Age of Conan

As an introduction to an MMO, Tortage is unmatched. Quests are fully voice acted, the storyline drags you through a genuinely interesting adventure that introduces most of the key elements of the Conan lore, and the general improvements to performance and gameplay have left Tortage feeling like an even smoother, more polished experience than previously.

Tortage has always had a problem, though - you have to leave. Of Conan's many huge issues, perhaps the biggest one in the early days was that players were spat out of the vivid, lively Tortage and into a far less interesting world where quests were few and far between, NPCs spoke in text boxes and a dull grind to level 80 awaited.

Sailing away from Tortage is still jarring, but much has been done to smooth over the seams. The main continent has sprouted a large number of NPCs with voice acting, which helps, but far more importantly, it has acquired far more quests. Leveling a new character past Tortage, I sailed to level 50 without ever emptying my quest log. I had a similar experience with a new level 50 character - the game allows anyone with a level 50 to create a new character at that level. It's not just that new zones have been added - old zones have been overhauled, filled with more quests and streamlined to guide you towards content you might have overlooked.

The only speed-bumps I hit in content terms were when I wasn't in the mood to team up, and ran into the game's forced segregation of solo and party content. Funcom doesn't let players do group content solo. Even when you're ten levels higher, a peculiar bit of combat mathematics kicks in which allows monsters in group areas to kick your backside. Personally, I found this very frustrating. It feels like an artificial way to force you to play the game as the creators envisaged it, rather than enjoying it at your own pace.

Speaking of walking into new zones, it's worth pointing out that that's actually something you can't do in Conan. Unlike most modern MMOs, Conan doesn't have a contiguous continent that you can just walk across - in fact, it doesn't always even have geographically continuous zones with load delays between them. Instead, you talk to a wagon train captain or a sailor, and after a load delay, you turn up at your destination. It's definitely an acquired taste. Some players even seem to like it, because it gives the impression of a truly huge world that fits with Robert E. Howard's fiction, but to me it still feels like a technological step backwards and breaks the world up too much, making it feel like a selection of game levels.

Let's skip forwards and talk about the endgame. Players tend to do one of a few things when they hit max level in an MMO. Some get involved in a guild and do big PVE raids and other such events. Conan has been steadily bulking out the content for them - the game features Guild Cities which can be constructed by large guilds, and is building up its collection of level 80 raid dungeons, adding the pretty solid Xibaluku to the roster in a recent update. It's still lacking some variety for 24-man top level raids, but what's there is pretty challenging, with Funcom finally learning to move away from plain old tank-and-spank boss encounters. Thanks to a recent overhaul of the gear system - which made armour and weapons much more powerful - there's also a proper incentive to progress.

Other players get involved in player-versus-player combat, which is one of the biggest draws for Conan. Prominently featured on the back of the box since launch is the promise of Sieges - gigantic PVP encounters in which people will get to fight with a hundred other players. Laggy and bugged at launch, Sieges are now running remarkably well - and if you're a hardcore, endgame PVP player, they're probably Conan's best feature.