Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Pre-Review

(Wisely) holding off on final judgement, 1up played through the first 20 levels of Age of Conan and wants to share some impressions.

If those incongruous activities smack of cognitive dissonance, they shouldn’t: While AOC lacks the freedom and punitive difficulty of the MMOs of yore, it’s more than cutthroat enough to lure competitive players back into the death grip of a genre that abandoned us more than a decade ago.
(…)
I honestly can’t see myself enjoying AOC on a non-PVP server. Not because I’m too masochistic to have fun without the constant threat of violence, but because that threat forces the kind of teamwork that online games are supposed to engender and, in doing so, makes the grind more bearable. Without the potential for the implosion of an area into an all-out player-on-player fracas, AOC would be very much a standard MMO, replete with inane collect-a-level and fetch quests — the latter often having a ludicrous amount of pointless steps. And player combat wouldn’t be the panacea that it is without the excellent combat system that rewards deceptive tactics, timing, and skill far more than level and gear.