Tobold's Blog
Sunday, May 18, 2008
 
Age of Conan first day

The early access of Age of Conan finally started. And Funcom applied the so-called "miracle patch" and managed to get the release version being better than the open beta version. Unfortunately it is still far from perfect. I can play at a good framerate of 50 fps, but only with low graphics settings, in spite of a E6600 dual core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a Geforce 8800 GTS 512 MB. And once in a while the game freezes up, and I need to reboot my computer to restart. Never seen a game that needs so long from reboot to actually running.

I played 9 hours and made it to level 15 with a Herald of Xotl. I only chose that class because I wanted to play a Stygian, as their level 20 area looked more interesting than the Cymerian or Aquilonian one. But it turns out that the herals is not a bad class at all. Technically he is a mage, but up to now I haven't got a single ranged spell or ability. The heralds main damage is done with a two-handed edged weapon, combos, and his Hellfire Breath spell. I put my first 5 talent points into improving that breath, so now it has a casting time of 0.3 seconds, practically an instant, and deals awesome area damage. As the combos take about as much time as the cooldown of the breath, I do a breath - combo - breath - combo dance which is quite lethal. And of course the herald has the I WIN ability, the ability to transform himself into a rather nasty demon every 2 minutes for 30 seconds, which helps a lot when you need to overcome a tricky situation. Best strategy is to transform into demon, quaff a heal-over-time potion, and then attack, and even large groups of my level are no problem. Having said that, I must say that I have never died so often in the lower levels of a game. Age of Conan is quite deadly, with sometimes huge aggro ranges and unexpected respawns.

After some experimentation it turned out that the optimum strategy for Tortage is to try to get as far as you can in the night mode (destiny mode, solo), and only play the multiplayer day mode when you need more levels for the destiny quests. If you level in multiplayer first, the destiny quests just become harder, because the level of the mobs there rise too. And of course in solo mode you don't have the problems with other people killing your mobs, which is endemic in some parts, like the White Sands Island. The destiny quest line is a lot of fun, where else can you make a volcano explode by exchanging the blood of a virgin used in a ritual to calm the volcano with the blood of a lady of negotiable virtue? Of course I missed half of the volcan eruption when my computer crashed again.

But I was happy enough to get to that quest at all, because the quest (The Awakening II) before that, finding a man called Renton and making him talk, is bugged. I killed his corrupted friends, he moves to another point, I kill the next group of corrupted friends, he moves in front of his house, and I get no third spawn of mobs to kill. And when I talk to Renton, the quest dialogue suddenly ends without any more options, you need to hit ESC to even leave the dialogue. Now normally I would have been forever stuck in there, as even after 1 hour of petitioning no GM came to help. But fortunately once you reach level 14 you are given the option to skip that part of the destiny quest and continue right with the next part, which I did.

So up to now Age of Conan is a mixture of having fun and getting frustrated often, a feeling I know from many previous bugged game launches. AoC is "playable", but don't expect a high level of technical excellence and customer service.
Comments:
Hm, i played about the same time, maybe a little less (lvl 13) and didnt experience any in game bugs or -crashes. I did sometimes get an "AoC has stopped working" message after exiting normally (mem leak?) Performance on my lesser pc (6600, 2gb ram, 8800 gts -the small version memory wise) was satisfactory, but that was with most settings to low.

Now i played a caster type (i always do) (PoM) so i didnt get to taste the 'revolutionary' melee combat system.

With the PoM i could take on 2-3 equal level mobs, if i timed the repulse (?) spell correctly. A bit squishy but that was to be expected.

I do think FC pulled of a very decent 'pre launch' though, it went better then i initially expected. I will definitly play this game until WotLK/WAR comes out and then decide with which i will continue..
 
This is why I'm waiting to try AoC until later this year.

I remember how much DDO sucked at launch - but going back two years later and now it's a blast to play. I bet Tabula Rasa will be the same way (unless NCSoft pulls an AutoAssault on the title and RG is too busy flying through space to work on it).

I'm betting AoC will be one of those titles that mature well over time as people upgrade their boxes and Funcom works out glitches.
 
I'm level 17 now. So far no crashes..extremely minimal lag. And I think my system is not as nice as yours.

Duo core processor , 5200+ I think.
4gigs Ram
9600GT vid card.

I really can't complain about performance so far. I have the game set to High but changed the shader to 2.0 and shadows on characters only.
 
I'm in as well and had alot of fun. I am PoM and did die alot in the Volcano quest, at that lv, two at once was difficult.

Overall though, besides the EA delay, I haven't had any real issues, no crashes, but I did have one glitch when suddenly my video color wasn't working well. I'm still testing the settings but I have a Opteron 180, (dual core 2.4ghz) due to my socket 939, 8800GTS512mb and it looks really nice. I get good fps even in pvp on low, on medium it was skipping when attacked by 6mobs but I expected that. I got stuck in a rock for a few mins but eventually jumped out.

I was Pk'ed in White sands with a fatality move which looked awesome even though I was the one dead. And I've only had one quest I had trouble completing. The Elder Shaman in the Arch ruins, what a pain. The guy has a slow respawn and players just stand there swiping so they hit him immediatly when he pops. And they don't want to group. B

ut that is fine, I have my little name list, when they get to the pvp zones...lol
 
I really have to wonder about people who have crashes or graphical glitches with this game. I had the game running for 7 hours without interruption, on high settings (plus some stuff tuned even higher) with a worse video card (9600 GT) less RAM (3 GB) with DirectX 10 and never had any technical issues at all.

As far as I could tell, everything worked 100% as intended. Absolutely flawless.

I'm afraid I made my Aquilonian Barbarian's breasts too large, though. She looks like she's about to topple over - the "bust size" slider is really dangerous.
 
So when can you be attacked? Are their any safe areas?
 
Are there any safe areas, I mean )
 
I have to agree with the people that experienced little to no problems.

I was a bit wary after the delay in getting the servers up, but once they were up I was able to play with little lag (albeit from Australia so I have lag all the time) and no crashes.

I'm finding your posts excessively negative Tobold... so to everyone else, AoC is quite a fun game. The combat is interesting an fun. The combo system is rather cool, more detailed than even Oblivion (a single player game). I am really liking the melee caster types, finally a healer that *has* to get up close and personal.

The pre-launch was much better than WoW's actual launch, the game seems quite polished, and other than a couple of stuck mobs I haven't experienced any bugs.
 
Not sure I understand the rush to play these games they day they come out. Why not leave things be a bit and come back into game at a later point?
 
I have 3 different systems, with one even specced lower than yours is. All ran on high with minor tweaks ala EQ2 style, etc...(did you turn off bloom and 3d occlusion?...these two are framerate killers and strictly for SLI or GTX model cards)
But, by far this game has run even better than LOTRO...and that is telling. And it sure does look a might better.
Usually if a system starts choking on a demanding game, it is pushing something in your hardware that is showing signs of issues...
Overheating, bad memory, bad video card, etc.
Something running in the background maybe?..
You also never mention your OS...you using Vista, and trying DX10?
The fact that a minimal number of systems are having issues now...it points to an obvious PC problem, and needs to be troubleshooted...
Good luck and hope you get that fixed.
 
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