Back in the day, when Age of Conan became free to play, I gave it a try, being a Conan fan and all. I recall having fun with the tutorial segment of the game. The gameplay, the story and the atmosphere felt really good. And the game looked good too. So, after completing the tutorial, I stepped into the open world with all the other players. I couldn't leave my starting location, as I was savagely murdered multiple times by players with much higher level characters than mine. The fun ended there and I proceeded to uninstall the game, at times reminiscing of the fun I had in the tutorial.
So now, years later, I decided to re-install Age of Conan and give it another go. While my old character still exists, I decided to create a new one just to see how the tutorial fares up to my memories. Then I'd step to the open world to see if the murder posses still remain, waiting for a possibility of murdering anyone with worse gear and lower levels.
Age of Conan began as Hyborian Adventures in 2008. Originally, it was your standard monthly fee-based MMORPG, but by 2011, Funcom shifted their initial model into a hybrid, where they turned the game as free to play, but also offered a premium, subscription-based possibility. The name changed to Unchained. F2P-accounts have limited character slots and can't access all the areas of the game. That matters very little, in the end, as even F2P offers quite a bit of content to play and I assume if you manage to play the free content through, you'd mostly be fed upon the game already, mostly because of its MMORPG nature which makes it repetitive and grindy.
It all begins from a slave ship. From these harsh conditions, you will rise, choosing your character and class. Either as a male or female, you drift ashore after the ship crashes during a storm. You've arrived at the island of Tortage, as is told to you by a man who finds you from the shore. He states, that you should capture the slaver, who was left alive as well, as he could cause problems for you if he manages to get to the city and claim you as his property.
So, to the jungles, you go, armed with a sturdy piece of flotsam you grabbed from the beach. You meet a woman chained on trees, left there to die. You can help her as well and together you venture towards Tortage city and your slaver. You find him and kill him, after which you can enter the city or spend a moment exploring the beach. You'll find poachers, picts and demons. All good for experience.
It all feels more MMORPGey than I remembered. For some reason, my thinking was, that the island of Tortage felt more like a single-player game that was just bolted on the side of an MMORPG as a tutorial. While the tutorial is in a sense, a single-player experience, you do see other players running around as well, so you are not in isolation. And the gameplay is, in all the terrible MMORPG fashions, an MMORPG. So, you run around and kill things and gather stuff and return that stuff to the quest givers. Combat is just pressing numeric keys in order to score hits. So, if you don't normally like this style of game-play, you won't like it here either. I won't dwell further on that, as I don't really find it that engaging.
If the gameplay is more or less the standard fare as far I understand MMORPGs, is there anything there to enjoy then? Surprisingly enough, yes. The tutorial segment on the island of Tortage is actually a reasonably well-crafted location. It looks great and there's a lot to do there. There's a decent story there with the Red Hand pirates keeping the city under siege and a lot of the running around is actually about trying to figure out how to get rid of them. The people of Tortage are tired of the situation and want to see it resolved.
I know I called Tortage a tutorial, but only the beginning segment in the beach can really be classified as such. As soon as you get to the city itself, you see other players as well. You can ignore them most of the time. On an occasion, someone can match up with you, so you can go on in a group. PvE servers make sure, that higher level players can't kill beginners, so you mostly just do the same old MMORPG quests, like kill a group of monsters because of some reasons and so on. After you get out from Tortage, you keep doing the same, but with less voice acting. It's quite obvious that Tortage is meant to be the "pull-in" of the game, with fully voiced NPCs and a tighter storyline. Sure, there are busywork missions there as well, but the whole feels more compact.
The atmosphere is fantastic, greatly helped by one of the best soundtracks ever composed for an MMORPG. Just go and listen to it to yourself from Youtube. The soundtrack is truly fantastic and in many ways reflects upon the awesome soundtrack from Conan the Barbarian. Even if the gameplay is lacking, the soundtrack alone makes playing through the island of Tortage a pleasant experience.
After Tortage, my travels took me to Aquilonia, the kingdom ruled by King Conan. I didn't see the king, as I proceeded towards the wildlands, where dark beasts are sieging a small town. So that is my next task, doing the same stuff I did on Tortuge: talk to random people, get random jobs and kill a lot of monsters to level up so that you can go to other places doing the same.
And there, really, lies the crux of the matter. Like in every MMORPG out there, it all boils down to completing busy work in order to proceed elsewhere to do the same. Over and over again. A decent storyline and a good atmosphere can help you enjoy the game, but even they have their limits. And, obviously, the game does keep pestering you to purchase stuff from the in-game shop. That's how they keep it going, besides the DLC packs and whatnot.
As far I can tell, there still seems to be quite a few players in Age of Conan. I've seen players doing the same missions as I was, so despite it has, apparently, fallen far from its glory days, there is a somewhat healthy player population exploring the game. Only two official servers exist for the game, one dedicated to PvE, the other PvP, so depending on your playstyle, it should be an easy task to pick which you want. If you need more player interaction, go with PvP, where the other players pose an additional risk. If the environment is enough for you, go with PvE.
Age of Conan is an MMORPG just like many others. It didn't re-invent the wheel, it more or less does the same things as every other game in the genre. What it does offer is a pretty nicely done Hyperborean world for you to toil in. So if you go in not expecting your mind to blow by the mechanics, you might get a kick out of it. It is a time sink like every game in the genre, so there's that. You rinse and repeat the same things till you are numb, but at least you can play it for free. I guess that counts for something.
I can see myself returning to Age of Conan from time to time. I shan't be buying any of the DLCs for it, it isn't that great of a game, but what comes to Robert E. Howard inspired RPG games, Age of Conan still is the best we have. Conan: Exiles is a sandbox world builder and Conan: Unconquered is a strategy game. So if you have the itch to play a Hyperborean RPG, Age of Conan is more or less it. You can get the base game from Steam for free. Even the DLCs are in sale pretty often, so if you want to get all there is, it's not THAT expensive.
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