Age of Conan - Review @ YouGamers

Another early review of AoC with a more realistic 3/5 score but also noticing the potential the game has.

You may think that after listing so many negative bits about Age of Conan, either the game sucks or I hate it. That's not true. While it's too early to dish out the final judgment on Age of Conan just yet, despite all the obvious faults and lack of final polish, it definitely shows promise. I can't recommend it as someone's first MMO - there are far too many rough edges, bugs and balance issues - but for MMO veterans who are desperately seeking for a new fix and don't mind the fact that the game is still work in progress, Age of Conan is already worth a look. The fundamentals are there - the servers have stayed up, the client is (mostly) stable, and you won't run into a show-stopping bug every ten minutes.

In comparison to the competition, I would put it below Lord of the Rings Online at this point, mostly due to lack of polish and balancing. Lord of the Rings Online may have been light on content at launch, and it still suffers from sub-par character animation, but at least what was there was pretty well balanced and playable. Age of Conan feels too rought as far as the balancing goes - in just a few days, several quite spectacular exploits have already been uncovered, mostly due to inadequate testing related to class and ability balancing. A MMO lives and dies by the balance of the content and classes, and a PvP-oriented MMO even more so. Several "OMG, look, silly overpowered feat combo of doom"-style issues have already been uncovered, and the fact that the bug related to redoing your feats ever got to live servers tells volumes about the QA process at Funcom.