Age of Conan gets 'unlimited free trial,' fine print

Well, I do now! Jerk.

Your monitor IS off. That's YOUR phallus you see in its reflection.

Let us not judge trolls by the quality of their trolling, but by the size of their penises.

Where would we be without you and your superior troll phallus spotting skills?

well at least it wasn't so bad now tha they have a new add-on to compensate for the time loss for the glamour of the game: http://bit.ly/age-of-conan-point-of-view

You don't have to smell it, they are shoving it down your throat!

Right? There is definitely that stench...along with troll penis.

Exactly. Joystiq are turning into the biggest trolls in the gaming industry. If you guys can't think of anything good to say, why not close the door to moms basement and shut the fuck up for a change.

Yeah, the last paragraph made me LOL, but it is pretty harsh. I mean, they're giving away a free trial and somehow this is a bad thing?

Lesson Learned From Joystiq: If someone gives you free stuff, they are desperate.

And so I will avoid all free DLC, expansion packs, content, trials, etc. : )

I'm not so much an AoC hater as someone that was very disappointed. I played AoC for a while from launch and was really disheartened by what I experienced. I was hoping for a more mature MMO, not just because of the 18+ish content (read: Boobs), but because of the source material that FunCom was trying to create an online world from.

What I found instead was a game that was just more of the same of what was already out there, MMORPG-wise, just with a Conan skin (read: Boobs). I wasn't expecting a reinventing of the wheel, but my hopes were high for a game comming from the company that brought me many happy times in Anarchy Online and constantly impressed me with what it did with that game (AO) to both allow, support, and encourage its players to really drive the game's content.

I'll admit that I didn't stick around long enough to witness some of these changes that people have mentioned are improving this game. I think I'm just burnt out on MMOs in general and do not wish to be constantly disappointed by the constant stream of them that seem to be getting churned out by the dozen lately. (Many of them WoW clones)

I may have some time during my winter break from school to give this free trial a go for the hell of it. But at the moment, I'm really just keeping my eye on what BioWare is doing with Star Wars: The Old Republic and I'm REALLY just holding my breath for someone to make an honest effort to bring the Firefly and/or Battlestar Galactica (BSG 75) universe(s) to us as an MMORPG. =D

Team Fortress 2 must be a giant cry for attention then. D:

@RKN: Yeah, I should probably uninstall TF2 and boycott Valve for daring to try to give me free content.

All sarcasm aside, of course it's a "cry for attention" or whatever. If the game isn't doing well sales they are going to try and entice people to play it. What should they do just say "Ah well the game is kinda crappy. Lets either keep doing the same thing that we're doing or just close it down totally"? Of course they are going to try and generate sales.
I mean, however you feel about the game, offering a free trial for 20 levels is a pretty interesting thing imo. It gives you a little taste of the game, longer than those short 10-14 day trials.

Also it's not really THAT bad from what I played of it. I've played much, much worse games. It's just "eh".

Their writers are so punny!

Don't be fooled after level 20 the game gets much worse.

After level 20, the game loses full voice acting (it's still there for some quests) and your Destiny Quest storyline progresses slower than on Tortage (where it once got a new quest every 2-3 levels, now you get one every 10-20). That's it. Contrary to popular belief, most of Tortage is daylight quests, which are exactly like the rest of the game.

For that trade-off you get large, beautiful zones which make Tortage seem tiny in comparison, the border kingdom castle sieges, and a lot of great dungeons and raids. Hardly what someone would call "much worse".

Well, unless you're a blogger looking for something snarky to say. I can only hope that Dante's Inferno and Age of Conan cross promote at some point. Most of the world's video game bloggers should choke to death in a rage of righteous indignation, leaving the world's blogs open to be repopulated by Justin and Ludwig's glorious love childs.

I don't know what the top listed MMOs are out there, but I'm pretty sure AoC doesn't sit at number 2 under WoW. Lets face it. There's World of Warcraft and then there's everyone else.

Warhammer probably has a bigger following than Age of Conan. I prefer Lord of the Rings Online. I know it has a decent following. Probably not much more, or maybe a little more than AoC. Its all scraps from the Warcraft table.

I want Age of Conan to be successful, but its still not all that consistent. It has a lot of content up front, a decent amount near the end, but I found the middle to be dull and lifeless. Much is the same problem with Aion. Many MMO companies get their product out and add content as they go to flesh it out.

Griefers? You do know that the vast majority of AoC servers are PvE, right?

And seriously, a hipster conspiracy? If you've run out of anything relevant to say and just want to troll the thread, perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere. I'm sure there are people waiting to hear more about Medicare death panels.

On Tortage island you have a linear path to the town, and then it's a normal quest hub. When you leave Tortage, you get sent to your starting city, which is also a normal quest hub. And yet you found this challenging to navigate?

Yet again, as I seem to have to repeat this in every Age of Conan thread as they get filled with misinformation, the world of Tortage in the daytime is exactly like the world outside of Tortage, minus the full voice acting. If you're so married to the few singleplayer quests that you can't live without them, maybe an MMO isn't for you.

The normal quest outside of Tortage is fine. But you have to level up with a bunch of random quests that aren't very fun nor offer much XP to level up with. I've played other MMOs, and currently play one. But the difference is that they have much more consistency than this one.

Conan set out to show itself different than other MMOs. In that it has both succeeded and failed. Unfortunately it is failing in place that matters most to me in a game. Fun.

The music is amazing. The graphics are fine, unless you have a ridiculously powerful computer to run things at full boar. The voice acting is fine, but again, I found it deceiving in the manner in which the frontload the game with ALL voice acting and then as soon as you leave Totage its a different game 'experience'.

Leaving my original point being that the first 20 levels that people would 'demo' would be misleading as to how the rest of the game will be.

I'll agree with you there Grant. Everyone who has ever been curious about the game should go ahead and give it a try. Just note three things as I've stated in another post.

First, the game past level 20 (where you'd actually pay money to play) is not the same experience. Two, prepare your computer for about 15-20 GB of hard drive space to be taken up. And three, hope you have a good graphics card and lots of RAM because this game will eat it up.