Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Preview

MMOWatch offers a hands-on preview based on the weekend beta showing of Age of Conan.

After beating (the rather low quality looking) Saddur to death with an oar from one of the slave ships (someone has a sense of irony at Funcom) you’ll be tackling Picts, Demons and Apes on the path to Tortage – all with the rather annoying Casilda cheering your beatings and combos along the way. At a gate just past the lava flow of a nearby active volcano (yes I tried walking into the lava and yes terrain damage is definitely in) the single player demo ends before getting to see Tortage. So a few NPCs and quests is all that was to be seen, but then, this was the pvp weekend. I wasn’t so interested in the low-level pvp mini games as in the actual start of the game.

Technically I thought the beta a success. The client seemed to run well and stable for me. I had one crash all weekend and was able to run the game well on high with my 3800+ single core CPU (for large amounts of time) which I wasn’t expecting. Latency wise, I was constantly running less than 60ms how this gets affected when entering the real open world of AoC remains to be seen. However, some of the textures were somewhat muddy in places and the character selection screen had trouble loading textures also (sometimes the actual characters wouldn’t load). Inside the pvp mini games there is a slight loading time while you are teleported to a spawn point that got some criticism from the players. Many questions are still to be answered about AoC, but what I saw and played of Hyboria I enjoyed and look forward to seeing more on release.