I’m not the only person who willingly flung myself aboard the hype train for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, lapping up videos and screenshots with huge excitement and anticipation. I (hope I’m) not the only person who frequented the official web site, who spent significant time thinking about what race, gender, class, and colour eyes I was going to sink hundreds of hours and plenty of subscription fees into (just a snippet of the important decisions one faces in life these days).
Unfortunately, before I got my hands on a copy, a number of things went wrong. Firstly, my pre-order vanished into thin air. I checked my local delivery office, nothing there, and the site I ordered from claimed to have delivered it, and had indeed taken my money (incidentally, I only recently received an email asking if I want my money back). I’d missed out on an exclusive Rhino mount and a cape that would give me an XP boost, so I was slightly cheesed off.
Although highly acclaimed by critics, Age of Conan was poorly received by many gamers due to a plethora of bugs and technical issues. You don’t have to look far to find many people still complaining about these kind of problems in-game today, and people are still describing their hellish experiences from launch, back in May 2008.
Once I’d acquired Age of Conan before Christmas, spent the best part of a day installing it, updating drivers, and deciding what hairstyle to give my character, I felt as though I must be playing a different game to all the ‘haters’. On my journey to level 66, I’d fallen through bits of scenery, sat on an invisible horse and been thrown straight through a wall by a monkey, but other than that, everything was fine and dandy – a blissful experience in a beautiful, detailed and expansive game environment.
Recently, I said to a friend that I would “see him online in 5 minutes”, as I opted to start a new character. But this was not to be.
The game loaded, and I tried to log in to get my character list about 10 times, but for some reason my correct password was wrong. The game then froze and I restarted my PC, fired up Age of Conan, and was still unable to log in. I was advised to try my password with a capital letter at the start, and what a suprise, this didn’t work either. Neither did changing my password. Neither did changing anything to do with my router. Finally, I disabled my anti-virus protection, and hallelujah! About 40 minutes later I LOGGED IN!
After that palaver I set about making my Barbarian, but the game decided to freeze and re-load everything on screen every three seconds. This was unbearable, so I quit the game and started again. I re-installed drivers for my graphics card, as I was recommended to. Losing my temper at a rapid rate, Age of Conan was still running about as smoothly as a brick being thrown along a cobbled path. I left the game for a good hour or so and occupied myself by thinking of amusing analogies to describe how well the game was not working.
I logged in again, I made my Barbarian and affectionately named him “Smeghead”. I watched him get washed up on the tropical beaches of Tortage, I watched random polygons infinitly extrude themselves from his beard, I watched the scenery turn bright red, pink and green, and general graphical craziness. I was set upon by a group of invisible crocodiles who distracted me by making my screen rapidly flicker black – I presumed this was an attempt to give me a seizure so that they could devour the defenceless Smeghead (I would show you a screenshot, but I don’t want to be responsible for any epileptic fits).
Since then, the game has worked sporadically. I’m awaiting the arrival of a new graphics card, the servers will be merged to ensure more than 7 players are online, and I am enjoying this crap so much I’ve got a 60 day time card. I think perhaps this proves my love for Age of Conan does indeed outweigh the hate, but god damn – I never thought I would work this hard just to try and play a flipping game.
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