It’s day four in Age of Conan which means that today was the first official day of release.  Graev and I spent the day questing, questing, and yeah more questing.  We logged in this morning at level 26/27 and decided to finish off all of our quests in The Wilds.  We achieved our goal and obtained level 32/33 tonight which is not bad by our standards.  The levels are coming in very quickly and until now we have felt that there are tons of quests and things to do.  We’ve made a couple observations however and I want to share those with you all.

First of all the questing slows down at about 34.  Levels 20-34 were overflowing with quests and things to do but now it feels like we have reached a void or fallen into a rut because the next questing areas do not really begin until closer to 40.  We’ve asked around and done a bit of searching ourselves and everywhere we turn we reach to same answer: Go do the other 20-34 areas (we did Aquilonias, so we would have to go do Stygia’s or Cimmeria’s).  Ouch.  Gray/green quests to progress?  There has to be a better way.  Any advice anyone?

Our second observation today was that the questing is actually getting very boring.  It’s been fun until now and nothing has really changed, but we’ve come to that always scary realization that this is it.  The quests are starting to become monotonous and repetitive.   That ‘lackluster’ feeling is starting to set in.  We actually logged off this evening because we both turned to eachother  at the same time (literally, I’m not saying this for dramatic effect) and said “You want to log off?  I’m bored.”

We’ve both decided that we’re still, overall, having a decent time in the game.  We’re going to continue on and hope that either the questing picks up, regains that momentum and sense of fun, or that we find some other change of pace.  That’s really what it boils down to for us.  The game’s pacing is wonky right now.

We’re psyched to have our first Age of Conan Podcast up! We’ve been spending a lot of time the past few days playing the early head start and if not for the servers being down today for five hours we probably would have come up with an excuse to delay the podcast even longer. (Too subtle?) In other words, We like the game!

We tackle several topics in our first episode:

• Tortage (We close the door on this topic finally!)
• What classes did we choose?
• Aquilonia’s Main City: Old Tarantia
• The Wilds and Tesso: Aquilonia’s first questing region
• The Maze Dungeon of The Wilds
• Quests in general and our thoughts on them.
• Listener Mail - We take your questions and comments and dive in head first here on our show.

We hope you enjoy! As we said in the podcast if you have any comments, questions, or want to submit Listener Mail feel free to email us or leave a comment here.

As always the podcast is available for your listening pleasure right here on our website at the top of our main menu. (and hopefully iTunes has it up… *shakes fist*)

Here are some screenshots from The Wilds, The Maze, and Tesso. They’re not “high res” or anything but they give you a good idea of what the game looks like at 1680×1050 on just below medium settings. When we get our comps upgraded in about a week we’ll post some much better shots.

We’re out of Tortage and that’s all that matters.  That had to be the longest, most tedious, horrific introductory feeling newbie area ever made!  Okay, it wasn’t ALL bad.  The Acheronian Ruins were good fun but the Underhalls, White Sands, and running back and forth and back and forth and back and AHHHH!!!! Sorry, short lapse of sanity there.  The questing in Tortage is horrible.  We simply spent more time running back and forth than we did killing.  Had we sat in one spot and just killed mobs we would have been out of Tortage in a few hours instead of a day and a half.  We’ll talk more about this in tomorrow’s podcast* and give you guys a bit of info on what parts we thought were the most well done.

Since my ToS is a Stygian and Graev’s Guardian is a Aquilonian (and I hate Cimmeria) we had two options for “starting areas” (read: 20+).  We decided on Aquilonia  because I had already seen a little bit of Stygia in beta and completely missed Aquilonia.  First impressions of Aquilonia = It’s HUGE!  It’s by far the biggest of the cities and it’s fantastic looking.  We spent about an hour and a half running around gathering up all the quests we could find and completing what felt like a dozen within the city walls alone.  Although the city is beautiful and a breath of fresh air compared to Tortage, it still felt like a prison after we had been inside the walls for an hour running back and forth and — you get the idea.

Before we logged off for a break (possibly for the night) we made it out to “The Wilds”.  *breathes deep*  Freedom.  The open world, or at least as close to open as it gets in AoC, at last!  This is when the game begins.  This is the first true step into Hyboria.

* We have been receiving a lot of emails/IM’s/in-game messages asking when we will be podcasting.  It was supposed to be today but I was gone for 4 hours this afternoon basically killing any chance of recording the podcast.  It will be out tomorrow and should have lots of information including answers to the reader mail.

Day 1 in Age of Conan has come to an end. We’re happy with our progress so far finishing the day at level 17 and almost ready to finally leave Tortage behind. It’s late here and we’re heading off to get some much needed sleep, but we wanted to give you guys a quick rundown of how the day went.

We began by doing all the Tortage night time quests that we could possibly do until about level 13. It took us what felt like forever to finally meet back up in the real world. Ugh! Those single-player quests are great for story but really lowsy when you’re playing with someone else. The multi-player portion of Tortage isn’t great, but it’s definitely better.

LOADS of quests. We spent easily 30 minutes roaming Tortage at level 13 picking up every single quest and listening to all the NPC dialog. Graev started losing patience at the end and said to me “just tell me what they’re about”. *slaps Graev* You think I’m listening to all the npc psycho babble alone?! Sheesh.

We spent the remainder of our night in White Sands knocking out a dozen or so quests and gaining 4-5 levels easily putting us at 17 just about to hit 18. We still have so many quests left including the last part of the main story! We have yet to even touch the Underhalls or Acheronian Ruins. There is simply too much to do — but you won’t hear us complaining.

Alrighty, I’m barely keeping my eyes open. Here are a few screenshots of our adventures tonight. We’ll be taking loads more. Look for our podcast tomorrow because we’ll be giving a much more detailed explanation of our impressions and experiences in Age of Conan.

We decided to join the party and create characters on the Wiccana server in Age of Conan.  Our names in-game are (you guessed it) Keen and Graev.

Keen the Stygian Tempest of Set

Graev the Aquilonian (or Cimmerian… lol he forgets) Guardian.

We decided this team would best fit our style of being completely self dependent if necessary.

If you’re on the Wiccana server let us know!  We want to network with as many people as we possibly can because, let’s face it, mmorpgs are boring without friends and community.

And uh, LFGuild!

I had the pleasure of guest co-hosting the Wife-aggro Podcast this week with Sethanon.   We tackle some great topics like Blizzcon, Classic rule-set servers, NPD’s top 5 mmo list, and of course Age of Conan.

Definitely check out Wife-aggro.com and specifically podcast #52!  It’s a fantastic Podcast and I highly recommend it.

Thanks to Sethanon for having me.

Lionhead Studios makes some fantastic games. Both Graev and I are big fans of the Black & White and Fable games. Graev was the first of us to discover both the original B&W and Fable back when they were in development years ago. He showed them to me and I’ve been hypnotized ever since. We’ve had a lot of open gaming time lately which allowed us to revisit a few old favorites. I have gone back and played through B&W2 and Graev went for Fable: The Lost Chapters since Fable 2 is coming up here soon.

Black & White 2 is a fantastic game. I love it a lot more than the original but I think Graev still clings to the old ways of creature development. Black & White 2 is a game of choices. You are a god to a tribe of people and their entire fate is in your hands. Basically you can be good or evil and every action you take has a direct and even visible effect on the land and your people. I love the game because the pacing is completely under my control. I can take hours building and perfecting my city and then lay siege to the enemy or I can focus strictly on sieging and taking over enemy tribes. Playing god never gets old. Telling my people who does which jobs like farming, foresting, building, or even breeding can be a lot of fun in a weird sort of way. There’s also the creature who can learn strategies, master new abilities and skills, lead armies into battle, harvest, eat people (my favorite) and poop - yes, poop.

I’ve had a lot of fun replaying through and could not pin myself down as good or evil, so I made a save file for both! I have a Monkey who is good and a Tiger who is evil. My Tiger loves to eat villagers, poop in their grain, and slaughter platoons of enemy soldiers. My Monkey loves to dance and entertain, water my crops, and build stuff. I find the game much harder to be good because raising the appeal of my city can be tough and pleasing everyone is tiring.  Being evil is a lot easier since I don’t have to worry about the needs of my people; I just force them all to breed me an army and live in skyscraper slums… mwahahaha!

It’s lots of fun and I hope Lionhead makes a B&W3.

Graev has been playing through Fable since Fable 2 is coming soon. Fable was originally a let down for me in some ways because, quite honestly, it failed to deliver on what it promised. It was and is still a great game, but it will always have this shadow lingering overhead constantly reminding everyone of what it could have been. Graev is playing through as evil this time around at a very casual pace and he says he’s enjoying the game a lot, even though it’s like his 5th time playing.  Below is a picture of his character progressing from an innocent farm boy to an ego-maniacal goat man or sorts.

We’re both ecstatic about Fable 2. Peter Molyneux is going to deliver this time, we know it. All the videos being shown are of actual gameplay and they’re literally showing us footage of what they’re promising this time. With co-op play and a world supposedly 20-30x the size of the original game… mmmm Fable goodness. We can’t wait!

Lionhead Studios definitely ranks up there in our list of favorite developers.  Great games!

The server list for Age of Conan is posted. Let the server choosing commence! We still have no idea which one we’re going to pick. We’ve narrowed it down to PvE which, as you can see, isn’t really narrowed much at all.

US Servers (Early Access 17th of May)

PvE Servers

*Set
*Dagoth
*Zug
*Omm
*Derketo
*Thog
*Wiccana
*Gwahlur (recommended Oceanic)
*Anu

PvP Servers

*Tyranny
*Bane
*Deathwisper
*Bloodspire (recommended Oceanic)
*Doomsayer

RP-PvP Server

*Cimmeria

We’ll probably end up playing on one of the more populated servers. Perhaps one that some of our friends choose.

[Thanks to Daedren and others for the heads up!]