Age of Conan Redux

Maybe some things are better left as memories.

After leaving on the desktop for 36 hours or so, all 25 gigabytes of Age of Conan downloaded and I gave it a spin. One long pause later, it flashed a warning message about my graphics card drivers not being updated (which I noted and postponed in favor of just trying out the game first.)

Turns out my characters have all landed in Wiccana. Possibly the only PvE server still left, who knows. My level 80 Guardian was still there, and I had two HoXes with similar names from my two alt attempts on other servers. Thinking to just check out the sights, rather than have to work on leveling, I picked the Guardian first.

That may have been a mistake, as the zone he was in began to load. No, I wasn't in some horrible deep dank dungeon level, I was just in a zone about half my level, the Wild Lands of Zelata. Straight away though, I realized one of the items that Age of Conan had been roundly cursed at when it started. The loading screen time.

The contrast was all the worse because now I had Rift's loading screen time to cross compare with, as opposed to say, City of Heroe's load time. The red bar of "Updating Graphics" slowly crawled across the screen. I told myself, nevermind, this is the first time the zone is loading, maybe it has to download stuff like Guild Wars when you enter a zone for the first time.

Some thumb-twiddling later, I looked with concern at my CPU's little blue LED light because the computer seemed to have stopped responding, nothing was flickering or anything. One to two minutes as I debated the wisdom of a reset, with a technically incompetent game, the last thing you want to do is bug out a patch or update or download by stopping it midway through whatever it's atempting to do.

Fortunately, it seemed to revive a little later and the hard disk started chugging away, something was being accessed at any rate. Good. The red bar was maybe a quarter way through the screen at this point. More staring at the screen. Sometimes I play a little game while waiting for load screens. I hold my breath and wait for the computer to finish or at least hit a point of progress indicated by my mouse cursor. No way was I doing that here, I told myself, judging by the speed, I would aphxyiate and die first before the red bar got anywhere significant.

Walked out to the kitchen, got a mug, filled it with water, had a long relaxing drink, opened the fridge, considered eating something, decided against it, closed the fridge, put the mug down, went to the bathroom, washed my hands, strolled back to the computer, and would you believe it, the screen still had not loaded, though there was some progress...about 1.5 inches more to go.

After the red bar finally finished, there was the yellow bar. This loaded in a semi-decent time, the time you expect Rift's load screen to take, or GW's load screen after all the data has been downloaded.

I landed in a very very UGLY looking village in the Wild Lands of Zelata. Whoa. Didn't I use to like Age of Conan for it's graphics? Why did everything look so blocky and splotchy and ugly? Maybe my settings were wrong, but I couldn't quite figure out how to change my video settings just yet, other things took my attention, like taking stock of my inventory and what this funny "claim" button that popped up was.

Turns out the "claim" button was left over bits of xp potions and CE bonus items and what not, though I had no inventory room worth speaking of to put them in. I had five mounts in my inventory. I'm not sure whether I bought them all or if they were an apology gift or what. But at least clicking them put them away into a mount button (did we not have that before?), so that some inventory space was left over.

My UI didn't look recognizable. Half my skills were grayed out. I couldn't recall how to fight Age of Conan reactive combat style. I checked my feats. All the points had been reset. I tried to put points back in the talent trees, but it was pretty much a stab in the dark now as the last time. Whatever. Time to give it a shot.

I walked a few paces, and the screen groaned and grumbled and stutter stepped as it tried to deal with the fact that I was now moving through the blotchy landscape. Hrm. I tried to mount up. Two seconds later, I was wondering if something had gone wrong because I didn't have a horse under me, and three to four seconds after that, I was going OH... as the animation finally showed up, the horse trotted into frame slowly, the Guardian clambered on, all the while with a very slow "Mounting..." progress bar underneath.

Moving forward reminded me of Age of Conan's interesting mount acceleration. You start off at a slow walk, and as you push the forward button, you can visibly feel the inertia and acceleration as you begin trotting and then hit a gallop. This would be all very well and immersive, except for two things - I wasn't sure of the route, which meant a lot of starting and stopping at the jerky point of inertia, and just as I got into a good clip of speed, the computer would decide that I had now entered an area which it hadn't loaded the graphics for yet, and everything would hang and lag for a couple seconds, and my horse would suddenly jitter forward in a teleport thirty paces ahead because it was still autorunning while the graphics were loading.

Did I mention the graphics were ugly? I finally found the Video Settings option, and crossing my fingers and biting my lip, I hit the "High" option. After one warning message about the computer may pause and seem to stop for some time (which it did) and that some settings options may require a restart, the scenery in the background got significantly better. Oh good, I thought, I must have put the settings on low because at the time I quit, our guild was attempting group raids. But the video settings overlay was still up, so I hit OK to get rid of the menu, and to my surprise, the same warning message about the computer pausing popped up (Hang on, didn't you JUST apply those graphic settings?) and yes the computer lagged yet again, but finally and mercifully, the video settings overlay went away.

The model of my player character was now significantly much higher resolution and looked a lot better. So did the other NPC character models. The view distance was back to the Age of Conan incredible that more closely resembled my memories. But to my disappointment, the scenery itself, though it was thicker and more lush in foliage, and there was more texture to the surfaces, did not improve significantly in resolution. It appears that Age of Conan has always been a lot blockier than games like Guild Wars, Aion and Rift.

Nevermind. I found a level 20 grey mob on which to begin a combat test. I hit a few of the 1, 2, 3, Q, E directional combat buttons at random, my character dropped into a combat stance and swung his sword and hit, and the mob died. Ok. Basic combat wasn't too bad, but the level difference made it trivial.

The only level 80 mob I could find on the map were village watchmen labeled "Guard". Hitting guard mobs seemed rather suicidal, but what the hell, I should just test my limits, right? Sure enough it was suicide without even denting its HP bar.

I decided to brave the slow map loading and leave the zone in search of more level-appopriate pastures. One zoning stop in Old Tarantia later, complete with glacier-like load times and clunky map navigation of a very cluttered city, looking for the elusive bridge across to the Noble's District. There was a level 77-80 Commoner's District next to it, which I figured had been put in later. More load times and start-and-stop stuttering walking later, I found some red level 80 wharf rat thugs, and there I realized I had no clue how to switch between my ranged crossbow pull and my melee weapons.

Deciding not to brave the overlay to look at my key bindings, I tried the inventory mouse click option, which left some severe pause times between my crossbow pull, and my switch to melee, leaving me 1/3 hp short, but I'm a tank, no? During the combat, it became rather obvious that I had no clue what all my combat combos did any more, and that I was pretty much hitting them at random in an effort to keep from dying. I lucked out and survived that fight with half my hp left.

I hit another wharf rat thug and managed to kill it. On my third go though, I hit a pack of three wharf rat minion mobs, and though I thought I was doing fairly well, somehow my efforts attracted the attention of three more minions, and being surrounded by six minions, I dropped dead shortly.

Hmm. This was leaving more bad tastes in my mouth than before. Talking to NPCs for quests also was laggy as it would bring up the cutscene conversations. Selecting the dialogue option I wanted also left long uncomfortable pauses before the computer detected what I wanted to say. Perhaps Rift's polish level has spoiled me. I can now understand why some WoW tourists can never break out of their game if they are already so used to slick performance and faced with poorer, more inferior game engines.

I decided to exit the game after resurrecting.

Still, it may be my fault in that I haven't updated my graphic cards drivers. I intend to give it another shot after updating. And I may start a new character in order to learn everything from scratch again because AoC is so different from the norm. My tank role is so awkward anyway.

But yeah, revisiting AoC after two years or so is a little bit of a shock. Perhaps some games don't age well.