One of the most striking initial impressions of Age of Conan is that the world of Hyboria is a lot darker and grittier than the standard MMORPG fare. Combat looks brutal and bloody, and feels like a battle scene from Braveheart rather than a fantasy world full of fairies and elves. Maybe that's because there are no elves in Hyboria...hrm. The graphics are certainly impressive and the dark art style is a nice break from the cartoony graphics of WoW, but graphics alone aren't enough to really differentiate a game in this genre.
One thing that must be said about Age of Conan's current status is that it is buggy. And let's be clear that "buggy"� doesn't mean the odd little thing here and there, it means the game is bugged to hell and back. NPC dialog is wrong or just absent, quests are broken, items don't work properly, and a myriad of other problems. That said, the client was stable and didn't crash, and the bugs mostly seem to be minor inconveniences. There's also something to be said for the fact that this IS a beta test, and one of the main reasons that companies beta test games is to clear up bugs. It may well be that Funcom will be able to squash most of them and AoC will release with very few bugs. But for a game that's scheduled to launch in 3 months, there's an awful lot of the little buggers to be found, and it's enough to cause concern that either the release might be pushed back or the game could be shipped with a lot of issues. With Vanguard so fresh in many gamers' minds, that could well be enough to sink this promising title.
Age of Conan was built using Funcom's proprietary DreamWorld engine, which is clearly capable of delivering beautiful graphics, and Funcom also promises will allow them to add content patches far more efficiently than any other MMORPG. Dreamworld was originally developed for Anarchy Online back in 1996 and delivered an impressive-looking game back then, and has been updated to do so again over a decade later. The game also runs in DirectX 10 and is the first MMORPG to do so, which allows for even more impressive graphics and sound. And speaking of sound, Conan will be delivering his Austri-English in 7.1 surround. It's enough to give any child nightmares.
As far as how the game ran, it was quite smooth on a Athlon 64 3000 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and a Radeon X800 Pro, but I'm a bit concerned as to whether my experience in a lightly-populated beta environment is really an adequate demonstration of how the game will act once it's live. Age of Conan's listed system requirements seem deceptively low considering its level of graphical sophistication (you can find the system requirements and test your own computer for compatibility with AoC at http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest , by selecting Age of Conan from the drop-down menu), and I'm suspicious that the requirements that while the requirements Funcom came up with are sufficient to run the game if you're playing by yourself, they might not hold up well in large-scale endgame content, such as the 200+ player PvP battles that we've been promised. The suggested system requirements might suffice for a casual player, but if you want to fully experience the game you're going to want 2 gigs of RAM and at least a 256MB video card, if not a 512.
The MMORPG graveyard is littered with games that looked and sounded great, but felt like the developers forgot to actually make a game in there with all of those pretty graphics. Without further ado, let's talk about gameplay.
Arnold's Austrian accent vs. James Earl Jones