Funcom recently launched their brand new entry into the MMO market, Age of Conan. We got our copy of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures through the mail, along with a limited edition AoC Zboards keyset, and we decided we'd use our first few days as the base for an initial impression.

There will be problems. That is the first and possibly the most important realization you have to come to when you log into a new MMO for the first time. Age of Conan is no different. There are problems and quite a few of them. What you make of them however will depend entirely upon how many times you have played an MMO from launch. I can't deny that Age of Conan has its host of problems but what I can say is that, out of any MMO I have played from launch, Age of Conan has to be one of the least problematic. 1 month ago, in closed beta, I was using one of the most bugged and problematic game clients for any game I have ever played. Age of Conan was resource hungry, crash happy and anything other than user friendly. This was 1 month from launch and as such, fears spread that Age of Conan just wouldn't be ready for launch. It really was a lag-tastic mess that required massive amounts of patching and server downtime. I really did worry. Thankfully, my worry was not needed and my fears were misplaced.