Age of Conan - Impressions Beyond 40 @ IGN

Charles Onyet's impressions of the game somewhere around the mid 40 level.

Before we go any further we should point out how this game world in constructed, since some may have a different idea. Instead of being one large, seamless world like Blizzard's World of Warcraft or Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan is fragmented and layered. You're required to load into each zone, and each zone exists in multiple instances, something like the public hubs in ArenaNet's Guild Wars. This might be disappointing for anyone who awaited the game's release with the fantasy playing in their head of hopping on horseback and roaming unimpeded across the vast expanse of the game's explorable area. The zones by themselves are quite large, but you can't transfer between them without loading.

As for the content, things seem to start to tail off in terms of solid quest lines and more engaging content once you hit 40. In the Field of the Dead, the game's zone for those between 40 and 50, things start off at a decent clip with a few quests near the zone's beginning, but then seem to sputter to a slow crawl, offering only a few tasks and meager rewards. Compared to the polished level 1 through 20 experience in Tortage and large number of quest chains available in the 20 to 40 zones, Field of the Dead doesn't really stack up. Leveling is still entirely possible through grinding as downed mobs around your level give out pretty good experience bonuses, but opportunities to gain quest experience rewards that can so quickly propel you along the leveling curve seem to dry up. Without the strength of the narrative threads present in the 20 to 40 zones, the game turns into more of a chore to play.