Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Impressions

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Written by BuckGB on May 21st, 2008

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The game staggers a bit performance-wise, but a great deal of that is due to the age of my system than the game itself. On max settings, my 2.13GHz Core 2 with 2GB of RAM and a Radeon x1950 Pro will run the game, but the frame rate is just terrible. Medium settings are playable, and medium settings with shadows turned off seems to be the sweet spot for my system. Low settings are playable, but you lose a lot of view distance in the process.

There are plenty of bugs and glitches to be had as well, but nothing that has completely ruined my experience so far. I've frozen a few times, but that is extremely rare. Sometimes instances take longer to load than other times, seeming to choke at the end. There are some clipping issues, notably with an NPC in Tortuga who has breasts too big for her modeled shirt.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that Conan is extremely polished. It should go without saying, but unfortunately some PC games and many MMORPGs get away with releasing a rough looking or playing game, knowing that they will have weeks, months, or years of patches to fix things up post launch. That's not to say that one should expect a bug-free game, but the user interface is very nice looking, well organized, and intuitive. The graphics and animation are superb, even at lower settings. Character models are just a leap ahead of anything else in the genre. Help text is nicely organized and quickly accessible right from the main game screen.

While on the subject of graphics, be aware that this game may have been created with the sole intention of making you feel inferior about your current PC. The install will take around 25GB of drive space, and even if you meet or pass the recommended specs, you still may not see healthy framerates. The good news is, there's not a terribly large difference between low and high quality settings for the graphics. More shadows, foliage, and draw distance is added, but the beauty of the game can still be appreciated.

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