Age of Conan at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

But unlike many other games, this isn’t a problem at all because the most outstanding feature in Age of Conan is the way combat feels to the general user. Time and time again Ten Ton Hammer staffers (and other publications) have extolled the many virtues of AoC’s combat system: the fluid feel of swinging your sword, the reactionary method of fighting, and the chest-pounding critical hits are all still in the game.

Yet the final release version of the combat system has attained a level of polish that many beta testers wouldn’t have believed possible.  Each strike of your keyboard is registered with the AoC client, and players who are spam artists should be wary that they don’t augment their own attack combos with too much button mashing. The combos themselves – although a bit difficult to master at first – have been honed to the point of gently scaling to the players’ increasing mastery of the controls.

You'll see some frightening figures in AoC, even in the early parts of the game.

Among the Ten Ton Hammer co-workers, many of us have talked with each other and note that if there’s one thing that Age of Conan achieved to near perfection, it’s the hands-on combat system. Even now as I try to log on to older games, the mechanics just feel clunky and slow. Especially for individuals who have played melee classes in the past, the combat mechanics are a step above and beyond anything we’ve seen before.

For example, at level 10 I had received a quest to go into a nearby cave and kill twenty scorpions and twenty snakes. In most games, the daunting task of killing forty enemies, even in a nearby area, would be a huge headache and a giant speed bump in the overall quest grind. When I entered the cave in Age of Conan I was immediately beset by foes and began driving them off to the best of my ability. As I kept progressing through the cave system – which was gorgeous – I dropped more and more of the creatures, each of them falling with a fair amount of difficulty to my blade. Finally I reached the end of the cave, but when I looked up I realized that I had long since completed the quest task set for me. Killing forty creatures had been accomplished in the blink of an eye.

It Takes Baby Steps

Although my positive attitude is clearly evident now, it wasn’t so blatant when I first tried to jump into the game during the Early Access weekend. With hours of server maintenance, forum crashes, and general high load issues, the Early Access program didn’t hit that sweet spot many MMOG gamers like to find when they’re plowing through the game’s early portions. For those of us with limited time, it was fairly distracting when our leveling adventures were interrupted by a one hour….then two hour….the three hour wait.

On top of that, the client download time was fairly horrendous. With the thirteen gigabytes of information slowly channeling through a server, you really can’t have enough bandwidth to go around. It took me a day and several hours to get the client downloaded, and that was on a cable connection with a fairly strong up-down limit. Once the game was installed, however, it ran like a dream. I have a fairly humble machine, with the only high-end part being an 8800GT graphics card from Nvidia. Everything else (Pentium 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 Gb RAM, average motherboard) runs right on the mid-line recommendations for running the game, and it runs just fine in the "Medium" graphics setting.

The graphics - even at the Medium level - are fantastic.

All things considered, however, those initial baby steps have really contributed to a solid opening week for a game that many thought would have numerous crashes, server lock-ups, and general issues for the first few weeks of the experience. Compared to the Anarchy Online launch from many years ago, Age of Conan looks like a bright-winged angel.

Parting Thoughts

The wait is over. Five long years have finally concluded and here we are standing on the precipice of greatness. Frankly, my initial experience with Age of Conan – and the experience of a number of my co-workers as well – has been nothing but enjoyable. With no crashes, huge graphical glitches, or mysterious hard drive explosions to speak of, the official Age of Conan launch (not the Early Access launch) has to be one of the smoothest experiences in recent memory – ranking right up there with the launch of Lord of the Rings Online.

For those of you that haven’t taken the plunge into the world yet, I strongly urge you to check out the game. If you’re looking for a title that brings a different sort of flair – one that is bloody and violent – to the MMOG space, Age of Conan is the place for you to go. Although this isn’t my official review, things would have to drastically alter in the post-20 level experience to sunder my opinion of this game.