Age of Conan

[alhoon]

Any thoughts, reviews or opinions anyone?

I'll start. The game is much better than WoW in terms of graphics, there's no denial on that. WoW has better interface though.
The age of Conan NPCs are very well designed and each time you talk to them something like a cutscene opens for you to talk. Dialog options matter in this game.
From what I have seen through the 6-7 hours I have played so far AoC is ripe with bugs. Not important, game smashing bugs, but annoying. Also Age of Conan is much more adult than WoW.

Personal opinions now:
- I like Age of Conan's quests more than WoW. They give much more XP and they seem more interesting and story oriented. It seems to me that about 20-30% of the XP comes from quests.
- I like the single/multi player mode. At the first levels, you can opt to adventure alone like a normal computer RPG. That's right. You don't see any of those irritating guys that cloud most MMORGs. On the other hand, you can't band up with your friends, hence they allow the multiplayer mode.
- I like the combat system. It gets the player more involved. For warriors, you decide which side of the enemy to attack and he decides how much to protect each side. Also for magic users, the mana replentish very fast out of combat but it's not as much as in WoW. I.e you can't hurl spells for 5 minutes on enemies and then have to wait 1 minute or so to fill up. No, you empty in 20-25 seconds and fill up in 5-6 seconds. NOTE: this happens to me, but I'm just level 13 out of 80. I guess at higher levels I will be able to hurl spells for longer but I'll need longer to fill up

- I don't like the world of Conan though. I prefer most other fantasy worlds.
- I don't like the fact that my character dies so often. It gets tiresome. I didn't have this problem in WoW.
- The inventory is too small. I drop items all the time because I find them away from a vendor so I can't go back and sell them.

[Archedius]

I was in the AoC beta for a month and thought it was ok but didn't like that it was released before it was ready. Ah well lol- if you want a very good MMO to play I'd try Lord of the Rings Online. Great quest dialogue, useful crafting system, balanced and useful classes and extremely fun pvp that doesn't interfere w/ PvE play.