Age of Conan: Initial Impressions

So, I'll preface this by saying I'm currently only level 26 so I have yet to experience the higher level content. The being said, it's been pretty solid so far. I went through the hybrid single-player/multi-player initial campaign which gave a good feel for the game and its lore. It's a little strange to have everyone start an MMORPG with the same 'background' in that we all stopped and killed the evil pirate dictator before moving onto the mainland. I mean, we can't all be former slaves with a prophecy about us. It removes some of the uniqueness, especially for the RP community.

But, mechanics-wise, I think it's going to pan out ok. I'll probably get carpal tunnel from all the button mashing that goes into being a guardian with all the attack sequences and lack of an auto-attack. Pretty nutty amount of button mashing... It does lend itself to realism though, since you need to work for every kill. As I'm on the RP-PVP server, which is all open PVP in the questing zones, I've experienced very little griefing or ganking. The community at large seems to be mature, and I only rarely get attacked in cheap ways. Once more of us guild up, it should be even less of a problem, since people are reluctant to go after a full group.

The concept of the stronghold, etc entices me, so we'll be hopefully joining up with another guild to have the numbers to support one. I'm looking forward to getting a mount so the tedium of running everywhere is less. Although, gold seems to be at a premium and the economy is a little out of whack... Higher level stuff is insanely expensive for high level players, giving a feeling of grinding for tiny amounts of cash.

Overall, I've enjoyed my experience there. I haven't had to deal with many bugs/crashes/etc. Only one time did my keyboard stop responding. Yes, I died, but it's easy enough to remove the whole 'death penalty'. And PVP related deaths don't cause any ill effect, unlike MoB releated kills. Actually, one guy ganking me as I was getting my ass kicked by a bunch of creatures saved me the hassle of a death penalty.

-L-