HANDS ON GUIDE

7 – Squashing bugs

Can the mighty Conan be felled by a bug? Of course, especially when he's in an MMO

Let’s not pull any punches here: Age of Conan is a brand new MMO and not everything is working quite as planned. The forums are awash with players raging about parts of the game that aren't working properly. At the time of writing, the item banks are offline until the developers iron out potential exploits with the system. A few missions are also bugged, and Funcom has a long list of important game features that need fixing.

Veterans of past MMO launches will probably be used to the early days being like a beta test, and people’s perception of how buggy a game is depends on their past experiences. Players who joined World of Warcraft of Ultima Online late will not be playing the same game as someone who was there at the start. These titles (and in fact, every multiplayer game) all have bugs at the beginning. Players who have never tried an MMORPG before might be used to FPS or strategy games that doesn’t have glaring errors, or missions that don’t work properly. These games are very different to MMO titles - they simply aren’t as big, which means less ways they can break.

With this in mind, our last piece of advice for players is to expect frustrating bugs. The node that hosts your instance will certainly crash at some point, you will be randomly kicked out of the game and you might find missions impossible to complete. If you are having fun in Age of Conan, these problems are easier to live with, even if it takes an age to keep restarting the client. If the opposite is true then perhaps it might be worth waiting for Funcom to iron out the bugs.

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