Age of Conan..First Impressions.

By alex

Hey people! Hope you all had a nice weekend! I had a good long one as it was bank-holiday here in the UK yesterday!

So i got my grubby little mits on Age of Conan on Friday night, and after our quick badge-run to kara I started installing the game.

Then I waited as this mother of all games set-about chewing up 10% of my hard-drive! TWENTY-FIVE GIG!!! Oh my god!! then i had to wait like another hour while it downloaded and installed the patches…god only knows how long a fresh install would take after Funcom have released a few patches.

Anyway so my friend and I sat back and watched the rather cool opening cgi thingy.

I had decided to make a conqueror – which was as close as i could get to a Ret-Paladin as possible. (called Firelight of course!!)

Took me a while to create him as i decided to fiddle with as much of the char-creation toys as i could to get him looking slightly normal, and not mouse-like.

Then I entered the game. Wow everything is so pretty…man the water…the water reacts to me being in the water!! Wow!

Ok so I wonder up to that woman and I see the “!” above her head – ok my first quest NPC. Expecting the usual page to pop up I’m surprised to see that I actually get to talk to her rather than just read a log.

Right she wants me to go kill the guard who locked her up. I run over to him and start hitting him. Ok the Combat systems is rather interesting, and not as complicated as the manual made out. Basically you click an attack and then press the corresponding attack direction to finish the move. Or you can just attack using the direction buttons. There is no Auto attack.

Ok he’s dead…hang on….I’m level 2 already? huh? Whats the deal with that? One mob and I’ve leveled? Riiiiight…

So back to the woman – she is free’d and off we go on our merry way to Tortage killing mobs along the way that seem to have an unusually high aggro range.

Anyway eventually i get into Tortage and start the night quests. I’m currently level 8 or so and I must say that Although the graphics are lovely, the game just isnt….well…..fun.

Its very realistic and detailed, and I love the way quests are handled (This fact explains the 25gb installation) and the combat system is a laugh as well, but there are just too many things that bother me:

1 – The chat window. Why do the system messages and chat have to be displayed together?

2 -The death system is just annoying. I mean i died and i have to fight my way back to where I was due to respawns?

3 – I’m still not managed to talk to anyone face-to-face in game…Mainly because i find it hard to distinguish the difference between a player and an NPC.

I just don’t find the game fun at the moment mainly. When I hit level 10 or 20 maybe things will change. I’m going to keep going though as I wanna make it through the night quests.

On another note – Rage got Archimonde down last night! Awesome guys! Grats!

I was at the cinema watching Indiana Jones…..Lucas please stop writing movies….