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Well, we got Age of Conan installed on my roomates computer after clearing a bunch of things off his drives to make room for the 30 GB required space. After playing it a bit, I really like the idea of the combat system, even though it pretty much sucks at level 10. Hopefully it picks up…

The biggest thing that is sticking out to me is the lack of polish. This game is 5 years in the making, and it really doesn’t look very good. I’m still scratching my head over where those 30GB are going. The roomate has a pretty nice computer with the graphics turned all the way up, and there are constant clipping problems (particularly with breasts through shirts, so it’s pretty much the best bug you could hope for) and animation glitches. The shadows and water look really good though…

The biggest problem for me are the parts of the game that just plain don’t work. Things that are supposed to be there aren’t, like the light meter (they talk about it and tell you to use it, but it just isn’t there), the refusal to let me  bind the keys I want to what I want, etc. This is release everybody, especially after the 3 delays setting it back over a year. What the hell were they working on?

On top of that, the quests are so damn boring. Hooray, a shitload of fedex and collect quests. I know this is an mmorpg and all, but this stuff has been fully explored for about a decade. There are some good additions like the way the quests affect the map to show you where to go, but not much beyond that. I guess I’m just not feeling like the envelope is being pushed, or even moderately filled.

That being said, I don’t want to completely submarine the game — it has its cool parts, but with so many missing features and lack of polish, this looks like an early beta, not a finished product. I refuse to believe blizzard is the only company who can put together a decent mmo.