This write-up ended up being way more gigantically huge than I expected, so I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!
The Storytelling
LotRO, for everything I disliked about it, had some pretty good storytelling for the storyline quests at least (the rest of the quests were...uninspired). The storyline quests in that game featured some well-narrated voice overs and some truly epic-feeling instances that were woven in pretty well with the Middle Earth stories we all know and love. Time has robbed me of specific examples, but you generally spent a lot of time clearing the way for the Fellowship or blocking the way of the unrelenting evildoers. I never saw the end of the game (too boring, sorry), but the storyline was the one shining gem amidst a fairly mediocre and redundant game, IMO.
Age of Conan seems to take this the next step--it pushes all the normal MMO mechanics we, um, "know and love" and weaves them into a story with all of the epic trappings befitting the Conan license. There's a great evil (check), it threatens all of existance (check), there needs to be a hero to deal with it (check), and that hero is you! (check) Ok, so we've got the basics covered; it doesn't really deviate at all from any epic fantasy plot. (cue writers)
So why can you res when you die? They go to great pains to explain this! It's worked into the story! I know, nuts, isn't it? If you're such a badass, why are you getting worked by low level thugs? They explain that too! Inside the fictional framework they've put in place, it even makes sense in a fantasy-plot-logic kind of way. That's a ballsy move. They could have left all of that unsaid like every other MMO I've played to date, but they didn't. The only glaring hole they left that I noticed is that everyone's a hero but, ya know, they did so well with the rest of it that I'll spot 'em that one.
The storyline quests were, in fact, the one part of the game that I really looked forward to. I was sad that post noobalicious island, there's only a handful of them and they're spaced pretty far apart.
The Voiceovers
I'm a sucker for voice overs; I don't know why. For the vast majority of games to date, they're awful. Some of my favorite games, in fact, have crappy voice overs (Spellforce was all over the map, the sequel was not much better, and many of Vanguard's voice overs were downright cringeworthy). It doesn't take much to come up with a list of games with crappy voice overs (don't even get me started on CivRev or EQ2) but coming up with the opposite list is way harder. Among the tops, IMO, are Mechwarrior IV: Mercenaries, Supreme Commander + expansion, and now, Age of Conan.
The entirety of the dialog is voiced over for the intro island (1-20). All of the storyline quests are voiced over. While some of them are mediocre, some of them are quite excellent. In particular, Rhiderch, your spiritual guide through most of the early parts past the intro, is quite well played, in addition to Turoch, Laranga, and Cassilda in the intro. In fact, Rhiderch has a set of dialog after you finish the last part of the quest at 80 for no other reason than story. The kicker? This game is not made where English is a first language! I'd love to know how the other language versions of the voiceovers are.
The Combat System
Admittedly, the combo system isn't what I was expecting, but that's their fault for picking terminology from a different genre. You basically get three swings to start with (left, middle, right) and add two more at a later level (lower left, lower right). To go with that, there's a set of shields on your opponent signifying where their defense is. Hitting a heavily shielded direction means you do a heck of a lot less damage so you're rewarded for hitting places where your opponent's defense isn't. To that end, there's no auto-attack. None. Every strike your character does is more or less because you hit a button to create that action.
A combo is just a starter with a string of attacks in a given sequence that, when uninterrupted, yields a multi-part hit at the end usually doing high damage and looking really cool. These start low (one move) and end very high (four moves). It's sometimes tricky landing a combo on a moving target especially when it's a four move job but it's not impossible. I'd expected a more freeform thing where you stick moves together and they speed up or slow down or have other bonuses/penalties but that's just my fighting game background shining through, I guess.
The thing I like most about the combat system in AoC is that you can't phone it in. You have to be aware and awake and mashing away at the right buttons at the right time. If you're not, you're probably not going to survive anything more than the most trivial of encounters. It's even more important when grouping since no character has even footing with any of the epic level mobs (elites from WoW).
The Art
The game looks really good. If you've got enough machine to do so, crank everything up as far as you can for the love of pixels. The environments are excellent. The character models are excellent. The weapon models are excellent. Normally I don't care terribly much about such things but this game looks really good. Just look at the screenshots.
