Age of Conan - Hands-On @ Games Radar

Chuck Osborn plays some multi-player AoC.

In fact, the biggest obstacle I encountered in multiplayer while playing the beta was that framerates dipped dramatically between nighttime and daytime modes. Tortage City, in particular, was plagued by stutters and stops that often turned the game into a sword-and-sorcery slideshow. Turning graphics settings down to “fugly” helped some, but I could almost hear my powerful machine whimpering in protest.Crashes were also very common in multiplayer, occurring most often when the game loaded a new area. Funcom says that the crashes are due to a known memory leak that will be fixed before launch, but wasn’t able to explain away my framerate issues quite so easily. Long story short: I shouldn’t have had them, say the devs, who suggested a lack of pre-compiled shaders may be the culprit. The final game will ship with a shader library that they - and we - hope will alleviate this problem. I also experienced an array of minor glitches, like absent animations, invisible enemies, and a broken quest or two, but these sorts of problems often get fixed by bleary-eyed developers in the final weeks before an MMO launch. Crom, if you’re up there, please help guide Funcom in ironing out these technical issues

This is actually day 2 of a week long series the first part can be found here.