Why Age of Conan sucks

I wanted to like Age of Conan, I really did. I tried, twice. World of Warcraft has become kinda boring for me, and while I'm sure that the next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King will have me sucked in once again, it would have been nice to have something else to keep me entertained until then.

I think my problem with AoC isn't so much that "it's not WoW", but more that... well, unless you can come up with something much better, then it should be as WoW-like as possible: surely that's your target market! For example: the chat system is awkward, the friends system is awkward... It all makes me feel that they never actually used it themselves.

To take a simple example: they use forward-slash (/) for commands, just like WoW, but in WoW you can just type a forward-slash to open up the chat window and keep typing, it's all automatic. In AoC, forward-slash is bound to some other action, so you always have to press enter first to open up the chat box. I've lost count of the number of times I've forgotten to do this and had to re-enter my command, and it quickly becomes frustrating.

Another simple example is key bindings: there is no excuse here at all to not have the default keys set up the same as WoW. Key bindings are instinctive, and are often used without thinking, so why on earth are the strafe keys bound to Z and C instead of Q and E? A sure-fire way to annoy any WoW converts is to have them perform random actions when they are trying to do something else... and even when I tried to fix it using the key binding UI, my changes wouldn't save.

That brings me to another point... AoC is probably the buggiest game I have ever played. For a long time after I installed it, I just couldn't get textures to work. Everything else was fine, but all the 3D models has a sort of chess-board black and white pattern on them. I would love to tell you how I managed to fix this, but in the end what happened was the game crashed and burned, and when I restarted it had magically fixed itself!

There are lots of things that seem completely overcomplicated, I suppose because they thought they knew better; again it makes me think they never really tried using it. An example: emotes. Pretty simple, right? In WoW, you can do things like "/smile Kotaro" and it will smile at Kotaro! In AoC, emoting requires some crazy-ass voodoo like /emote social_expression_suspicious, and half the emotes you are used to using in WoW don't work; and I don't mean anything obscure here: there is no smile emote that I can find. Maybe AoC developers just don't like smiling.

Oh, and there is an emote UI, but you first have to find out how the hell to turn it on (press Y, if you're interested), then you have to select from one of about 50 emote categories (happy, ecstatic, sad, melancholy, friendly, etc), guessing which one might contain the action you're looking for, and then, finally, you can wave at someone... about five minutes after they have already run off and found something better to do.

There are other things that are more fundamental, too... like every single character you create starts off in the exact same place with the exact same quests, regardless of class or race. This means there is almost no incentive at all to try any of the other classes, and the game quickly loses any interest.

When you look at it, compared to all the other games, it's pretty amazing what Blizzard managed to create with WoW. Somehow AoC manages to be smaller, more buggy, less immersive and harder to use, when AoC actually had the luxury of having WoW right in front of them to copy. They had a golden opportunity to steal so many WoW players, but in my opinion, they have wasted that chance.