OK, when it said "preview" on the thread title, I was expecting a few hi-res screenshots, not a link to a 320x200 video!
But anyway, I'm just being a pedant. I really do want to go back to Conan sometime soon, it's a matter of me finding the time - apart from 3 weeks of WAR I've been MMO-free since August.
For me, none of the well-known problems the game had were all that bad. The tactile, actiony melee combat, the gorgeous world and the solidity of the characters made up for it.
For instance, I never cared about the itemisation. Funcom always SAID it would not be an item-centred game, and for a lot of people I know (mostly pvp'ers who hated grinding for gear in wow) including me this was one of the primary reasons they signed up. Sure, it would be nice to get nice stuff more frequently to get a better feeling of reward and progression, but it wasn't essential.
Lack of PvE content was never quite as bad as they made it out to be. The main reason for it wasn't lack of quests, but the fact that, once you passed a certain level, low-level quest givers lost the exclamationmarks over their heads. This meant that if you followed a single quest chain too far up, you wouldn't be able to do all the other quest chains unless you spoke to every random NPC and did a bunch of grey quests for little reward to unlock that quest chain's higher-level quests. And because there were at least 2 zones for each level range (until Aztel's approach and Kheshetta in the late-60s and 70s at least), you could spend so much time in one that the others would end up not offering any decent quests for you at all. For instance, if I stayed in Cimmeria up to my 40s, Khosphef Provice would offer me nothing to do. I took a more easygoing pace through the game, and didn't find myself running short of quests until 68 or so - and this was without doing villas or repeatables more than once each! (Well, villas each had a 3-part quest chain associated with it, I did the quests once each, but didn't farm the last one repeatedly as some people had to do.)
There were definitely things I didn't like, like the crafting and gathering, although I don't like stuff like that in any MMO, so it's hard to judge whether AoC's was particularly horrible as I don't think I'd have enjoyed crafting even if it were done well. My two MAJOR gripes were with the combat and the pvp-incentives:
The combat, while it was fun, and it had depth (at least for melee classes, the casters feel very gimped - in terms of gameplay, not in terms of power) and it's by far the most tactile and immediate gameplay experience any MMO has to offer, sometimes felt a bit random because the damage rolls simply have SUCH A HUGE RANGE! A normal attack on a single-shielded side on an enemy player of similar level could score anything from 70-300 damage non-crit or 100-700 when it crits! For combo finishers the damage is even more extreme, I've scored from pathetic 300-damage CoS finishers to 1,200 crits! Overall you exchange so many blows that it balances out, but every so often a fight that was in the bag is lost not because the other guy threw a lucky last-ditch dodge or parry or moved his shields, but simply because you rolled badly for your finisher, so it feels a bit like a crap-shoot. It lacks the elegant maths of games like Guild Wars, that can be summed up in simple equations and you know exactly how a single attribute point up or down will affect your average damage output.
The other problem I had with it was the lack of PvP incentives, and that's a twofold problem. The first was the massive amount of resource farming you needed to build a t3 city and be able to compete for battlekeeps, the second was the lack of anything else to do but sieges in the border kingdoms, meaning that pvp on most servers was either random ambushes or huge gank-parties rolling Kheshetta. I was a bit lucky in that I was on an RP server, and there were a couple of large wars going on between alliances of guilds that led to lots of fun group-based world pvp, but they eventually wound down. What was desperately needed was resources in the game world for people to fight over (as was originally planned iirc), and it looks like they will be implementing those in the next big patch - the guy in charge was talking about putting pvp-specific building resources in the Border Kingdoms.
Bottom line was those were the only two things that bugged me, and they didn't make me quit because the overall experience, the look and feel of the world and particularly the combat system was just so different than anything anyother game has to offer. If that's the kind of game you want to play, you have to admit it's still the best (and only
) in its league.
