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It's been a month since I last wrote about Age of Conan. Life has kept me busy and not able to play it too much, but I'd like to share the new thoughts I have on the game. The game is still beautiful. I've made a few characters since then, and it's still just as fun as it was the first time that I did so. I've been enjoying playing the different classes just to see the effects and animations from abilities. My complaint about stealth in the game seems premature now. Stealth is actually somewhat realistically based on lighting. It is much easier to sneak up on something at night, or inside a dark, dusty crypt than it is during the day near a bonfire. I ran through a few underground areas with my assassin and my friend's assassin and we were shadowy nightmares. It might just be my imagination, but the way that the monsters faced also seemed to have an effect. I've noticed the effort that they put into other movement types too. Sprinting uses up stamina. When you use all of your stamina up, your character is exhausted and has a harder time concentrating or moving out of the way of attacks. If you fall from too great of a height, you not only take damage, but you can also twist your ankle or break a bone. There are still a few issues with movement. I've found that you can swim up waterfalls. I might not be a Cimmerian, but that I've never actually been able to do that. Funcom seems to be taking care of many of the balance issues. There have been numerous patches adjusting the powers and abilities of the different classes. I haven't seen any of the higher level content yet, but while there's still a bit to go before everything there is fixed, they seem to be moving in the right direction. I haven't found a class yet that seems so underpowered as to be not fun, and they've even tried hard to give typically boring classes (guardian/tank types, for instance) a variety of abilities to make them more fun. I haven't seen much improvement in the AI yet, but it's not a huge detraction from the gameplay. I've found things involving my character directly, like my necromancer having to summon all of his minions again each time a board loads, to be more annoying. I have to say that I've been enjoying the story. It seems to fit right in with most of the Conan stories that I've read (even down to the strength good/magic baseline), and is pretty engaging. The night missions are especially fun. These take place in the same area as the day quests, but are completely instanced and involves solo play. "Night" isn't based on any server time, but is something you can bring on yourself by specifically resting and waiting for it. These night quests specifically advance the story-line (they're called destiny quests), and are different based on the class type that you play. Each quest line for the different types interact with each other. My rogue-type spied on a man being captured; my warrior type rescued him. This not only made it fun to go through more than once, but I actually wanted to try each of the types going through it, just to see how they interacted with each other. The night quests also seem to scale with your level, so it's easy to mix them up with day quests, depending on whether you want to play with others or just be by yourself. Someone told me at first that it's best to do the day quests first and then go through the night ones. I found that to be just the opposite. The night quests start and stop depending on your level and sometimes you have to go back into the daytime to gain experience. I had also made fun of the amount of amnesiac, escaped-slave characters in the game. I take that back. They actually had a good, logical story-based reason for it. I was suitably impressed. It hasn't change my opinion on the pickup line, though. As much as I recommended it before, I do so even more now. This game has quite a bit of potential, and I really hope it succeeds. If it can weather the storm of Champions and Warhammer, then it will likely be forged into something great.
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