Day 1 in Age of Conan has come to an end. We’re happy with our progress so far finishing the day at level 17 and almost ready to finally leave Tortage behind. It’s late here and we’re heading off to get some much needed sleep, but we wanted to give you guys a quick rundown of how the day went.
We began by doing all the Tortage night time quests that we could possibly do until about level 13. It took us what felt like forever to finally meet back up in the real world. Ugh! Those single-player quests are great for story but really lowsy when you’re playing with someone else. The multi-player portion of Tortage isn’t great, but it’s definitely better.
LOADS of quests. We spent easily 30 minutes roaming Tortage at level 13 picking up every single quest and listening to all the NPC dialog. Graev started losing patience at the end and said to me “just tell me what they’re about”. *slaps Graev* You think I’m listening to all the npc psycho babble alone?! Sheesh.
We spent the remainder of our night in White Sands knocking out a dozen or so quests and gaining 4-5 levels easily putting us at 17 just about to hit 18. We still have so many quests left including the last part of the main story! We have yet to even touch the Underhalls or Acheronian Ruins. There is simply too much to do — but you won’t hear us complaining.
Alrighty, I’m barely keeping my eyes open. Here are a few screenshots of our adventures tonight. We’ll be taking loads more. Look for our podcast tomorrow because we’ll be giving a much more detailed explanation of our impressions and experiences in Age of Conan.
youre giant! would you say night quests lvl faster than daytime or about the same?
getting about 18 by 2am seems like a good day
I’m really curious to hear how it’s going as a caster, after all the not-so-good stuff from PvP about them. Enjoy the much deserved rest and thanks for the update!
Any chance to get some uncompressed or higher quality screenshots? I’m really interested to see how the game looks really looks on your settings (my computer specs are better than your old rig, but it’s certainly not an ultimate gaming machine.
I’ve only seen screenshots of it, but I have to say I really enjoy the look and placement of the user interface. The placement of health bars and action buttons seems a lot more natural than it is an other MMOs.
I was wondering if/why u took ur great video/comments about the classes off youtube ?! I really wanted to check em out one more time before i make my decision on what class to play in AOC, maybe u could hand out a few advices here 🙂
Dark templar and HoX seems pretty sweet.
Thnx for sharing ur experiences with the crowd :):)
Best regards
How is client stability and performance? Any bigger bugs? I wonder how much it is better compared to bad-bad pvp and ob clients.
The client has been 100% stable for me, performance is adequate on my rig which is a little over a year old, so that’s expected. Nothing to complain about here.
It’s run very well for me and everyone in my guild that made it into the early access. Smooth and performing well, though most of us have nice videocards.
No crashes, except on exit (which does probably mean a memory leak, but a small one since you can run the client for hours). I didn’t find any show stopping bugs either, but I wasn’t looking too hard because I was too busy having a great time. =)
So all in all do you think the game is worth to get?
I was running the game close to three hours yesterday without any issues. I messed with the video card settings (could only run at 1024×768@Medium in OB). I can now run at 1600×1200@Medium with around 45-55FPS. Tried high settings and the FPS dropped to the 15-20 range (but the game looks gorgeous at that res). I’ve got a eVGA 8800GTS with 512MB. I also have the leaving game crash but I didn’t DC in game. This is a huge improvement over OB with the low res, lag and disconnects. The verdict is still out whether the game is still worth it…need to see new content before I pass judgement.
I am very pleased with the release, I have run into no problems at all yet. Hit 21 last night myself.
*zombie mode* Just woke up here (it’s 7am) so bare with me as I read through these and try to answer all the questions.
@Eric: My character does seem a bit tall.. no idea how he got that tall since I did not even adjust his height when making him. Graev lowered his height quite a bit though which makes me look 9ft tall. 😛
@Frag: Being a caster is rough. Well, I’m actually a healer. I’m officially an “Offensive casting healer”. Graev died only once yesterday. I died about 8 times. If I get more than 2 mobs on me my lvl or above I’m toast. I’m expecting that my character will get better later on.
@Rosie: We’ll take a few high quality shots today (Shift+F11, I think) and see how they turn out.
@Martin: Took them down because they are mostly outdated and not accurate representations of most classes now. If you want access to them though feel free to add keenandgraev to your youtube friends list and then send me a message. I’ll give you access.
@Fugazi: Stability is 98%. Found one memory leak and I crash every time I exit the game. Overall it’s standard mmorpg launch stability. Stupid Funcom and their OB/CB BS *mumbles*
@Tim: I’m going to hold off on recommending the game just yet. Keep reading our impressions and perhaps that will help you make a decision. We want to experience a quite a bit outside of Tortage before we tell our readers to get the game or skip it.
It’s been rock stable for me too, I played for 16hours “non-stop” without any crash at all, the performance is WAY better than I could ever imagine for a MMO “release”
Even when our Fury (EU-PvP) server got more or less completely overcrowded we couldn’t notice any server related issues or lagg in the game! That’s simply amazing!
I can’t remember any other mmo having this many players at “launch” and still being able to provide what I would call a perfect server stability!
I was afraid of 5k latency etc because of the heavy load, but I didn’t get past 60ms! A really good job by Funcom there!
Did they fix the issue with not being able to bind skills to your mouse? Or is it consideret a “feature”?
this looks promising…Kenn hastn bashed AoC yet! YAAAAAAYYYY there must be hope!
lol..take that as a joke…and not offensive.. =)
@Graev
Could you give us a small over view on what Keen said? I’m too lazy to read it ;P
It was nice to see some extra stuff polished up and added from OB. My stability has actually been slightly below what OB was and my frame rate is 10fps lower, but the world doesn’t feel half asses and the zone load times are very short now.
Still really enjoying the game, having more quests than you can finish is great. Hit 21 before the servers shut down.
Welcome to the Wiccana server guys! your vids on youtube kept me going while I was waiting for beta access 🙂
I went all fan-girly when I spotted you both in the ruins 🙂
Pretty solid performance, but then again I have an above average rig. I got a single exit-game crash (which doesn’t make a difference to me, as I am finished playing at that point anyways).
Caster of any sort are decently entertaining, the necromancer seems like the most involved. Melee (Soldier) classes bore the snot out of me. I believe there are some design flaws preventing them from being fun. It really is just button mashing with them.
Lokked
Quad-boxing Shaman on Burning Legion
since i cant post on the aoc forums atm this seems like the best place to ask a little question i hav as i didnt play OB. Its about my server choice pvp or pve is the big question for me, is there enuff pvp content ingame to satify the average joe’s pvp needs? Also are any of u guys in EA playin on pvp servers atm and are they just carnage?
damnit! it was suppose to be a failure at launch so I could put off buying a new PC. Arg, want to play! :p
I’m in the same boat, I think whether AoC can be recommended depends entirely on the post-lvl20 experience and quality of PvP gameplay.
The 1-20 experience which is mostly solo does nothing to sell a player on the game IMO.
@Scott
That’s what I am waiting for. I want to hear how the game is post 20.
@Chris: PvE servers and PvP servers have the exact same PvP content. The only difference is that PvP servers have “FFA” pvp ANYWHERE (save for main cities. If you like ganking and that constant fear of being griefed by ANYHONE then PvP servers are for you.
I normally like pvp servers. I played on one in WoW for a while and I plan to play on one in WAR. The big difference here is that Conan does not have factional based PvP (well, I take that back they sorta do now on their “culture” server but it’s doomed to failure because of balance issues with classes). There’s no one to rely on in a pvp server other than your guild.
I hope that answers your question.
Post 20 is important to know, totally understandable. Although I don’t think there will be much polish on the endgame, not until the first major content patch or so.
That’s just a guess.
Yesterday everything ran great. Now today after the patch, I have been playing in the 2nd city (aqualonian something…) and already I have crashed twice in less than 20 minutes. Blue screen of death. Anyone else getting this??
Now on my 4th crash as I type this…
Keen I hope you’re wrong on the RP-PVP as I have a 21 level ranger going at the moment. would haaaaaaaate to have to reroll and go through Tortage again! It hasnt been to bad so far though.
I am loving my Tempest of Set, Keen.
I wasn’t sure at first, but man is he a beast now. 🙂
I hope to be out of Tortage tomorrow and starting the TTH AoC guild. If you want, we’d be glad to get you in. You just have to e-mail Boomjack or PM him at TTH and tell him I sent you. He’ll then get you access to the TTH Guild boards.
If you’re interested.
That goes for anyone on Wiccana, too.