MMO Gamers

Finally I hit level 20, completed the single player storyline, and headed to Khemi, the home city for Stygians.  So what do I think so far?

The first class I tried was the Tempest of Set.  I got him to about level 12 before I started trying other classes.  I wanted to check out the combos so I made a melee character.  First I tried the Dark Templar, then a Herald of Xotli and a Guardian, all to around level 7.  Not really long enough to get a good feeling for the class but I kept wanting to go back to my Tempest.  So I’ve stuck with the Tempest, got him to level 20 and moved out of Tortage.

The Tempest of Set isn’t too bad to solo, though being a cloth/light armour wearer I’ve come unstuck a few times with multiple mobs.  Towards the latter levels I managed to get into a few duos and the Tempest really seems to shine in a group situation.  I’m looking forward to doing more and more group content and really testing this class.  I might try the Herald of Xotli some more or maybe one of the tank classes also.

Tortage wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Pirates of the Burning Sea for instancing.  I’m led to believe that it’s less instanced once you’re out of Tortage but I’ll have to wait and see before I can judge.  Graphically this game is the bees nees and looks totally fantastic, particularly the characters.  Unfortunately that comes at a price and my PC is struggling in some areas.  I’ve turned shadows off and reflections down and for the most part I’m getting 40+ FPS though often it’ll drop to around 20 FPS.  But when I entered Tortage Keep I was getting 12 FPS or less.  The indoor environments seem to put a lot of load on my PC.  Turning the shaders down to 2.5x doubled my FPS so that was the short term solution there, though it doesn’t look anywhere near as good.  I also have Anti-Aliasing at 4x and I haven’t really seen any increase in performance by turning that off.  I’ll be looking at my upgrade options.  Currently I’m running an 8600GT, which I know isn’t really all that good, but I can pick up a second one quite cheaply, about a third of the price of an 8800GT, so two of those in SLI might be a cheap and effective upgrade.

All in all I have to say that I’m really enjoying Age of Conan.  It looks great and I haven’t experienced any game breaking technical problems yet (although the first time I tried to go to Khemi it took ages to load).  This game is innovative enough to differentiate itself from other MMOs but still sticks to a tried and true formula.

I like it.