Choose My Adventure: Finding frustrations in Age of Conan

If that headline wasn’t a big enough clue, then let me just go ahead and reaffirm: This week, life in Age of Conan was not easy.

The whole thing started off pretty placid in general. Things weren’t exactly overwhelming, but they also weren’t really challenging either, so I was kind of left to believe I could go through the motions as I gathered up day quests to level up. Unfortunately, my lowered guard saw me get kind of smacked in the mouth.

First off, the quests that I was taking up were pretty routine activities that didn’t bring me a particularly large reason to remain vigilant. A few places that I’ve been to before were revisited, some more enemies were taken down, some items were collected. I even returned to that location in White Sands with the high-level crocodiles surrounding the rowboat in order to complete a quest objective – only this time I was at even level. Finally, I would have my revenge!

Well, not exactly. See, this is where the problems first started to show up. It seemed like it was taking me a whole lot longer to kill enemies, even when I was swinging at the open holes in their defenses. I would win out for the most part, but fights were almost always a near thing, and if there were more than two foes attacking me, it was probably curtains. There were more than a couple of times when I had to run away because the whole stinking animal kingdom was attacking me. And friends, let me tell you, for some reason animal mobs have extremely long leashes.

Still, I had managed to generally persevere through the quests I was given until I was at a point when I could continue the main story. It was at about this time that I realized that I had a couple of toggles I could have been using pretty much this whole time, if not fairly recently.

See, the skills that you learn just sort of appear and populate the hotbar, but not all of them did so, and at a certain point the buttons that I normally pressed were flooded with things I had to remove because they weren’t associated with my two-handed sword. It was then that I realized there was an Abilities tab… that had a couple of toggles that would either ramp up my crit or apply a chance at self-heals on damage.

I don’t want to say that these were game-changing, but it definitely did seem to solve some of my problems in feeling a bit too squishy. My Barbarian still didn’t feel like an unstoppable force of unhinged steel chaos, but at least it seemed like I could stand up to fights a little more.

A few humdrum quests later and i had to once again level up in order to finish the main story arc in Tortage, so it was back to the day quest grind. And that took me to the Acheronian Ruins.

This place very nearly defeated my will to play this game. It’s another open field map much like White Sands is, only here there are a bunch of cultists or whatever. I don’t really care who they were; all I cared about is how densely packed every mob group was. And that presented a problem when it came to engaging enemies, since I didn’t really have an ability to pull foes in or close to melee distance, meaning I had to sheepishly creep up and wait for senpai to notice me before attacking.

Most of the time this tactic worked, but there would be some times when I would manage to reel in two full groups of enemies. And this kept happening over and over and over again in the Ruins. Worse yet, by the time I was back to where I died, most of the mobs I had cut through previously had already respawned. Except, of course, for the quest step that needed me to defeat one very specific named mob; that guy took his sweet time respawning, but boy did all of the other packs of trash surrounding his spawn point want to show up to party a lot.

For a while, the cycle of death repeated itself, and every time I questioned why this was happening. I was about three levels over these foes at some point, and I had learned to place and use a toggle buff, so what the hell was going wrong? Why did I keep falling over so much? And why was this series of quests constantly taking me deeper and deeper into this hellish nightmare?

After a while, I stepped away from the quest chain, tried another couple, but came away feeling pretty unrewarded. The XP earnings weren’t particularly good since most of those quests were lower level (presumably, since I have no way of knowing what level a quest is as far as I could tell). It came to a point where I felt compelled to see this annoying quest chain through. I started thinking about it like the old ak’ab fights in TSW – a sort of proving ground to know if you really wanted to play this game or not.

I beat the freaking ak’ab. I sure as hell would beat these cultists.

Luckily for me, after some time away to cool down and do other things, I came back at a point when there were other people running around this area completing quests. I even was picked up to do some group stuff by someone for a brief moment, which was nice because I got to play with other people at last. By the time I got to the quest step where I had to break a bunch of spooky stones for reasons, I was following someone who had an absolute army of minions at his beck and call. So technically I won, but not really. It sure didn’t feel like a victory, anyway.

However, I am happy to report that all of this toil got me to a point where I could get off of Tortage and start in on the assignment that the poll voting told me to do: to see whether the game does indeed take a nosedive. But I don’t know that it could get any worse than it already has. I am genuinely frustrated with how this has all played out, but I’m not going to ignore the task assigned to me and walk away. Age of Conan cannot be the game that beats me down.

So as you might expect, that means polling for this game is effectively shut down as I explore this new area that’s open to me. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a poll choice this time around because we have to now decide on which direction to head towards for next month. And my idea is to peek in on some rogue servers and emulators for the next series of adventures.

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As usual, polling closes at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 23rd. For now, I am walking away from this one before I just get hyper frustrated, then I’ll report in with my general thoughts. Spoiler warning: They’re probably not going to be very nice unless things turn around quickly.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.