"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"

I picked up Age of Conan two weeks ago and in this time I have played much of it. Originally I only had a passing interest in the game but thanks to my friend Erik talking it up to great extent I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did, as the game is extremely fun.

This is probably the only MMO I've played where I feel like the NPCs are actual characters in the world, not just faceless quest givers. I know a few of my friends have chosen to completely ignore the conversations and storyline, but my god man... how can you? I mean, first off there's this whole overarching storyline with your character as the focal point (all of these "destiny quests" are single player), then there are side stories like the battle between the Cimmerians and the Vanir that I've been taking part of the entire time I've been off the noob island of Tortage. Here we have a town being ravaged by red-haired marauders coming down from the mountains; the town chieftan is a coward who refuses to send any men to fight, insisting that if he spares anyone to send out to fight back, that they will leave the settlement undefended and the Vanir can juts come and take everyone out. Everyone in the town believes this man is wrong but they don't dare speak out against him out of fear of death. However, this hasn't stopped a few people from fighting back, as there are a few renegades led by a man named Kern Wolfeye that have left the village altogether to take the fight to the Vanir and try to drive them back. So my character, a Cimmerian himself, has taken it upon himself to assist Kern and his men in sending the Vanir away once and for all!

Okay, obviously we're not talking about some greatly original story here, but the characters are solid and memorable... so far. I have heard horror stories about this game past level 50. And apparently there is literally zero endgame content up right now, so the crazies out there with no life that have already hit level 80 are doing nothing but complaining on the official forums. Honestly, this isn't surprising; its a brand freaking new MMO, even everyone's favorite WoW had some serious issues for the first few months after it was released. Hell, they didn't get the UI right until some time within the past year.

So Age of Conan is fun in PvE, absolutely. Grouping is damn fun as well, and I just found out last night that my Conquerer class has some passive ability to heal and rez teammates as long as I'm not tanking. Combine that with my shouts, auras and AoE attacks and I'm pretty happy with the Conquerer. I am getting scared at the fact that I am running out of quests in my current area, however, as the next closest one is a 40-60 zone and I'm only at 32. I don't want to have to travel to a different continent just yet, but its looking like I might have to.

PvP is another story. It took me a while to realize this, but the PvP in this game right now is garbage. The super cool 3-point guard stuff that you need to deal with vs the NPCs doesn't really come into effect in PvP because there is no incentive to shift your guard at all. Combine this with some seriously unbalanced classes and realize the only effective skills in PvP are stuns and knockdowns and you have a recipe for a piece of shit. It just seems like all of the class balance went towards PvE, I seriously don't think anyone ever tested PvP. Of course, its still early in the game's lifecycle so I'm sure this stuff will be fixed eventually, but my god its annoying to be on a PvP server right now, especially one where the SA goons are running rampant.