The First Impressions

First of all regarding the issue with the collectors edition activation keys; Tarib from Funcom has posted the following regarding the faulty keys:

We are aware of an issue with some Collector Edition keys incorrectly stating “No Offer Found for given key”. We have a solution for correcting this that is now ready. Please go to https://register.ageofconan.com and enter your key again, then follow the on screen instructions. We are very sorry for those inconvenienced by this.

Note that this is only related to Collector Edition keys and not standard edition keys. If you are having issues with your standard edition key please look for more information on http://support.ageofconan.com/ or contact customer service

Thank you

So just follow the instructions given and I hope everything works out for you.

Now for the first impressions

So yesterday I got home, made some food, sat down at the computer, logged in to Age of Conan without any problems and played for over 12 hours straight.

I started on the new Europe PvP server Soulstorm, that opened up yesterday with the Europe release of  Age of Conan. My characters name is Odefi and I am a cimmerian barbarian. Here’s a face for you to remember:

The game started a tad slow. For the first hour or so I found myself fighting mobs that couldn’t really offer any kind of challenge and just randomly smashing the buttons seemed to do the trick no matter how many they were. At this point the game seemed a tad boring, as I had gotten used to the way you swing your swords in AoC and no longer going “Ooh!” and “Aah!” everytime I swung my weapon, but that’s how tutorials always tend to be.

This all changed really quick though as I got to the city of Tortage and started questing there. I found myself having to use as much combos as I could to slay the groups of enemies I was now facing and really having to plan out the fights especially if I was facing more than just one mob at a time. At this point I really started enjoying myself and the more I got in to it the better it got.

Quick tip for everyone: Turn the autofacing off from the options. I really wish I had noticed this sooner myself as manually facing adds a whole new level of tactic to the game as your character wont automatically lock the facing on the targeted enemy anymore. This makes fighting bigger groups easier too; just back away a bit to group them, face them in a way that all (or most) of them are getting hit as you swing your weapon around, throw a stunning punch,  throw some combos and voila, you have a dead group of mobs. ^^

As I play on a PvP server things got really interesting (in a good way) when I started questing in the underhalls and white sands as they are FFA PvP zones. Got my fair share of getting ganked and did some ganking myself. Was having a great time and later found myself getting excited whenever I received a quest for either one of these areas.

The fighting system is not that hard to get in to, but you’re going to have your hands busy mastering for example strafe circling in PvP while throwing combos. I have managed to do this to some extent but probably not in a way that benefited me any more than my enemies. There is indeed a great amount of skill involved here and that’s exactly the way I like it.

The graphics are awesome and gazing down on the widespread landscapes from high places just takes my breath away.

I am currently level 17 after about 12 hours of playing. Done tons of quests and every single one of them has worked like they should so no bugged ones. Haven’t really encountered any issues / bugs at all. The game froze on me once while loading but that was simply fixed by restarting the client.

Been also doing some frapsing and will probably upload a collection of epic moments later this weekend. So far I’ve fully enjoyed playing Age of Conan and cant really say a bad word about it. Putting a game down for a tedious tutorial would be like going to a movie and putting the movie down for bad trailers.

Oh one thing actually that I found annoying are the fatalities as they are rarely a good thing. Didn’t see this coming now did you? The fatalities tend to get me killed or atleast seriously wounded when im fighting a group of mobs and fatality activates on the first one of them that happens to drop dead. Your character will stand there performing the animation, taunting the dead mob or slashing its corpse or whatever, and during the animation you wont be able to control your character and the other mobs wont give you a break as they keep battering you down, and sometimes a fatality involves your character moving a bit which can put you in a tactically bad place. They should add a way to break off the fatality when necessary (or if there is a way someone should inform me ^^).

That is all for now. Stay tuned for some fraps later this weekend. See you ingame on Soulstorm.

– Odefi