Funcom is currently giving ex-players of Age of Conan the chance to come back and try the game for 2 weeks for free. If you sign up for a subscription at the same time they’ll even give you 20% off and through in some nice in-game items.

Being particularly interested in MMO games from an interactive and social experience view point (as well as forming a mild addiction, especially to PvP) — I bought AoC the day it came out last year and played for about 3 months. I quit because once I got my character to the early 40s and there didn’t seem like there was many more quests and I didn’t fancy the idea of grinding levels. The day I cancelled my account I had just finished a city raid with my guild, where we attacked another player city. Unfortunately my frame rate dropped to 1fps, which made it unplayable. Anyway, with the promise of a lot more content and better performance I decided to reinstall it under Windows Vista 64 on my new unibody 15” Macbook Pro. Under DirectX 9.0 with medium settings the game runs about 40-60fps. DirectX 10 will only manage about 20fps on medium settings, and around 12fps on the highest settings. The DX10 setting isn’t really playable but I understand it’s still in beta so likely to improve in time. This is about a 35% improvement over what I was getting after it was first released, however I was running a Macbook Pro with a 512MB 8600M graphics card instead of the 512MB 9600M I’m running now. On a desktop machine with a newer gaming graphics card (ATI 4850/4870 or Nvidia GTX 250/285 etc) I’m sure it’d be really smooth.

My experience with AoC is limited to those first three months and levels 0-45ish (of the 80 level cap). I have played a number of other MMOs to compare it to (as well as a lot of other games released in the last year). WoW for a number of years; LoTRO, Guild Wars and WAR for a number of months each; and one month of EVE, RoM and CoH. In AoC I play a bald female Tempest of Set, an offensive/healing spell casting class that worships snakes (for some reason all of my MMO characters are evil female classes, but we won’t start analysing that!)

Overall I like the feel of the game. It’s got that same realistic world setting (ie: not cartoon-like) that Warhammer, LoTRO and Guild Wars have but it’s graphics are one of, if not the, best — with some really beautiful landscapes. It’s also probably the most violent with lots of blood, as well as a lot of partial nudity. I like that they didn’t compromise and adapt the game for children. Unfortunately you still get a lot of children running around as topless women and flirting with everyone..

The real time combat is one of the unique features of the game and generally works really well and makes you think about your position (though my blood elf rogue in WoW still has to ensure she’s behind the enemy for stronger attacks too). There are still a lot of complaints that spell casters are much stronger in PvP though, because they don’t need to worry about doing melee damage. The spell cast mechanic works like any other MMOs.

Another nice feature is the global chat channel, so regardless if you’re in a city or a remote zone you can still read the chat — it makes you feel like you’re actually in the game with many other people. Guild cities are a nice idea, but they aren’t really working that well yet. The quest givers also feature different camera angles, so when you speak to them the camera moves right in to provide a dramatic angle. Many of the early quest givers also feature voice overs too.

The Tempest of Set is one of the more enjoyable classes I’ve played in any MMO. It’s a hybrid of dps spell casting and healing. In fact all healing classes in AoC are able to put out decent dps, which is the only time I’ve been attracted by the healing class and makes finding a group easier as you can generally do either role. She has a range of offensive single target ranged spells as well as AoE. A single target rooting spell as an AoE slow — so you can play the mage and slow your enemy while casting lighting at them. She can also be played in close range by activating two spells that charge your skin with lightning so that anyone in close range takes damage. While these are active most of the range spells can’t be used but I could kill a group of 3 melee NPCs by standing near them with these spells constantly active and just healing myself through the damage. She has 2 HoT healing spells, that are cast on yourself and any party members near by, as one single heal spell that heals the player and also anyone directly in front.

The game still has some serious flaws, which are making me question whether I will continue to play the game. I’ll outline a few of the ones that come to mind.

The first is due to playing on a PvP server, which is my fault for originally picking it but I refuse to pay them another 20 euros to move my character and I don’t want to roll a new one. The game features open PvP, which means you can kill anyone, which means everyone kills you on sight. This used to be ok when there weren’t so many players, and when I was playing last year most people would leave you alone if you were questing. Now it seems I’m constanlty being attacked. The only way to get quests done was to group up with 5 other players so that if someone attacked you you had some support and could kill them and continue the quest. It took me hours to get one level for this reason. And as you also only resurect at the one point now (you used to be able to chose any in the zone but this made it to easy to travel to the other side of a zone — just get someone to kill you instead of running) these points are just camped by groups of players so you can’t even walk a few metres without being killed again. Funcom have tried to do someone about this by introducing a crimal debuff that prevents you from auto traveling for about an hour, but this doesn’t seem to prevent anyone. Either give players a more serious debuff for constantly killing the same person or allow free transfers to a normal server!

Lag is the other big issue. There’s only one main city (though there are smaller ones) and it also acts as a hub for each of the three regions so gets a lot of through traffic. It’s hard to move around this zone in busy periods. Often you’ll be running down the street and then suddendly find yourself 10metres back running in to a wall.

I think the most appealing aspect to an MMO for me is the social connection. Knowing people, belonging to a guild and playing with people are what sets MMOs apart from other genres. It’s the reason I often return to WoW, as I’ve been in a guild for years and actually like to catch up with other players. AoC feels very temporary at the moment, with the influx of ex-players trying the game again. I think this is why there’s so much ganking. Maybe once those players leave again it will settle down. It mostly meets the other two requirements I have before I’ll even consider subscribing to an MMO — being able to play an interesting (evil girl) class, and having engaging visual (when there’s no lag) and audio design.

I’ve still got another 5 weeks of play time paid for so I’ll make a judgement on whether to continue my subscription closer to the end. With so many interesting looking games on their way, like Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Dragon Age Origins, Alpha Protocol, Splinter Cell Conviction and Dante’s Inferno I don’t know if I’ll continue to have the time for an MMO — not to mention The Old Republic, or even time for real life stuff like work, travel and friends!