Just like I'd done with WoW a few years back, I've intentionally skipped the Beta opportunities with Age of Conan. These are two games with so much potential that I don't wish to ruin my experience testing a beta that can be wildly different from the full game.

I've played enough betas (especially MMO betas: Ultima Online, Everquest, Guild Wars, etc.) to expect frustrations and disappointments that can all be avoided with a bit of patience for the actual game.

As expected, I'm seeing a variety of first impressions from the current 'Open' Beta of Age of Conan, that's very reminiscent of beta info leaked from World of Warcraft before its initial release. None of those reviews are fair of course, whether glowing praise or doom and gloom. You just cannot rate a game based upon its beta, no matter how close to release it is. At the most, you can get a general impression of gameplay.

The WoW comparison:

If WoW had to survive on the merits of its release (let alone beta), it would have failed miserably. Penny Arcade actually withdrew their 2004 Game of the Year award due to WoW's lack of server stability. The real test that Blizzard passed was in halting the game sales (yeah, they did that), refunding time to players and addressing the stability issue, although it took them months. At the time, WoW had sold just over 600,000 copies of the game, which was a great achievement but a far cry from the millions they have now.

As a player in 2004, I was thrilled to be playing WoW. I rarely commented on the bugs & problems (first day: fell out of the world, got stuck numerously in flower-picking pose, disconnected from server continuously) since I had expected them. I expect Age of Conan to have its share of issues too, in fact I'd assume more, it's designed to a much higher standard of visuals compared to WoW (which was hardly state of the art in 2004, let alone now).

The real test for any MMORPG if you ask me, is twofold:

• Is the gameplay fun? This is subjective of course. What's fun for me isn't necessarily for you, but there are some commonalities to mass-market fun. WoW certainly meets most player's standards, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. Age of Conan's PvP beta gained some glowing reviews, though personally I'm more interested in PvE fun so I'll just have to wait to see, but what I've seen during development looks good and the RPG world certainly suits me.
• Are they a standup company? If there are problems, will they fix it? Or will they just cave, count their losses and dump the whole thing? I don't think I need to give examples of companies that are not what I'd consider standup in the MMORPG field, some of them are notorious and have either outright mismanaged their game developments or have let good games die on the vine.

  Blizzard is clearly a standup MMORPG company, they pulled their socks up when they needed to. I'd say Funcom's experience with Anarchy Online shows they are legit and worthy of faith too.

Funcom doesn't want a repeat of their nearly disastrous Anarchy Online launch. Proof that they're working to avoid that is in their current beta, which is clearly a stress test complete with heavy-duty debugging software. The downside is the impression they're leaving on the beta-testers while they try to push the client and servers to the breaking point, because as expected, things are breaking. That's the nature of the beast.

I'm pretty stoked with the pending release of Age of Conan, from what I've seen this game will suit me better than any that have come previously. I'm really looking forward to watching the game mature as it goes along.

Hell, I'll just be thrilled to play a fantasy MMORPG with no elves!