen. The graphics utilize some incredible textures to give everything a very tactile look and the style of Hyboria feels authentic and "lived in." Much of the graphic experience is going to depend on your hardware, of course, and that is a frequent topic of conversation in the game's chat channels. If they aren't dishing out the hatred for World of Warcraft the patrons of AoC are listing their computer builds and frames-per-second figures.
Age of Conan requires newer hardware to render its lush vistas in high resolutions.
Just as a comparison I'm running it on a quad 2.6 with 4 GB of RAM and 768 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX at 1600 x 1200 with 2x anti-aliasing and almost everything on the highest settings. The only settings I knocked down a notch were the shadows and the bloom effect. After getting blinded by the white beach sand and again by the white shirt of a bartender I thought, "Either this bartender is about to turn into a star, which would be unexpected to say the least, or the bloom is too heavy." At these settings I'm able to keep a steady 45 - 50 frames-per-second most of the time with the occasional 80 - 90 fps spike.
One of the more important aspects of a newly launched MMO is the client stability. If you can't log-in or keep the client up all the fancy graphics and gameplay innovation is for naught. I can only speak from my own experience here but I'd categorize this client as very sound. I've had the occasional crash here or there but nothing that felt excessive. The most annoying recurring problem I've seen is that sometimes the hi-res textures don't get rendered and you're stuck with muddy, low-res textures on some world objects. Usually this problem works itself out when you go into an area that requires a loading screen but sometimes I had to quit and restart the game to fix it.
Server stability has been very good as well during my play sessions. I've seen many people complaining about lag but I think they're confusing lag caused by server latency with lag caused by their hardware chewing on hi-res textures. I never experienced any server lag at all even while playing during peak hours. Once again the game experience will vary depending on your hardware and I'm playing on an internet connection that ranges from six to 10 Mb/s down. As with all PC games better hardware makes a better experience.
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