I had been fishing over the last few months looking for a new MMORPG to fool around with. It’s not that I’ve quit World of Warcraft as I still have an active account, but I decided to go on hiatus for awhile. Since I was tired of repeating the same things over and over, I began jumping around looking for that one new account I could activate that would be fun to try out. After flirting with a plethora of different online games, I latched onto Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, managed by FunCom Inc. So let’s continue on, dear reader, and unveil the many mysteries of this particular online game.

You begin with creating your character. You get to choose from three races and 12 classes, including melee, priest, mage and ranged characters. You have to decide if you want a basic or advanced character. Basic means head, hair, eyes and tattoos changes. Advanced deals with height, muscles and facial features, among a number of different changes you can play with. The character creation system in Age of Conan is simple and easy to use, and only your imagination is needed.

After you’ve created your character, a sequence of events occur to kick-start you on your way. A cutscene starts with you apparently drowning, but at the last minute, you are tossed ashore on the island of Tortage. You’re basically wearing nothing but scraps of clothing and carrying a piece of wreckage as a weapon. The story unfolds along the lines of saving a lady chained up, killing the slaver who imprisoned you and making your way to the town. At this point, you should have reached level 4 or 5 by killing everything in sight. Once arriving in town, you must do a couple of quests prior to being allowed to enter. Once in, head to the tavern immediately to the right of the gate, as this continues the major ongoing quest. Here is where the quest deviates into a nighttime, ongoing storyline, or you may stay during daytime and do additional quests that are shown as yellow exclamation marks.

As quests go, you’ll be better off doing the daytime ones as they garnish the greatest amount of experience overall. By doing the nighttime and daytime quests, you should easily make level 20 before you even need to leave the island. While on the island, you’ll find that you can do all of the quests solo depending on your level. Monsters — or mobs as they are called — have different colored circles so you can judge how much of a challenge they will be. The colors are grey, green, blue, yellow, orange and red. Grey will not reward you experience, while orange and red are will favor the monster. On top of that, you have certain mobs that will be bosses and elites and are shown as horns on their stats tables when you click on them. The size and amount of horns showing determine the difficulty in defeating said boss. What I like about the quest log is the way they have colored each quest and shown which is a grouped quest and which can be done solo. This makes it easy to determine what you will be able to handle at that point in time.

Statistic tables are easy to access and will give you detailed information on what you may be lacking in health, mana, stamina, magical abilities and such. By hovering over any particular stat, you can get a small overview of what it does. This is most helpful in improving your abilities by wearing equipment that increases those stats you need. Feats are enhancements or new spells that add to your abilities or improve current spells, whether for yourself or party members. You get one new feat every level, beginning with level 10 to the maximum level of 80.

Player versus player in Age of Conan is a mixed bag of individual players and siege warfare between guilds. The individual playing involves minigames, such as capture the flag and deathmatch games. You also have what can be called a criminal element, but it would likely be confined to a PvP server more suited to that kind of activity. Minigames are grouped by levels such that there is activity for every level player in the game. These levels would be 1-19, 20-39, 40-59, etc. Siege warfare involves Tier-3 guild cities attacking opponents’ battlekeeps, which can involve as many as 48 players per side.

Guilds play an important part in Age of Conan. They are needed to build guild cities and battlekeeps. Involvement in group quests or running raids is another important aspect of joining a guild. Mainly looking for friendship, an interaction with other players has always been an important mainstay in any MMO game. An example of what it takes to build a Tier-3 building is listed below. The materials required have to be gathered and an architect, which is a trade skill, is needed to put it all together.

Gathering and crafting skills are part and parcel, which is pretty diverse. In gathering, you can pick one to five different skills, such as mining, prospecting and woodcraft — to name a few. Gathering is represented by finding nodes and removing the raw contents. Nodes get depleted and are renewed over time, which then can be reharvested. Crafting is a bit more labor-intensive. This requires the raw materials and certain items purchased from merchants, the auction house or friends who have that particular skill and can donate or sell for a reasonable price the materials needed. Second, you must have the recipe before you can produce an item. Some crafts include weapon smith, alchemist, armor smith and a number of other skills. You can have only two crafts per character.

Age of Conan as a whole is well-rounded and easy to work with. Most information is subscribed in an in-game journal for quick answers. The community and guild members are usually helpful with questions, plus the online manual is very helpful. Some faults are that Age of Conan is very computer-intensive, requiring at least 2 GB of RAM or more to keep from having the hard drive chugging along. I found that having not enough RAM was causing what I thought was a video card problem with locking up, and load times from scene to scene were taking longer than they should have. Also logging in takes way longer then it should compared to some other MMOs I have played. Another annoying problem was group quests. Unless you are in a guild whose members will help out in these quests, getting a party together is mathematical, especially if you’re a solo player.

The graphics in Age of Conan are exceptional with strong detail to the surroundings, buildings, NPCs and mundane artifacts, plus weapons and armor. Music complements the different aspects of the game though a bit redundant, while the ambient sound effects have you thinking you are right there. Cutscenes sometimes will converse with you and at other times are silent. Townsfolk will communicate with each other depending on the areas you might be stationed at. On the whole, your immersion in the game makes you feel like you’re right there.

Other than those few thing not so great that I mentioned, I found Age of Conan quite enjoyable in that having a level 48 character and seven characters all together at various levels is a testimonial in how fast character development is. So if you are shopping around for a new MMO, you might want to try Age of Conan through the trial phase before going all the way.