Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

Graphical Adventures

It’s easy to poke fun at the graphics in Age of Conan and so far we’ve had a few good laughs at the expense of the old Cimmerian’s somewhat wizened appearance, but it’s important not to forget that Age of Conan is an MMO and it therefore needs the graphics to be nicely streamlined if it wants to run properly.

With that in mind, it’s perfectly acceptable to see the game using generic animations for most actions to help the game avoid going through all the inverse kinematics and object placing headaches that normal games have to do.

Still, the graphics in Age of Conan are still above average for the most part and the amount of character customisation available to players is a great place to see that – sure it may not be as impressive as the systems in Oblivion or Mass Effect, but it still beats the arrogant snot out of anything World of Warcraft can offer.

Water Reflections

There’s an impressive amount of time in Age of Conan spent in and around the water's edge – especially in the early stages of the game. Therefore, we thought it might be wise to have a gander at the different options for tweaking the water in the game.


The effects of this setting are subtle, or at least they are on the first two settings. The main difference notable in the pictures is that on the Reflect All setting you can make out the shimmering mirror image of the player – the yellow man-skirt of our Stygian Demonlogist fluttering on the surface of the wave. On the lower settings meanwhile this effect is first diminished, then absent.

The impact of this when you’re actually in-game though is negligible. If you’re the type of gamer who wants to have everything turned up to 11 – including your Spinal Tap references – then by all means turn this up to full, but know that you aren’t really gaining anything worth sacrificing performance for.

Low Quality View Distance

Here’s a funny story. There are two settings to control the view distance in Age of Conan – Low Quality and High Quality. Naturally when it came round to testing the game we figured High Quality would have the most impact and set to fiddling with it. It took more than an hour's worth of fiddling and screenshot comparisons before we realised that we were wrong.


Judging by the rather significant effect in the screenshots, our money says that this setting controls the detail of low quality textures and geometry, but leaves others alone. If you want proof then click for the big pictures and ask yourself why the ground textures are getting blurrier and blurrier while even the NPCs in the distance are staying at full detail.

Either way, this is one setting which we’d say is absolutely essential to enjoying the game from an aesthetic point of view and you’ll definitely want to push it up as far as you can – which might be further than you think. Even on the High Preset this slider is only pushed up to 75 percent, though we cranked the extra 15 25 percent out of the engine without any performance hit.