It's impossible to judge an MMO in a preview, even a hands-on one. (My
demo with Age of Conan today wasn't hands-on, but it was live,
run by three Eidos developers.) There are 185 square miles of terrain
in AoC, filled with enough content to "keep someone entertained
for about 10 months," said Eidos. There's no way to judge games of
that scope without dozens of hour of play.

But of course "just hold on until release" isn't very useful for a
preview, so let me just run down the list of stuff I really liked and
what gave me pause.

It's impossible to judge an MMO in a preview, even a hands-on one. (My
demo with Age of Conan today wasn't hands-on, but it was live,
run by three Eidos developers.) There are 185 square miles of terrain
in AoC, filled with enough content to "keep someone entertained
for about 10 months," said Eidos. There's no way to judge games of
that scope without dozens of hour of play.

But of course "just hold on until release" isn't very useful for a
preview, so let me just run down the list of stuff I really liked and
what gave me pause.

Good stuffs:

• A very realistic art style, with humans of proper (if fit)
proportion. Seeing an enemy NPC walking down a cavern path half in
shadow from torchlight was properly ominous. It's not that I hate more
cartoony art direction like WoW, but it's a nice change of
pace.

• The art direction, while still not as dusty and plague-ridden
as I think a Conan setting should be, seemed to be leaning toward
African (especially Egyption) sources. There was a sorcerer's lair
designed for a 25-man raid that looked like it would have been at home
in the background of any given Frazetta painting.

• One of the buffs is the writhing torso of a woman that appears
briefly above your character's head. That's the Conan I know.

• There will be player-owned towns, something that probably won't
work very well—it rarely has for other games—but I still
love them.

• There are silly, useless, and wonderful "drunken" emotes. Like,
a couple dozen varieties of drunkenness.

"Eh" stuffs:

• The melee system looks like it might be more generic button
smashing, despite their claims to have tailored it to be more like
beat-'em-up fighting systems.

• The pet system, while interesting (necromancers summoning
multiple pets using eight "points," with various pets costing
different amounts) has really goofy pathfinding, which kind of drew me
out of the game. A group of eight scorpions bounced around like air
hockey pucks instead of seeming like actual creatures with legs.

• Microsoft may require Eidos to charge an additional fee to play
AoC on the 360, despite the existing subscription to Xbox Live.
I'm not actually all that offended by that—I understand there
are operation costs in an MMO—but it is still mildly irking. On
the upside, Xbox and PC players may end up sharing servers, which
could be neat. (That decision is still up in the air.)

• Sometimes when you kill a human enemy, he drops a giant
wooden chest. It's very goofy to see that appear out of nowhere on
the field of battle.

In summary: So far so good, time will tell, etc. Until we get a
"lamentation of women" bonus, I will remain unsatisfied.
–Joel Johnson

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