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| From: Eidos
List Price: $79.99
Buy New: $19.99
You Save: $60.00 (75%)
New (25) Used (5) from $19.99
Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 6908
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows Xp
Genre: adventure_games
ESRB: Mature
Media: CD-ROM
Edition: Collector's
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: Windows Vista
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: SAGECPUS01
Model: SAGECPUS01
UPC: 788687100748
EAN: 0788687100748
ASIN: B000V1OUTU
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 55
 Entertaining game, unprofessional service from Amazon. May 23, 2008
Kent D. Kelly (Denver, CO USA)
12 out of 17 found this review helpful
Allow me to preface this by saying that I have been a loyal and steadfast Amazon customer for over 10 years now. Despite a few bumps in the road, they have remained as paragons of exceptional service in virtually all of my dealings.
Until now.
For those who are not aware, Amazon accepted pre-orders of the Collector's Edition for months. And yet, after the projected ship date of the game, I have now received an e-mail stating that they overestimated demand for the game and my order is going to be held indefinitely while they get their act together.
Meanwhile, I'm unable to claim my special items from my Age of Conan account, because I don't have access to the code on the manual. FunCom is e-mailing me to let me know that my account will be suspended for not entering a retail code in short order. The odds that I will receive what I ordered (the CE) diminish by the day, with no follow-up other than a meekly-presented $10 gift certificate and reassurances that this does not happen very often.
The game itself is rather fun. It lacks flavor and is overly instanced for the first 20 levels. It runs clunkily and needs more optimization for anyone not running it on a late 2007-2008 computer. But the atmosphere is great and some of the features are truly innovative.
That, however, is not the point of this review. The point of this review is to warn anyone and everyone who is considering using Amazon as a pre-order service on any item that is either (a) time-sensitive, (b) in limited supply or (c) reliant on physical hardcopy for access to online features. As of now I will be moving all of my future business from Amazon to several of their competitors. Why? Because Amazon messed up, and they had so much information prior to this that they could have easily avoided this entire fiasco with a little more careful planning and a little less greed.
Sadly the old Amazon where I received personalized service is dead. I'm left with a series of form-emails offering me ten bucks to shut my mouth and suck up their mistake as my own. It's beyond disappointing, it's an irrevocable and final severance between myself and a once-great company.
Caveat emptor.
 Wait, or expect frustration May 7, 2008
E. S. Thompson
10 out of 78 found this review helpful
I just cancelled my pre-order of this game. Have been (trying) to play this product in beta and it is the most buggy software I've ever seen. In addition, Funcom is providing 0 technical support at this time. I'll wait until the product has more polish if I purchase it at all.
 This game is NOT ready for prime time... June 6, 2008
Brett W. Lathrope (Cerritos, CA USA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
As beautiful and innovative as this game is, its not ready for prime time, and you should save yourself a tremendous amount of heartburn by waiting a few months until it is.
As of this writing (6/6/2008), these are the problems being experience by myself and the 80+ members of my guild on a regular bases.
1) People can't log into the game at all after the patch (a week ago). They try to play the game, and it just goes to a black screen. Some have used the Windows task manager as a work around to get logged in, but the game is unstable afterwards. FunCom has made no effort to provide a solution, they simply say they are monitoring the reports. There are people who have everything from the minimum configured PC, the the "uber" PCs.
2) Its an instancing game ... that is, x number of people play in a zone, when there's too many, a new instance of the zone is created and players are put there. This approach works only if players can change instances to meet up with friends. Right now, changing instances is broken.
3) For the PvP environments, there are absolutely zero mechanics to deter level 80's from hunting down and harassing level 20s. And because so much is broken at the moment, that's all the 80's have to fill their time with.
4) Zones/Instances just stop responding, and there's nothing you can do but exit the game. Before we could change instances, but since they don't allow that anymore, you have to quit the client.
5) Group mechanics are totally broken. Group members are randomly dropped, or players are not able to see they are in a group when in fact they are. Sometimes they is a simple log-out and back in. But sometimes you have to completely shut down your PC and do a cold boot.
6) The Guild City mechanics don't work, or are turned off by FunCom. The players don't know which because the Developers won't tell us.
7) The crafting system is broken. If you make a crafted item and fit it with a socket, it doesn't match the data structure used by the rest of the inventory system ... so every time you mouse over it, or anything that compares itself to it, the game crashes.
8) Harvesting of resources is broken. Resources are "tier" based and you are required to complete the gathering of one tier before moving to the other ... but the items needed don't spawn the in the game.
9) They have a volunteer GM corps that handles all the petitions for problems in the game. But this corps is under trained, over-worked, and pack a huge attitude towards the players. It can take days to get get a response from a GM to your petition. But the average seems to be between 12 and 16 hours. There are some GMs that are stellar, but the vast majority are rude, short, and usually can't help you with your problem because they don't have the privilages needed. But rather than escalating your petition, they clear it and you have to start all over. If you are offline when they get to your petition, too bad, they clear it anyway and send you a message saying, "Sorry we missed you."
10) This game takes you from level 1 to level 80 fairly rapidly. Even legitimately people can get to 80 in about 3 weeks. This is fine, because the game is about the "end game" not the level grind. The problem is, there's very little content for the 55+ range. What content there is, is so over camped its simply an exercise in frustration to try and get quests done. If their instancing system worked, that would be a partial solution, but it doesn't. There needs to be much more content in the 55+ levels.
11) Quests are broken. You can't complete them, or if you do them with a group, you have to reset the instance and do it over for every member of your party.
12) Bugs in buffs and debuffs that allow exploiters to just grief people while remaining immune. They either stack far beyond what they are supposed to, don't expire when they should ... allowing the player to add another. Or, in the case of a debuff, they won't expire when they are supposed to and you have to log out and back in to clear them.
13) The trading system (Auction House) does work, but its so 1970s by design the Developers should be ashamed. Its not really an auction house, its just a system where you post an item and set a price. It always breaks items you put up for sale ... because if they don't sell and you decide to vendor them instead ... they won't show up in your list of items to sell at at the vendor once they've been listed on the trader.
14) The vendor system that looks like it was a complete "after thought" ... we have a better vendor system in MMO's 12 years ago. Its simply a list of everything in your inventory (except equipped gear) presented in a list. If you accidentally sell the wrong thing, you can "undo". But once you close the vendor, the undo goes away, there is no "oh crap" and going back and getting it. Also, there's no what to flag an item as a "no sell" item, and they all use very common icons ... so you're constantly sorting through your inventory for what you want to sell and what you don't.
15) There is a bug where if a zone crashes, or you are apprenticed when you level ... the next level's (or even the current level's) total experience requirement doubles or triples. And there is currently no fix, and the GM's just tell you to gut it out, because again, they don't have the authority or privileges to fix it.
In the two years that I've had this computer, I'd never seen a blue screen on it. Sure, I'd seen crashes, but I'd never seen a blue screen. I see at least one a day while playing this game. As does viturally everyone else in my guild.
I, like many others, had great hopes for this game, and still do. But right at this moment in time (again 6/6/2008) the game is nothing more than a broken version of "Guild Wars" on steroids.
And unfortunately, we get little from FunCom except the acknowledgement that there are problems in two sentences, and then paragraphs of what they are going to do for us in the future.
So my recommendation to my friends here; Wait for the future before you buy this game. Stay in touch with someone in the game who you can trust, and when they say its actually ready, get it it. If it weren't so broken, it is definately worth playing.
Much to Offer May 16, 2008
Iam Urinsight
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
At this early stage AoC has much to offer gamers especially if they have the hardware to detail its graphic glory.
There will be hiccups in the first week, so if your frustation level is low just begin later. The weakest at present of all the classes as far as innovation are the Necromancer and Demonolgist. Without access to combos you are like casters in any other game. Not a bad thing for many and the easiest way to sample and learn the game. Spellweaving as I understand it at present will not be available until perhaps level fifty and it will have limited PVP uses as the animations can be VERY long and you need to remain still. Casters will be powerful and although I always play one, I will play a hybrid in this game to have access to combos also and from my open beta experience a more involved experience.
I suggest finding a good guild and picking a good server for your playstyle (PVP vs. PVE).
Amazon sucks May 21, 2008
Kenneth M. Macdonald
9 out of 23 found this review helpful
The game appears to be very nice in every way. Amazon just informed me today that "it could not find the product I ordered". So nice to inform me of this after the game has come online. The purpose of pre orders is to get the game when the game comes out (or within the 3 day early access period). Thanks for nothing. Now apparently the price is about 50 bucks more than the pre order price and I don't see any hint of the bonus stuff I was promised...... I ordered it over a month ago and they wait until today to send me an e-mail.
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