Who Was I Kidding?

I had every intention of holding off on the installation of Age of Conan till next week. But then I got a whiff of that new game smell and that was all she wrote.

The game installed flawlessly, but took more than an hour and a half, including the requisite update. Praise Crom it came on two DVDs rather than a trillion CDs. Setting up an account was straight-forward and very similar to other major MMOs. The pricing plan and options are identical to those of WoW. I eventually found myself in the juicy part of the game, character creation.

Eager to hear the lamentations of their women, I slapped a toon together, a Stygian Tempest of Set (a priest). You could burn a lot of time tweaking your dude. Character creation reminds me a bit of Oblivion’s in that you can zoom into different body parts and fine tune them to your hearts content. I had not the patience for that indulgence, so I gave my dude a rocker’s hair dew with accompanying beard and entered the game.

Graphically, the game reminds me of Tabula Rasa. In fact, I’d swear they use the same engine, though in reality I don’t think they do. Funcom said they weren’t shipping the game with DX10, but I found the option available and successfully turned it on. The starting area is a lush jungle off a sandy beach. I don’t know how to get my fps meter up, but with everything turned to its maximum setting, the game looked fluid and seamless; I’d guess I was getting at least 40 + fps. Though the graphics are a generation ahead of WoW’s, I found them inferior to Lord of the Rings Online. Which is surprising because LotRO is going on a year old and AoC is fresh out of the gate.

It took less than five seconds to see why the game has as mature ESBR rating. Just up the path, a scantily-clad blonde woman was chained to a stone archway, calling for help.

My first quest.

I won’t go into detail of what she said, why she’s there, what I did . . . for her; I don’t want to ruin the storyline for those who have yet to play. Suffice it to the say that the dialogue and plot are very Conanee.

Yes, that’s an adjective. I looked it up on Webster’s.

As fun as the main storyline is, I hate the game’s background story. Fresh off a slave ship that recently sunk, your toon has amnesia, can’t remember his favorite color or boy band, let alone what happened to him even an hour ago.

Yawn.

I mean, jeez, haven’t we gone to the amnesia well about as much as we can in fantasy literature (and I mean “literature” in the loosest sense of the word)? I guess it’s kinda cool that they explain the abilities you get from leveling as “remembering bits of your past,” but I can’t shake how hackneyed the whole thing is.

I do like the whole day/night think that Sean Molloy referred to in his beta observations. When you talk to an innkeeper, you enter the night zone, essentially a single-player affair. I think even global chat is turned off. This allows the player to immerse themselves in the single player campaign perhaps easier than having a toon named “Pwnmaster” run by you.

I’ve only reached level six, so I have more game to play, more observations to make. Since Funcom refused to send me a free journalist review edition of the game, I’ll call it as I see it. I told them if they hooked me up for free, Furious Cognition would sing their praises even if the game sucked.

Incredibly enough, they were not moved to improve the hype of their game. I gave them their chance to make thousands more dollars in sales. Now they're at the cold mercy of my unbiased wit.