Sakkara, Nelg and myself were spoiled with the clean pre-order launch of WAR but at release things haven't been as great. Lurch ended up with a faulty install disc (the 2nd disc to be specific), which was surprising because I thought this problem was limited to the European release of the game, but now I'm hearing from other locals with the same frustration.

It's not a huge deal, a returned or borrowed disc and the game is up and running fairly quick, but that's easy for me to say since I didn't experience this problem myself.

My first day in WAR was great. I'd expected population-related problems, but that just didn't happen on our server. It was well populated for both sides, I never encountered any login queues (Michelle did, but it was less than a minute long). Public Quests were well attended and anytime we wanted to play a Scenario it would start almost right away.

Some of the problems that nagged the Open Beta had evaporated too, it was far less laggy for us, although there were still some disconcerting moments of high latency and WAR still doesn't handle that well. Framerate was all over the place, but that was largely due to the high numbers of players running around.

Game? Great

Michelle had the day off, so it was perfect for an epic gaming session. Our /played time is already scary. Her Witch Elf is Rank 12 and my Squig Herder is Rank 9. Both of us ended our day still in Tier 1 so we can start fresh in the next tier.

Michelle likens the Witch Elf to her WoW Druid's Cat form, which makes a good deal of sense with the Witch Elf being a sort of rogue archetype. I found the Squig Herder has a few unique abilities but pet AI in both pathing and controls response is still poor, my Squig could use some love.

Public Quests were a hoot, although some are definitely better than others. A few players whined about loot, and some were overly competitive (healers happy to let others die, DPS grabbing mobs that they shouldn't, etc.), but for the most part I was thrilled with the cooperative nature of the game.

Questing is fun but standard faire, I'd seen it during Open Beta and already decided that I liked the Greenskin storyline the best.

Open Groups work really well, I was a sceptic and now a complete fan of the system WAR has developed. It could use some tweaking, there's no listing for the group's intent and some players have a tendency to join then wander off while still grouped, but overall the Open Groups combined with Public Quests are a new level of convenience that coaxes even the most insular players (that's me) into participating.

Players? Lots, but some suck

The only serious disappointments so far have come from what we've seen of the playerbase.

Michelle & I witnessed numerous botting and boxing attempts, especially in the Scenarios and RvR where some players clearly intend to farm for exp + renown with multiple characters at a time. The worst situation was when we were faced by a well-coordinated premade, but on our own side almost our entire team barely wandered from the starting mound to attack: The score ended at 500 to 1 as five of us futilely tried to fend off the enemy on our own.

I'm starting to really loathe boxers. They're really obvious right now while they try to get their setups working well with WAR, and it seems they're commonplace. I'm hoping these are just spillovers from WoW and they'll get bored with WAR's lack of raiding, but the mechanics of WAR are particularly open to being exploited this way. I don't automatically consider boxing an exploit, but I'm concerned we're going to end up playing alongside a bunch of players with scripted healers behind them and that's definitely an upset to the balance of the game.

The bots and semi-bots didn't spoil much of our fun however, despite being noticeable they were a minority and the sheer joy of the rest of the game offset their annoyance anyway.

Co-op, Co-op, Co-op!

As I stressed earlier, the cooperative nature of the game won out. With the many Public Quests, ample Scenarios and Open Grouping, it's more co-op than I've seen in any MMORPG before. City of Heroes for instance has great teamwork, but a lack of things for those teams to do. WoW is far too PvE-competitive these days for my taste and I hate what it's done to the WoW playerbase.

I'm a huge Co-op nut, so this is big for me.

RvR works well, the large zergs are the norm, but we found that a small strike team can do wonders. RvR so far is oddly the least coordinated part of the game, but I suspect that's entirely because Tier 1 RvR lacks keeps and siege engines, it's essentially a slower version of the Scenarios.

This game is working for me, even though it's missing a lot of features I'd usually prefer. It just goes to show what good solid gameplay can do.

I'll post more info tomorrow, but for now here are some quick screenshots of my intro to Age of Conan. No action shots here, this is strictly social stuff for starters. =)

Creating my first character in Age of Conan, an Aquilonian Guardian ready for some polearm action.

Nelg and Narkis hang out in Tortage.

When Michelle said she was going to roleplay a flaming male Priest of Mitra, I was pretty sure she could pull it off, but she's doing it better than I imagined.

Narkis here would look perfectly at home at the PumpJack.

Our first encounter with a GM was an early one, just inside the gates of Tortage this 9foot monolith was standing.

Nelg cries, realizing already on his first day, that at level 10 he has no hope of ever matching the awesomeness of the 9ft GM.

I took some video too, also character-centric, but I'll upload that later.

I've spent most of the first hour at the character creation screens, so it's really my first two minutes with the actual game. All I've got to say so far is I think Funcom underestimated demand for Age of Conan. The servers seem very crowded, or at least the only RP PvP server is.

They've already added two PvP servers, I think there will be more soon. I noticed the Deathwisper server also maxed out, which is expected because a few large PvP guilds had announced they would be headed there.

So far, in the miniscule time since clicking the login button, it's reminiscent of most MMORPG launches.

Update: It looks like there's another patch before launch, so they've pushed the official launch time back to ~1pm Pacific (8pm GMT).

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Age of Conan launches today and so far the 'early access' client has already received a number of patches over the past few days. This is actually how I prefer it, I'd rather a lot of frequent small patches than the less often monolithic patch.

I know most people hate the delays, regardless of how small, but it seems far less problematic. I hope Funcom keeps it going this way, although for them it will probably be easier to wait for the larger content patches and do it all at once. That's what most players expect anyway.

I almost missed this, but Flying Lab Software have announced a release date for Pirates of the Burning Sea: January 22nd.

It's good to see it come so soon. Considering the rumours towards Warhammer's potential delay, perhaps spring 2008 won't be so crowded for MMO releases after all and we'll see more staggered releases than expected.

Congrats to the Pirates of the Burning Sea crew, after 6 years of development I'm sure they're very excited to see their launch on the horizon. Shouting out a hearty Arrrrr!