Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Collector's Edition
by Eidos
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Product Summary
Brand: Square EnixFormat: CD-ROM
Release Date: 2008-05-20
Platform: Windows Vista, Windows XP
Model: SAGECPUS01
Publisher: Eidos
Product features:
- First Mature rated MMORPG: Savage, bloody, violent and sexy; delivering the true essence of Robert E. Howard?s original vision. Real Combat System: Fight mounted or on the ground. Team up in battle formations
- Diverse Gameplay: Build cities, craft unique artifacts, explore a fantastic world, befriend others and master the use of magic, steel or bows. True Conan Experience: Explore King Conan's amazing universe.
- Conan?s World: Enter a gigantic and savage world spread across the three nations of Aquilonia, Cimmeria and Stygia. Explore jungles, deserts, mountains, valleys, dungeons and cities all depicted in rich, realistic detail.
- Form guilds and lay siege to hostile castles in massive PvP battles. Team up with other players in clans or face the Hyborian dangers all by yourself. Let your imagination run wild with thousands of options.
- Creative Fatal1ty Gaming Headset
- Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Official Strategy Guide (Official Strategy Guides (Bradygames))
- Ideazon Age of Conan Keyset for Zboard
- Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures 60-Day Time Card
Video Game Reviews of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Collector's Edition
Customer Review: This game is NOT ready for prime time...
Summary: 2 Stars
As beautiful and innovative as this game is, its not ready for prime time, and you should save yourself a tremendous amount of heartburn by waiting a few months until it is.
As of this writing (6/6/2008), these are the problems being experience by myself and the 80+ members of my guild on a regular bases.
1) People can't log into the game at all after the patch (a week ago). They try to play the game, and it just goes to a black screen. Some have used the Windows task manager as a work around to get logged in, but the game is unstable afterwards. FunCom has made no effort to provide a solution, they simply say they are monitoring the reports. There are people who have everything from the minimum configured PC, the the "uber" PCs.
2) Its an instancing game ... that is, x number of people play in a zone, when there's too many, a new instance of the zone is created and players are put there. This approach works only if players can change instances to meet up with friends. Right now, changing instances is broken.
3) For the PvP environments, there are absolutely zero mechanics to deter level 80's from hunting down and harassing level 20s. And because so much is broken at the moment, that's all the 80's have to fill their time with.
4) Zones/Instances just stop responding, and there's nothing you can do but exit the game. Before we could change instances, but since they don't allow that anymore, you have to quit the client.
5) Group mechanics are totally broken. Group members are randomly dropped, or players are not able to see they are in a group when in fact they are. Sometimes they is a simple log-out and back in. But sometimes you have to completely shut down your PC and do a cold boot.
6) The Guild City mechanics don't work, or are turned off by FunCom. The players don't know which because the Developers won't tell us.
7) The crafting system is broken. If you make a crafted item and fit it with a socket, it doesn't match the data structure used by the rest of the inventory system ... so every time you mouse over it, or anything that compares itself to it, the game crashes.
8) Harvesting of resources is broken. Resources are "tier" based and you are required to complete the gathering of one tier before moving to the other ... but the items needed don't spawn the in the game.
9) They have a volunteer GM corps that handles all the petitions for problems in the game. But this corps is under trained, over-worked, and pack a huge attitude towards the players. It can take days to get get a response from a GM to your petition. But the average seems to be between 12 and 16 hours. There are some GMs that are stellar, but the vast majority are rude, short, and usually can't help you with your problem because they don't have the privilages needed. But rather than escalating your petition, they clear it and you have to start all over. If you are offline when they get to your petition, too bad, they clear it anyway and send you a message saying, "Sorry we missed you."
10) This game takes you from level 1 to level 80 fairly rapidly. Even legitimately people can get to 80 in about 3 weeks. This is fine, because the game is about the "end game" not the level grind. The problem is, there's very little content for the 55+ range. What content there is, is so over camped its simply an exercise in frustration to try and get quests done. If their instancing system worked, that would be a partial solution, but it doesn't. There needs to be much more content in the 55+ levels.
11) Quests are broken. You can't complete them, or if you do them with a group, you have to reset the instance and do it over for every member of your party.
12) Bugs in buffs and debuffs that allow exploiters to just grief people while remaining immune. They either stack far beyond what they are supposed to, don't expire when they should ... allowing the player to add another. Or, in the case of a debuff, they won't expire when they are supposed to and you have to log out and back in to clear them.
13) The trading system (Auction House) does work, but its so 1970s by design the Developers should be ashamed. Its not really an auction house, its just a system where you post an item and set a price. It always breaks items you put up for sale ... because if they don't sell and you decide to vendor them instead ... they won't show up in your list of items to sell at at the vendor once they've been listed on the trader.
14) The vendor system that looks like it was a complete "after thought" ... we have a better vendor system in MMO's 12 years ago. Its simply a list of everything in your inventory (except equipped gear) presented in a list. If you accidentally sell the wrong thing, you can "undo". But once you close the vendor, the undo goes away, there is no "oh crap" and going back and getting it. Also, there's no what to flag an item as a "no sell" item, and they all use very common icons ... so you're constantly sorting through your inventory for what you want to sell and what you don't.
15) There is a bug where if a zone crashes, or you are apprenticed when you level ... the next level's (or even the current level's) total experience requirement doubles or triples. And there is currently no fix, and the GM's just tell you to gut it out, because again, they don't have the authority or privileges to fix it.
In the two years that I've had this computer, I'd never seen a blue screen on it. Sure, I'd seen crashes, but I'd never seen a blue screen. I see at least one a day while playing this game. As does viturally everyone else in my guild.
I, like many others, had great hopes for this game, and still do. But right at this moment in time (again 6/6/2008) the game is nothing more than a broken version of "Guild Wars" on steroids.
And unfortunately, we get little from FunCom except the acknowledgement that there are problems in two sentences, and then paragraphs of what they are going to do for us in the future.
So my recommendation to my friends here; Wait for the future before you buy this game. Stay in touch with someone in the game who you can trust, and when they say its actually ready, get it it. If it weren't so broken, it is definately worth playing.
Description of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Collector's Edition
Based on the events and characters of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a fantasy themed massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that immerses players in a dark, expansive universe filled with ground-breaking brutal combat, dangerously intoxicating magical abilities, and the social and cooperative game features that MMORPG players crave. |
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One of the most highly anticipated MMORPGs in recent years due to the strength and familiarity of the Conan franchise across a variety of major media, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is the first of several releases planned for the franchise, all of which are aimed at an adult audience. Firmly rooted in the savage, bloody, violent and sexy Hyborian universe, players can expect a graphically beautiful game blended with gritty gameplay that is true to both the barbarian hero from Howard?s writings and the Schwarzenegger influenced version from books, movies and comics.Available Cultures and Classes
Although Age of Conan contains a wide range of peoples, its playable cultures are currently limited to Aquilonians, Cimmerians, and Stygians. Within each of these players can choose from a selection of archetypal character classes, although available classes and subsequent subclasses are not necessarily the same within each culture. For example, archetypal classes for Aquilonians and Cimmerians are Rogue, Priest and Soldier, while Stygians are represented by Rogue, Priest and Mage. Further differences exist within subclasses for each. See the basic breakdown of all three cultures below:Aquilonians: Internally divided, but united against their barbarian neighbors, the Aquilonians live lives on the edge. Their kingdom, with its prosperous cities, enlightened culture and religious freedom, is known as the "Flower of the West." Yet for all this and despite the power of King, Conan I, it is a land where culture clashes and unrest are always a threat.Cimmerians: As the Hyborian Age comes to an end the northern barbarian clans of the Cimmerians know that the end of their time is drawing near too. King Conan I of Aquilonia is himself a Cimmerian, though not typical of his people. Although his life has been filled with wanderlust, his Kin care nothing for what occurs outside their clan territories.Stygians: Masters of the magical arts and ruled by their consuming worship of the serpent-god Set, the Stygians excel at occult and diabolic lore. They learned long ago that true power lies in knowledge and in pacts with dark powers. This single-mindedness has allowed them become the only culture to harness the secrets of the Mage class and power that comes with it.Modes Singleplayer as well as Multiplayer
Unlike most MMORPGs, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures includes a significant singleplayer experience as well as deep overarching multiplayer gameplay. This is an atypical MMORPG feature, but one that has a purpose. Players enter the game as a lowly galley slave with no memory of his/her past, and over the first five to 20 levels of singleplayer action build the skills necessary to survive in the game's multiplayer levels. During this time you will traverse a variety of rich environments including jungles, deserts, mountains, valleys, dungeons and cities packed with NPCs, beasts and monsters, before eventually leveling up and moving back to your chosen culture?s homeland. Because the only character-related choices that players have to make at the game?s opening are their looks, clothing and culture, this singleplayer mode is important in deciding what class and subclass to pursue and thus the level of impact your character will have in greater multiplayer portions of the game.In-game levels 20 and above are strictly multiplayer. 20-40 introduce players to guilds. 40-60 deal with large scale combat. 60-80 have the player interacting with King Conan and levels 80 and up represent end-game play. Here gameplay changes as social aspects of MMORPG gameplay take over on a large scale.Real-time Combat That Takes Queues from the FPS
Traditionally MMORPGs have utilized a mix of auto and turn-based functionality in their combat systems, but Age of Conan dispenses with that, instead drawing inspiration from FPS/action games. Firmly rooted in the brutality of the Hyborian universe, game developer Funcom has devised an action-based system that not only provides the sense of actually being in the fight, but also requires the player to participate in it. That means no simple targeted attacks. Players can attack and defend from nearly any position in real-time, whether on the ground or atop a mount, while standing still or on the move. It?s a recipe for carnage and one that fits right into the world of Conan.The combat system in Age of Conan comes in three forms: drunken brawling, mini games like CTF and massive Player vs. Player battles, which lets you engage in siege combat to defend or attack a city. All are easy to learn, but difficult to master, providing hours worth of play and replay value and are the core of this new cutting edge MMORPG.Additional items included in the Collector's Edition
- Hand-finished, metal-embossed oversized collector's box with inlay page and individually numbered holographic sticker
- Leather map of Hyboria (faux) 14" x 20"
- The Ring of Acheronia (exclusive in-game item)
- Unique Bonus DVD featuring trailers, behind the scenes, developer diaries, and rich artwork
- Official Age of Conan soundtrack CD
- Art Book (128 pages)
- Five free guest passes giving friends online access to the game for a limited time
- The Drinking Cape (bonus in-game item)
System Requirements:
| Minimum Specifications: | Recommended Specifications: | |
| OS: | Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz or equivalent | Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz or equivalent |
| RAM: | 1GB | 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 |
| Video Card: | NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or better | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or equivalent |
| Video Memory: | 128MB | 512MB |
| DVD-ROM: | Quad-speed (4x) DVD-ROM drive | |
| Hard Drive Space: | 30GB of Free Space | |
| Other: | Broadband connection required for online gameplay | |
