|
| 
 enlarge
| From: Eidos
Category: Video Games
List Price: $79.99
Buy New: $19.99
You Save: $60.00 (75%)
New (24) Used (6) from $17.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 7755
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows Xp
ESRB: Mature
Media: CD-ROM
Edition: Collector's
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows Vista
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: SAGECPUS01
Model: SAGECPUS01
UPC: 788687100748
EAN: 0788687100748
ASIN: B000V1OUTU
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 From J. Kaye's Book Blog June 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This game has tremendous potential; but for now, it has way too many glitches and bugs that need to be ironed out. I spent too much money on an upgrade just to get the game to work properly.
Sweet combat system and superb graphics especially compared to WOW, but it's highly demanding hardware wise.
 Very nice start June 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've been playing Age of Conan now for a little over a week and I have to say - I'm having a blast.
The Good:
The quests are interesting both in execution (ie - what you do) and in story. The voice acting is good though it gets a bit sparse once you leave Tortage. The game is easy enough to get the hang of but as you gain levels and skills, new options open up to you, which in turn lead to new challenges.
I love the skill system - allocating skill points as you level to customize your characters strengths and weaknesses in addition to the customization allowed by feat selection. It's little touches like this that really make the game feel fun.
Character creation is extremely nice - quite a few options and a VERY editable face make sure you don't run into too many people that look just like you. I do have a minor quibble about it (see below under The Bad)
Graphically the game is awesome - sprawling wilderness, cliff faces, water that moves like water should, bustling villages and cities... prey animals that aggressive mobs will stalk, attack, kill and eat. In addition to LOOKING alive the game FEELS alive to me as well.
The classes are all pretty interesting and take a slightly different approach to some of the traditional roles. I can't say I'm an expert on these as I've only played a few classes past 20 but, looking at the feat trees it seems that every class has, in addition to their primary function, some sort of utility as well - usually in the form of supplimental DPS or a group buff. This is nice - hopefully gone will be the rogue of WoW that's essentially a 1-trick pony (3 trees to determine how you'll DPS in melee). I say hopefully, because I honestly don't know how it plays out at higher levels.
The Bad:
First and foremost - despite the M rating a majority of the players that I've encountered so far are ANYTHING but mature. I'll leave it at that. That is my number one gripe and, in my opinion will do more damage in the long run than any botched patch, laggy interface or any of the other things I'm about to list.
Tortage - It's great at first. It's interesting, draws you in and, as mentioned before, feels alive... at first. By level 19 I could hardly wait to leave. I felt chained to that damned island and wanted nothing more to do with it. That's not to say that the areas were bad - if they WERE I never would have made it to 19 but you're essentially stuck there until you're done there.
Character Creation - Weird huh? Both good and bad - this is really more of a quibble than a full up 'bad' point. You get to pick these really cool body markings and facial marks as character options. But what you don't get to do is pick their color so far as I can tell. If you can, I wasn't able to figure it out. Some of the markings just look silly in their default color but would look quite nice if you could tweak that. That's basically it. Oh - and when you're done making your character you automatically go to Tortage - see above.
The other 'Bad' things are a grab bag of the usual things that plague an MMO on release - sketchy servers, questionable initial class balance (they seem alright to me, just some tweaking here and there should put things right), certain skills don't seem to work quite right and performance issues. It's very strange to go from 40 fps to 11 fps and you don't change anything. You run around, things are smooth, you keep doing your thing for about an hour... suddenly you chug down to 11fps... and then 20 minutes later you're doing 40 again... I'm not techincally savvy enough to understand the whys and hows.
Anyway - I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys a good solid MMO. Note - based on the community though, come with thick skin and a healthy stomach for toilet humor. Lots of it. All the time (unless you leave every public channel in the game).
Oh - one more thing. The Bow that Amazon gave us is just about useless to EVERYONE in the game save rangers. Whereas everyone that preordered this game from ANYONE else got an awesome mount. I'm feeling pretty pissed about that to be honest, but that's not the game's fault - I blame Amazon for being lame, overselling their preorders and not even shipping mine out to me until 2 weeks after it was supposed to be here. In short - the bow is as lame as Amazon.com preorders.
 This game is NOT ready for prime time... June 6, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
Entertaining game but still feels like you're playing a Beta version June 4, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I've had this game for a couple weeks now and I've played it fairly regularly during that time (70+ hrs. accrued), so here are my thoughts on it:
The Pros:
This game is very entertaining. The graphics are very good. Engrossing storyline.
The Cons:
1. Still very much a work in progress with system issues. At the time of this writing, there are still major problems with the game. (Ex. Gemcutter profession causing crashing to the desktop.) While FunCom is working to address these, these should've been handled prior to release. When you first install, expect to spend literally hours or days (depending on your connection speed) to download the updates to fix them.
2. Playability issues - I've only had experience with the Necromancer class, so I can only report on that (as well as general issues):
A. Resource Gathering - At level 20, you become able to gather resources, but if it comes from anything other than fallen enemies, it comes from a resource node. These nodes have terrible recharge rates (ex. I went to mine Silver and needed to wait for the node to recharge. I waited an entire 45 minutes and the node was at less than 30% capacity after that). Expect to spend tons of time waiting for resources.
B. Boss/Quest Item spawning - Like resource nodes, these have terrible spawn rates. Also, be wary of other players present, because if you need to kill X, the game only recognizes the first player (unless you are in a group) as to damage X as the "killer" of X. Ex. People A & B need to kill monster Y. B hits first for 1% and then gets slain by Y. A finishes it off. B gets the credits (and spoils) where A gets nothing and will need to wait for Y to spawn again.
C. Unreasonable targetting - As a Necromancer, one gets to summon undead minions to help you (obviously). Well, once you send your minions to attack, the adversary immediately tracks and attacks you, and ignores your minions. Why? I don't understand this aspect. I've sent various minions to attack at extreme range, and then I go around a corner to hide, and yet, I am still targetted. Why? The monsters have no way of seeing me or detecting me. (There are skills that reduce the auto-targetting, but these generally are worthless (1% reduction of being attacked automatically = useless in my book).) I guess I'm expecting more of a realistic approach (like in Guild Wars), where one's minions are treated as valid targets for attack just like everyone else.
3. Very poor documentation - A lot of aspects of this game are not covered or are just plain wrong in the manual. Ex. "Spells can be acquired from merchants" - no, they are acquired by levelling up or spending points for feats which grant spells. There are no skill/spell merchants (as in Guild Wars). Ex. Item distribution in groups. If an item is acquired by a group a window pops up showing the item with buttons of "Need" and "Greed". Nowhere in the manual is this discussed. So, one is often left wondering what the heck to do. (Yes, you can go online and check various forums to get the necessary info., but documentation should cover basics and be accurate).
4. Ambiguous quests - This is mainly the resource tree quests. You will be given quests like "Gather Tin". Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you where to get tin. Only through trial and error (or looking at the online forums) you find out that it comes from a copper resource node, and hope that while you're collecting copper, you'll get a tin drop.
General Overall feeling:
This game is neat and the storyline is intriguing, but feels like that I'm playing a beta version of the game. While I fully believe that FunCom will address all the issues (system and playability alike), these shouldn't have even arisen in a "live" version. (Especially with a subscription-based model.) The various extras that came with the Collector's edition are nice; I especially liked the soundtrack.
 Amazon has these in stock.!!! June 2, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
I ordered this 4 days ago hoping maybe they had them, and the next thing i know i get a shipped notice from amazon. W00t!! Great game and a great collectors edition.
|
|
|
Copyright action-web.net 2007 | |
