AoC: the Bad, the Dumb, the Good.

Well ok, last night I just managed to get Aretus the second out of the Tortage starting area at level 21. There's a couple of quests left undone on the island, but I doubt I'll bother going back for them.

I'm going to list some of the things I'm not enjoying about it thusfar:

Age of Conan isn't a very alt-friendly game, since all level 1 characters regardless of race start in the same zone. You want to level a new toon, you've no choice but to run the same quests over again. Also, if you want to change toons, there's currently no way to do so except completely shutting down the game and restarting it. Add to that the hard limit of eight characters across all servers (compared to wow's ten per server) will have most diehard altoholics running back to Goldshire.

Healers really seem to get the shaft early on in AoC. In Wow at least they got relatively potent healing spells early on to make up for their crappier mitigation. In AoC, the first healing spell you get heals for a paltry 2 damage/tick and when combined with their weaker armor and lower health, they spend a lot of time running back from the respawn point.

The starting quests give a false impression of how the game's going to go. Almost all the Tortage quests have cut scenes with full voice acting and multiple dialogue options, which made a nice and impressive change from WoWs "read the quest log and click accept approach". Once you leave Tortage however, things change. You still get the cutscenes, and the dialogue trees, but the voice acting dries up to a trickle of core quests. For most of the quests you're faced with a mute NPC starting blankly at you as you read his request along the bottom of the screen.

Talking about questing brings us to Instances. Rather than a large, open plan world like WoW, the world Age of Conan is a series of instances. In theory this prevent overcrowding in quest areas, and being a veteran of Hellfire Penninsula on the opening week of The Burning Crusade I can kind of appreciate this. In practise however, when grouping you spend a minute or two getting everyone in the correct instance version, and moving to and from various questing zones requires load times.

Whilst it graphics are pretty realistic, (the water effects in particular are excellent) I find myself missing the variety and vibrancy of WoW's more cartoonish palette. Say what you will about WoW but Blizzard took their visual cues from Games Workshop and Anime and they ran with them. The end result is almost uniquely theirs.

Related to this, the default UI is very clunky and when I'm trying to play the game in 1024x768, things feel cramped in a way they don't even with WoW's default UI. Since Funcom haven't released the API, we can't expect the same level of modding that the WoW community enjoys, but some brave souls have started doing what they can to skin the UI to make it more manageable.

In spite of all this, there's some good stuff in there:

Guild creation's as simple as right-clicking a tab at level 20. No gold spent, no running around getting ten signatures.

Trading posts seem to combine banks, mailboxes and auction houses pretty smoothly, but I'm still experimenting with them.

Most items don't get soulbound, but there are some items (quest rewards and I assume boss drops) that are listed as non-tradeable. In practise, this means I can equip the green "mace of twatting" some pict scumbag dropped and when I get a better weapon I can put it up for trade or pass it to an alt.

Skills don't require hours of grinding to raise. And if you want to change your skills, you can do so by clicking on them and spending some money.

Travel between zones is pretty quick for the most part, so no long Griffin rides.

And I really like the Dark Templar. It's a wierd mix of Protection Paladin, Warlock and Shadow Priest. They have the lowest health of the three Soldier classes, but your melee attacks drain life from opponents to bolster your own. As you gain power and spend feats, you can do more damage and even start to damage enemies in the area around you. You also have an aura that heals people when they're struck and a spell that heals your entire group at the cost of your own health. It's an interesting class.

And of course, Barbarians are also great fun. One of those classes that seem to be built around offense with a complete disregard for survival.