After years or hype and fan boy drooling over screen shots, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is nearing launch. I have played in the Tech Test and several of the BETAs and I’m here to tell you it’s not worth playing.
The game is slow, boring and unimaginative. The graphics are decent at higher levels, but when turned up that high the game slows to an unplayable crawl. Though my system far exceeds the requirements of the game, I can only play at the “Low” settings, which means textures that look like Quake 2 and boring effects. For a game that consumes 24GB of hard disk space you’d really expect more on the visual side. Even when set at “Low” I frequently have to stop moving to let things “catch up”.
Even worse, I can never play for more than an hour before the game crashes. This is such a common issue that they even address it in a recent survey. Though it is common, it hasn’t been fixed.
The fighting system, which is supposed to be revolutionary, feels just like a hundred other button mashers found mostly on consoles. It is more tedious than fun, and adds nothing to the game. On top of that it just doesn’t work very well.
The quests are all cookie cutter – go kill this guy, go fetch this, go tell this person something for me, etc. You have done all this before in better MMOs. Yawn.
Small annoying problems abound in AoC. Hiding doesn’t work very well – you never know when they AI will see you. You can only sprint for a few seconds at a time because your stamina drains at an alarming rate. Loads times are still horrible, although they have improved over the development of the game. The world that has been created isn’t very visually appealing, though it isn’t for a lack of content. The NPC’s are all the same type of character – all weathered old soldiers who are angry at something but need you to run some lame errand for them because they are too busy
This game gets boring fast. If this were a real review I’d tear into it further, but it’s not worth the time. Just don’t waste yours!