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

A few things from work (rawr!)

The First Player Built City (Possibly worldfirst)

The first (from what I’ve heard it is also the worldfirst) player made city has been built early this morning by the guild Axemen on Europe PvP server Fury. Here is a quote of what Thesc0rp, from the Axemen guild, posted on the AoC forum, featuring screenshots of the buildings and information on its location:

We’ve had the first city spot reserved from our first lvl 20, but tonight at 05:24 the City came alive. We are now ready to invite you all to come visit our Player City in “Purple Lotus Swamp”, in instance 1 (Thor)

The buildings we have up so far are Keep, Tradepost and Temple. More will of course come in the days ahead, and we hope to see you all there sometime \o/ (Worldfirst?)

First building to come up was obviously, The Keep

http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/4322/keepmw8.jpg

Then we setup our Tradepost, sadly the merchant is on holiday as of now, but we are sure he will come soon!

http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/1191/tradepostvs9.jpg

Then came the Temple, the place for our different Faiths

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/1050/templeiq4.jpg

(also featuring Shockwave, Cepheus, Oophus and Thescorp, the earliest wakers)

For more information, and perhaps more screenshots visit http://aoc.axemen.org or drop by our forums at http://aoc.axemen.org/forum/

Congratulations to the Axemen guild for your achievement. Getting a player city up before the game even officially launched must count for something.

Todays launch

Apparently all the new servers have not been launched yet since people on the forum are complaining about them not appearing on the server list. I can’t confirm this myself as I am still stuck at work for atleast another three hours, which is really agonizing as I know I could be at home playing Age of Conan right now. T_T

It has been widely reported that some of the AoC Collectors edition activation keys are not working. When trying to add to the account it will give an error message, something in the lines of “No offer found for given key”. Also the customer support mailing system is down today for quite some time so nobody has received an answer about this issue from Funcom yet. I was one of the lucky ones whos activation key worked without any problems, but I do feel sorry for the people who cant get their keys to work. They sure have got a right to be upset with Funcom. I know I would be.

It has been an eventful launch so far and I dont think its going to get any less eventful in the near future. I shall endure the remaining work hours, take the longest bus ride of my life to get home and if everything goes as planned spend the weekend in Hyboria. o/

– Odefi

Report/review on the AoC Collectors Edition

Ok so. My collectors edition of AoC arrived today. Figured I’ll do a detailed report on its contents for all of you who didn’t pay the extra cash to get it and show what you’re missing out on. Just be glad I didn’t make a video of it cause I probably sounded exactly like this guy (Was so hard to find this video on Youtube since it has been ages since I last saw it and apparently tons of people document their macbook unboxing (Wonder why?). I searched through at least two pages of macbook unboxing videos and couldn’t find it. I remembered that the guy sounded orgasmic so I gave the keywords “Macbook unboxing orgasmic” a shot and there we go! The first result in the search ^^):

The Unboxing and the Box

First of all what surprised me was the size of the box. It is HUGE. Like the director says on the bonus DVD “A huge package for a huge game” (or something with a similar meaning). The textures of the box make it look like a book as you can see in the picture below.

Some of the paint on the cover came off as I removed the packaging tapes from it, but that doesn’t really bother me too much. Each CE box also has an unique hologram sticker with it’s number written on it. Mine says 6,492/86,000 but I’ve heard they ended up making 111,000 copies of the CE to meet the sales.

The box also opens up like  a book as you can see in the image above. The backside of the cover has a picture of King Conan printed on it and the first page a caption from one of the Conan books. The caption may be hard to read out of the picture so here it is:

“What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing; rush in and die, dogs – I was a man before I was a king.

When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat, the people scattered gold-dust before my horses feet; but now I am a great king, the people hound my track with poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.”

– The Road Of Kings, Robert E. Howard

The Contents

Here’s a list of everything the CE box contains:

• The Art of Hyboria – 125 Page Art book
• A leathery map of the Hyboria
• Two game discs used to install the game itself
• Bonus Disc
• The soundtrack of the game
• and of course the manual

In my opinion the art book alone makes the CE worth paying more for. There’s alot of really nice concept art and descriptions of races, characters, creatures, architecture, gods, weapons, armors, game development itself and plenty of other stuff to read about.

The map is textured as an old scroll like thing. Only textured though since its completely flat. The whole Hyboria is printed on the map so the map doesn’t represent only the game area, which at this point is a really small part of the whole hyboria (Lots of room for expansions at least. ^^), but the whole world the game is based on. I’ve been reading the AoC Europe forums alot these past few days and seen people complain about the poor quality of the items in the CE box; the map in particular. All I can say is I guess I got lucky with it. The map I received is in perfect condition and I can read even the smallest print on it without much trouble.

The Bonus disc is filled with all sorts of trailers, developers video diaries, some concept art and in general some stuff to pass some time on while waiting for the release. Went through it quickly and seemed like most of the videos are the same ones you can find at different fansites and such by now.

The soundtrack has 25 tracks on it. Listened through it a few times as background music while updating AoC and fiddling with other stuff. Served nice as a mood setter and I enjoyed listening  to most of it. Went over and discussed it with a friend that is way more musically inclined than me and in his opinion it was okay for a game soundtrack but far too ambient to be great. We concluded that Manowar’s Hail and Kill on a continuous loop would’ve done the trick just as well (Just kidding of course. ^^).

Ingame Extras

Almost forgot about these. With the Collectors Edition added to your Funcom account you will receive a special ring and a drinking cape.

The special ring is called “The Ring of Acheron”. It will increase your xp gain by 2% and your stamina by 3%. On the forum there is word going around that the ring is only usable until level 40. Probably not the greatest thing around, but then again I didn’t expect to receive endgame items right away anyway.

The drinking cape is probably the greatest thing ever. Wearing it will grant you free drinks for life at any tavern you enter. So feel free to drink on my tab as much as you like. ^^

EDIT (Added on 26th of may 2008): Just noticed I completely missed a few things.

One would be the 8-slot bag that you get ingame. Really nice imo considering equivalent bags cost considerable amounts in game. The items can be claimed on all of the characters you make too so the bag is really useful at Tortage (atleast for now as banking and tradeposts are disabled).

The other one would be the 5 buddy trial keys which we did not receive on launch though. They are promised to be given to our accounts in the future.

/EDIT

Conclusion

The AoC Collectors edition is a nice little (quite huge actually) package. The content (especially the ingame content) could have been better. Something that doesn’t affect economical balance or give the player too much power; like a nice hat? Everyone could use a nice hat right? However I don’t regret paying the extra cash for CE even the slightest bit.

About the game install itself; it took about 45 – 55 minutes to install the whole thing and there was around 800mb of updates to download after that. Went without problems and the update server could give my huge 2Mbit (\o/) connection the maximum speed for the whole download time.

I am really looking forward to tomorrow’s launch and I know for a fact that the hours I will spend at work tomorrow are going to be pure agony. I don’t dare to try the game out in the morning as the temptation to skip work and just play AoC all day might get too hard to resist.

The servers should go live early in the morning. I hope everything goes smoothly and everyone gets to play without huge problems. Wish you all good luck and will be seeing you ingame soon. ^^

– Odefi