Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Reviews

Both a less positive and a more positive review of Funcom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures have surfaced. PC Zone UK finds it hard to recommend Age of Conan, rating it 7.3/10.

Once you make it to 20 though, you’re bundled onto a ship and out of the
loving embrace of noob-dom.

Gone are the voice-acted quest givers, replaced with distressing mutes with unmoving mouths, gesticulating in place of speaking.

This worrying shift to lifelessness sadly epitomises what the rest of AOC turns into – a drab disappointment.

While Tortage has had much love poured into it, the subsequent hub zones feel barren, the map barely helps you find your way around and quest-givers, and vendors and traders (AOC’s guild banks and auction houses) are placed awkwardly and sporadically.

Once you’re through the first non-Tortage quests and receive the one pointing you towards the nearest grind zone, you talk to an NPC and get magically teleported to a hub full of yet more quest givers and, inevitably, peril.

This is where AOC finishes transforming from story-based action MMO to an utterly monotonous experience. While it’s not an entirely unenjoyable slog, cracks in Funcom’s work begin to show.

ComputerGames.ro is more positive, rating it 89/100.

Starting with PvP, the server choice is very important: in Age of Conan the player versus player system is based on a (free for all) approach, with no delimitations, factions, area restrictions, or anything. With the exception of each faction’s capital city you can kill any player anywhere, when you like, how you like. Imagine the implications of this system, where anyone can kill you if he feels like it. A PvP server is a difficult and violent place, to say the least, but there are a number of advantages, as well: it fits extremely well with Howard’s brutal universe, and offers a quick and effective way to devastate anyone, at any time. Does the group tank piss you off? Kick him, whoop his ass, and invite him back. Does he have the audacity to farm your resource node? Raze him to the ground. And so on.

The total lack of rules, although easily abused by the Internet’s frustrated section of the populace, also offers quite a bit of personal satisfaction. In any case, the choice is yours. And, if none of these choices seem right, there’s also the possibility to roll on an experimental server, where the rules change as the developers see fit. It’s called Culture PvP and it involves a number of restrictions, such as the inability to attack anyone belonging to your nation. This obviously affects more than the PvP itself, such as the way guilds are formed, and how they recruit new members.

There are also a small number of battlegrounds, similar in concept to the ones in World of Warcraft, but at the moment the whole PvP thing (outdoor or not) has no direct end-result, because there are no rewards, or ranks, or anything. Yet.