After playing the game now for about 3 weeks its time to get critical about AoC. Up to this point ive been quite tolerant about the game and when i say tolerant i relly do mean that.

Performance: Poor and were not even at Dx10 yet
At times its almost like your “fighting” your PC to play this game. The reason i say this is that ive spent a good amout of time chaning my videos settings during the game. In a few on the instances that you can solo the ones in the “Noble District” in “old Tarantia” you actually have to turn the games shader model setinng down to “2.0 or 2.x” due to a huge drop in the games framerate, its so bad it makes the game unplayable with framerates varying from 3-10fps. This is an issue ive seen on the forums from other people and hopefully will be fixed in a later patch.

From the poor performance the game gives condsidering the hardware my PC has is very frustrating. I bought an Nvidia 8800 GTS 640mb back in September 2007 so i could play this game if i decided to buy it but it was mainly for Crysis. Looking back i should have waited but thats the gamble that is PC gaming. I was very dissapointed in the performance of AoC on my PC, ive tried it on Vista32,Vista64 and XP 32 SP3 and theres not much difference between them however Vista 64 seems to a bit better and is better for PC since i have a 64 bit Processor and 4gigs of ram which 32bit operating systems cant support. I run the game with almost all settings on high and of course my Graphics card cant seemt o handle that with frame-rates dropping from 40-15fps in built up areas. Even when you turn off and reduce most of the settings most of themseem to make to impact on the games performance. The only settings i found that helped were;

Turning off shadows (gives about a 6 fps increase)
Turning off AA (gives 2-3)
Turning off Bloom (1-2 increase not sure)

DX 10:
The game gives the options of 3 “Shader Models” which basically make the game look better/reduce performance. Shader Model 3.0 is Direct X 9’s default and make the game look its best with more lighting and shiny stuff, the other 2 are Direct-X8 and while they make the game run well they also make it looks really “dated” like a game you would seem from 2-3 years ago. Were told Direct-x 10 is coming but i would i cant imagine its going to be any better than the current state of the game’s performance of course who knows.

Bugs:
The very first thing i heard about this game when it lauched was “Theres a lot of Bugs”, it didnt put me off and still hasnt.There are bugs in this game which is no surprise however most of them ive been told and read either were working or have been broken since the “BETA”. I tried to get access to the “BETA” of the game before its launch but didnt get in. To be honest i dont know what Funcom did in the “Beta” as from what i read they failed to fix many things before launch. The most annoying ones are the “Quest Bugs” where you cant either do the quest or finsih it because its not working. Noew this really is something that annoys me, you do the questhadn it in and nothing happens and think to yourself “What the Frack?”. Then you ask in the chat channel is “XYZ Quest Bugged?” to of course the answer is always “yes it is at the moment.” Now im not 100% sure but i think in World of Warcraft they “Hot-Fix” these issues i.e the fix them without patches or downtime. This isnt been done in AoC yet which is kinda dissapointing but i guess its too early for that yet.

End-Game, boredom and Quests Drying up:
Ive read that quests from level 55 upwards are scarce and a fair of “grinding” is involved. I decided from the start of this game that there was no way i was going to do that and i wont. Funcom who make the game as you know “Are aware” of this and are making new content for a future patch. Im only 1 level away this and im starting to get well fed up really in the current zone im in “the Egliphian mountains” the quests are running out plus after managing to save up enough gold for amount at last im kinda getting a bit sick of it plus the zone looks very dull at least the first 2 areas of it.

Age of Conan has something missing:
There is a lot of things missing from the game at the moment but theres one real important thing that any game needs and thats “soul” and what i mean by that is an immersive world that “flows” with characters and quests that give you a sence of achievement and make you want to log back in in fact make you never want to log off. This is missing from the game, when i started WoW i felt it of course wow had 1-2 years of patches by the time i got to play it.