First Look redux: Age of Conan

Another day, another couple of tin coins. Assuming, David Hollingworth discovers, that the servers are up.

So, I'd love to have a lot more to talk about in regards to Age of Conan, but a couple of things stand in my way.

For one thing, it looks like I've been hooked up with an EU client. While this explains the unusually high pings I've been suffering, it's also bit of a gameplay challenge when, in the last 24 hours, the EU servers have had nearly 12 hours of down-time. Word on the virtual street is that it's all in preparation for the EU launch, but that seems bit of a ropy excuse.

Surely the game should have been launch-ready when the early access crowd started logging on a few days, wandering about killing picts with Stygian abandon and looking sharp in batik drinking cloaks. Instead, the coveted so-called early access types have, like me, been left twiddling their thumbs and idly wandering around whatever virtual world they could get into.

Middle Earth, in my case. Go Captain Alfwine of the Mark!

Anyway, back to Hyborea.

The whole issue of the pre-order early-access gig was muddied even further by poor communication and sales practice by a lot of retailers. Funcom - and local publisher Atari - was quite up-front in saying that early-access codes were always going to be limited, and given on a first-come-first-served basis. Retailers, like JB Hi-fi for one, were not quite so up front.

There has been a mini-storm from angry fans who pre-ordered under the illusion that their codes were safe and secured, but have missed out. This has happened here and abroad, and while Atari maintain that it is quite out of its hands, it remains that retailers could have done a much better job of informing the game-buying public.

JB in particular, in at least one store, advertised the pre-order offer as being valid with no mention of limited numbers, and did so for four days after the shop's allocation of codes ran out.

So, customer contentment may not be running all that high, and with server downtime in the EU, there might be some signs of a rocky launch for the game. Even worse, the downtimes seem to have bugged out any character that was in an instance at the time of server shutdown. Given that the entire night-time phase of the early game is a private instance, that's a lot of locked out characters.

Like my Stygian assassin.

Crom must hate me. Sad panda.

Find David's more successful attempt to play AoC here.