Worst MMO Ever? - Age of Conan: Unchained 

This was fun mate. Cheers bro 😝

"Do you know who I think I am?" Is such an amazing line. Truly excellent writing.

MitchManix being the good friend he is, helping Josh quit that MMO before it sucks him in.

20:35 underrated joke “because that succubus be succubussing”, caught me off guard

That music during the snake fight wasn't an indication that YOU were in a boss fight. The music was the snake's because you were ITS boss fight.

This was one of the best 1-20 levels in any game. And one of the worst 40+. The funny part is, whenever I hear talk of live services, and why they fail, I'm like "Am I the only one that remembers the MMO rush of the late aughts? Did NO ONE learn from their collapses?"

A 20 minute rant on fonts is the EXACT reason we watch you Josh! Keep it up!

I used to be an Anarchy Online GM (called ARKs - we got our sub fee comped, but otherwise were volunteers) and met the Funcom folks at some annual meetups at their US office around when they were developing and releasing this game. I doubt many, or any, of the same people are still around, but they were legitimately awesome folks with passion that just couldn't get their projects to crack through into the big time. I wish you could play through the Anarchy Online of 20 years ago for this series because it was bonkers.

Assuming Josh's Alchemia Story body pillow is designed after his support character that he designed, I am in a state of renewed terror at the thought of that face staring at me while I try to sleep.

That first Steam review is mine... My god what a small world 😂 This game was great back in the day, if not for 4 issues. 1. It launched in WoWs shadow 2. It had serious performance issues (ex. Memory leak) 3. Class balance was handled with the same care and attention as a baboon performing open heart surgery 4. The content 1-20 was SO solid it made the drop in quality afterwards far more noticeable than your normal MMO

Though the graphics are dated by today's standards, I still remember when I first stepped into this game and couldn't believe my eyes how beautiful it was. The water physics were the best out there and sometimes I'd just sit by Tortage's port watching the water. It was relaxing. Heck, the tutorial alone made me really immersed in the world, I didn't want to leave. ... and I didn't. No joke, I loved that area so much I never bothered to advance beyond it. Kinda like how I left one character in the pre-searing timeline of the original Guild Wars. I forget the details now, but there's this one questline where you have to lift the curse from a family bloodline and getting there felt like an epic journey, which ended in a bittersweet victory where you did lift the curse, yet the bloodline itself had met its end. The music accompanying that moment, and the surroundings themselves, is my fav mmo moment of all time.

God I love the idea of Josh trying to gatekeep people from doing similar things

I am endlessly impressed with how well your humour can walk the line between brovocative and brofessional. brolific but never brotracted. well done.

i applaud your persistence. i remember when you started the Patreon and later when you had a few complained that you had to think of a way to show them all so you just decided to keep making the font smaller to have them all on a single screen, and you still do that to this very day. amazing!

Odd thing about the premium currency I just noticed: If the initial cost is 4.99 for the smallest pack, and the next pack up is 9.99 for double the amount of currency. It's cheaper to buy two 4.99 packs. It may only be a penny in this instance but it counts, especially once you get into the metrics of the larger packs.

Age of Conan was a lot of fun at its peak. The territorial Guild vs Guild PvP warfare in particular was a great time. The raids were quite challenging too. Honestly one of the top MMO's I've ever played.

The random snake getting its own boss music was exquisite

Josh if you're reading this and don't have Flyff on your 'Worst MMO Ever' backlist of games to make videos on; you'll love making a vid on that one. It's so technically advanced it even has New World's swimming... and an entire one button rotation for every classes combat. Absolute gem.

Dude idk how you do it but that bit at the beginning was comedy gold 😂

Day man, nice one, big approve, really great to watch new ones in this series after watching all of them in a few weeks, thank you!

Personal story time: After Blizzard murdered my server with Cataclysm expansion, I quit it and tried several MMOs. AoC was the one that I got stuck in for 2 years and it was.... magnificent! Back in the day there was no cash shop (or at least I don't remember it?), there were 4 servers - RP and RPPvP in addition to these 2. The population was huge, you'd constantly run into someone. PvP was no stop. Dungeons were absolutely amazing, especially the expansion ones. There's castle building by the way. Yep, your guild can build its own castle in special zones! And then do massive guild on guild raids with siege weapons! I've done pretty much all the content the game had to offer except for the Khitai expansion main raid. It was a bit too hard. And then... the Funcom came up with a brilliant idea. "Why don't we merge RP servers with the regular ones, to fix the dwindling population?" So... you got innocent RPers who sometimes like to PvP stuck with tryhard PvPers of the regular server. It was a disaster.

Funny thing is that the Funcom points don't just not get cheaper the more you buy, they even get *more expensive* the more you buy. Granted, we're only talking about a couple of cents, but still: upscaling all of them to the biggest amount you can buy at once (12000), all compared to the 600 package, the 1200 package is 10 cents more expensive, the 2400 package is 15 cents more expensive, the 6000 package is 18 cents more expensive, and the 12000 package is 19 cents more expensive.

I used to love Age of Conan, and I still remember the Necromancer class as one of my favorites in a game. The further I got, though, the harder it was for me to find things to do, and eventually I felt like I was just grinding. And I always thought the game didn't give you new, better-looking equipment nearly often enough

Hahaha i love this so much. Also thanks for the shoutout for my other favorite youtuber Mitchmanix, bro !

1:46 "Do you know who i think i am?" Josh, your humor always gets me. cheers.

Okay. That cult thing is funny. I was GenCon this year, and either Wizards paid for a few actors and an actress, but I joined the Cult of Tiamat. My version of the joke was, "You know, who hasn't just randomly joined a cult on a whim."

19:53 he's also the fighter of the nightman lol. Loved the Always Sunny reference Josh!

This is awesome, now I have something to watch while I wait for Josh to ipload

Age of Conan was something I picked up out of curiosity for like 5 bucks at Half Price Books and it completely captured my imagination. The lore, worldbuilding, atmosphere, class design, music, and visuals (for an MMO in 2008) were all just amazing to me. I don't think it's a particularly enjoyable game to play today, but it introduced me to Hyboria and I would love another RPG set in this world (Exiles doesn't count).

Not having any discount for higher coin packages in the cash shop is a GOOD thing, because it's at least one way that they are not manipulating players into spending more. It also makes it clearer (or at least less obscured) how much you are spending when you spend those coins on cash shop items, because it means that X coins are always worth Y dollars. So that's a point in their favor. It's a small point, basically completely undone by everything else the cash shop does, but it's still a point. As an aside, cash shops using special premium currency isn't JUST a thing they do to manipulate players. It also dramatically simplifies the backend development, reduces cost in transaction fees, and allows buying stuff to be much more responsive in general because each transaction with coins doesn't need to go through all the external authentication steps that purchasing coins with money does. Now when they filter stuff through multiple currencies that's just scummy.

Gotta say Josh. Considering a recent wonderful plagiarism-on-youtube video it is WONDERFUL to see how well you treat other peoples content. You literally turned jokes you wanted to make, but realized they already were made into jokes about wanting to have made them first. And how its all integrated in showing off other peoples content in a wholesome instead of competetive or copy pasta way is great to see. All the thumbs up. (edit: geeez Josh, whats with your fanbase tho?)

Age of Conan, I knew he would play the game at some point... I played AoC from 2009 to 2020, needless to say that I enjoyed it. The music, the world, the story, the gameplay are probably in my altime favorites of games. The dungeons and raids are difficult, require preparation and knowledge of the games mechanics and pose great challanges - as does the solo content, the world really feels dangerous because you can easily be killed. However, all those positive memories I have get heavily overshadowed by the fact that Funcom is managing, or well, managed, the game so horribly. Bugs from release in 2008 are still present, cheaters run rampant and content delivery died off in 2014 pretty much completely (there were some content updates but these were honestly insignificant). All of that has led to a declining player base - obviously. Nowadays both servers are very dead (at least 3 years ago when I quit it was that way), since there are no solo versions of dungeons and raids most of them will be forever abandoned, the community itself isn't in the mood to teach new players either, from level 80 on its a harsh and insanely steep learning curve that most people will not be able to climb due to an unwilling community of hardcore players and the lack of resources elsewhere to learn mechanics and so on. It's sad to see the game in this state. The item shop is egregious, yes, but also insanely unnecessary at the same time. None of what they offer there is worth the price or actually any price. Why pay 30 bucks for a low level armor set that becomes irrelevant 5 levels into the future? Why buy a T3 raid armor set for 60 bucks when the balancing of T1 to T3 armors is so bad that every experienced player skips these sets completely? The only things worth buying in the shop are the expansions, they add new gorgeous areas and story lines (forums have some guides regarding those expansions and what they offer) but the rest? In all my years playing the game I never bought anything from it. So, would I recommend playing this game? If you just want to experience Hyboria and awesome stories with a great combat system then definitely yes. There is so much to do, so many areas to explore, great stories to experience. If you want to play it to reach the best gear possible and do the hardest content? Then no, you will only be disappointed by the steep learning curve and inaccessibility. This video somehow made me think of returning to the game, just to look at my characters again (I loved collecting armor pieces for vanity sets to dress my characters up) and maybe run around in the world, listen to the music and maybe even do a dungeon run. But no, I won't do that, I must resist the urge to delve into nostalgia because in the end, the trip down memory lane will only break my heart again, realizing what kind of state the game is in and what could have been if Funcom were to invest into the game.

I honestly love the Hyboria low-fantasy setting. A big problem I have with something like Warcrafts current lore is how insane and far removed it has gotten from Warcraft 1, 2 and 3, where now you're fighting extra-dimensional threats and aliens, orcs are now the size of cars and there's whole underground steam-punk cities blah blah blah, it's so far removed from a guy tending his field and picking up a spear and shield to go and investigate a threat of some 6'6", muscular green guys called orcs. Just a grounded, low-fantasy setting where people with swords matter, sorcerers are rare and take time to cast spells (that are powerful if they can do so), and the world is this iron age-like setting of adventure and wilderness.

I did play that game for over a year when it was subscription-only. Exploring the world was pretty cool and it had a small but dedicated German-speaking community. Tourtage is still one of my favorite tutorial areas in an MMO Funny fact about that game: There was a rumor that having sex was a possibility and it would give you buffs

Killed it with the Always Sunny reference! Made me laugh out loud Keep up the good work brother always love to see when you upload a new vid!

I do love these videos. It's like listening to Richard Hammond critique MMOs

Your rivalry with that other guy who made Bronan is hilarious.

This copyright infringement is not acceptable. As a sign of protest I will now go watch all their videos, and leave a strongly worded comment under each so the algorithm knows to share it to more people, who will undoubtedly join in the protest !

I had this on in the background while I was working on a very dry case brief and I took a moment to look over and right as I did you said “jiggle”… eerie

I cant watch these videos fully but the intros are allways the best, keep up the good job

Josh: "The bearded clam", i see what you did here. Me: *mind blown*

I enjoyed the steady descent into madness with each new character.

I miss this game, it had amazing atmosphere and music. I remember walking through somewhere in aquillonia and there was mist everywhere, music playing nicely. I got into a fight I couldnt handle (PVE but still, who wants to die?) and some rando jumped in and saved me. A short while later, I saw the same rando fighting stuff, jumped in and gave them a hand...and that was how I joined a guild. Khitai was a great expansion, the Gates of Khitai soundtrack is still amazing. I miss this game.

That starting skit was priceless! :D

For about 6 months after the release of AoCs one and only expansion, this game was a ton of fun. The dueling scene was actually super satisfying. Lots of movement and animation canceling. End game dungeons were tough with hidden hard modes. The classic must have classes, and some really unique seen nowhere else classes. Bear shaman ripped your head off fatality for the win. Just a cool game. With really cool class mechanics and spell effects.

That's very sweet that you found a way to show everyone "Stop coming at my friend, I KNOW him, he has my permission" in a fun way lol

I played this game yeaaaaaaaaars ago, I recall joining after they changed the combat (From what we see in this video) it apparently used to be less forgiving and penalize you for getting combos wrong and the combos you needed to perform skills were lengthier. I made a clan called Black Annihilus, was a cringe edgy clan name but it was one of those random public clans that grew a bit, had a fun community and it made the game contain some good nostalgic memories with it, even when I know how bad and predatory it was. What I really loved was the Clan-related Base-building, you had your own hunk of land and depended on immense resources being pooled together to build exclusive clan-shops and built your own little Keep/Castle, castle gates and castle walls to truly claim your OWN plot of land that was shared with 2 other clans at once that could visit/attack you varying on the server. Seeing the Walls be built up one by one as your very own castle and little kingdom gets built after lots of effort and teamwork of collecting resources was fun. Even as it dies and continues to die, I'll remember it for the fun times, even when it was always destined to die in mediocrity. [Update]: I also don't even remember doing anything relating to 'Blocking' during combat.

Loving this series! Can't wait to see what other games will show up on here, would love to see Trickster Online though.

Damn, I remember playing this during release and my god was it a frustrating, hilariously fun mess of a game. Checkerboarding, broken raids, broken raids, unwinnable dragons. The bonds I made over the 3 yrs of playing was peak MMO.

Great video as always Josh. i'm still excited for the day this series brings you to Tibia, an MMO that used to be incredibly, WILDLY popular in Brazil (and in some other countries like Poland) in the 90s that is somehow still going today.

Damn you @Josh Strife Hayes!!! you got me @10:12 , i was just making some commission work and then you said the word "jiggle"!!!

Oh man, this was so much fun to watch, thanks Josh ❤

I also feel I should point out that the respawn upon death mechanic in Age of Conan does in fact have a lore reason for it.

I’m no MMO player though I enjoy hearing Josh talk about the game design, but I love Conan and the Hyborian age which is why I play this one. Whether or not it’s really that good I love this game because I get to explore and exist in Hyboria

The fact that the question mark above characters is shaded makes it feel so solid and real. I can't not think that it's something that actually physically exists in-universe.

three minutes in, already GOLD. thank you for your hard work and the amazing jokes.

I dont know why but at 17:33 I laughed so hard because of Josh's comment before hearing the dialogue of the NPC, he sounded like he was garggling his throat and also constipated. Btw, these videos are great! Love this series and love watching a mix of critique of the game, gameplay, and funny comments made throughout. Great job as always

To be fair, lava in real life pretty much does have an instant death aura around it. Heat travels from places that are hot to places that are not, so the area around lava is going to be hot enough to cook you alive instantly. Imagine putting your hand on a hot stove for five seconds, but instead it's 2000 degrees F and its your entire body, your lungs if you breathed in at the time, and your eyeball jelly flash boils and pops in their sockets. Yeah, jump over lava in real life, and you're either dead or wishing you were.

Aaaaaand... now I'm following your friend's channel too. That was hilarious.

Thx for the video! Back in 2008/9 I was that Dark Templar - tanking was horrendous until you juiced up a bit. Its was all fun until population tanked. Good memories

Can’t remember how I found this channel, but I can’t stop watching you Josh, great content as always. I haven’t played an mmo since Maple Story in like 2009, but these videos make me feel so nostalgic in the best way

Glad you used the Josh dry face joke again. A friend and I have been exclusively referring to you that way since the first time you did and this felt strangely validating

the epic music for the wedge snake was amazing XD i almost fell from the chair

sweet, how you had a short look around while fighting, when that music started :D

A good thing to know is that voice acting stops for non main story quests after Tortage. They might have fixed that since I played so many years ago. But I doubt it!

Great video as always Josh! I remember trying to play this game when it first came out. The starting location was fun and ran great but once I left to the main land the game would crash after playing for a while. Apparently there was an issue with a memory leak. I tried to push thru it and hoped that it would just be patched but eventually I made it to that main city and the game would crash every time I logged in. When I was finally able to login after numerous attempts, I would try to run out of the city but it would crash on the way, and when, after even more attempts, I was able to logged back in, I would be in the same starting place at the center of the city each time, never making any progress to the city gate. I could not leave or play the game even in potato mode settings. Stopped paying the monthly fee and never looked back. Real shame cause it was fun and I probably would have kept playing if I could have

I played this game for 2-3 years while it still was subscription only. It's by far the best MMO I ever played and it's sad that you'll never see a Dungeon or even a Raid in this game.. Raids are so incredibly hard and fun at the same time. I've spent so many evenings with my guild trying to achieve World First Kills on new Raid bosses and I even was one of the players who finished T4 first.. This was during a time the game had active support and even the game developers watched our tries and congratulated us when we finally made it. Even Dungeons are incredibly hard and require tactics and a lot of skills to finish them. Such a good time and I completely forgot about the game until now.. maybe I'll start again but I'm pretty sure I'll cry seeing what they did to the game

Dude I totally feel you. I come up with song titles for my tracks and I always gotta Google the title to make sure someone else didn't use that title for a famous song or something. It's wild! Most don't titles I come up with are taken! I felt so proud of "Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who Is in the Water" only to find it was taken almost a decade ago. Unbelievable.

2010-2012 was the golden era in this game, the raids, the pvp, the players, the worldbuilding, it was just different from all the other very safe options at the time, the fantasy felt more realistic and unique, it's brutal. And of course, it has the best tutorial in any MMO, Tortage is such an awesome vibe, feels like an actual adventure in a hostile strange world. Also, it has some incredibly unique class designs I have never seen anywhere else. Glad you found some enjoyment in it, even though the cash shop is laughable and the free version greatly limits the player.

Aah, I remember playing this one when it first came out. Picked it up with two classmates but we didn't stick with it that long. At the time once you left the tutorial area the quality dropped drastically and it became fairly obvious that the game was very much unfinished. I mainly have memories of kicking people down cliffs with my horse and finding a broken build with a bow that could one-shot most enemies.

Would love to see a video on palia in this series. First mmo since destiny that I’ve been into, before that was Star Wars galaxies. As always great content!

Can I just say. I subscribed to both your channel and dumb ways to Kai solely on the quality of the first 3 mintues of this video. Bravo chaps! Good show!

I played this way past it's prime as a f2p. Got to level 77 on a Necromancer through a ton of grinding and tried to find a secondary main class. Never managed to do so, but I think Demonologist was the closest I got. Quite a lot of the classes were pretty freaking cool. Loved Herald of Xotli as well. As for the game itself, I didn't dislike it, I just wish it managed to stay as strong as the 1-20 tutorial bracket in Tortage was. Loved the Spellweaving mechanic though. Also I'm still waiting for a video in this series on Perfect World or Rappelz.

Absolutely love your MMO reviews and have so far made it about 90% of all the ones you've made. I know it's not the exact same game as when it was live, but what are the chances of you doing City of Heroes: Homecoming? I think that was the first MMO I really got into and played for more than a few months (played it from about 2 years after it started and continued until it shutdown. Now that it's been resurrected I would love to see what you think of the current version. Anyway thanks for all the videos, a lot of them have brought back great memories of fun games and the wonderful people I played them with. I hope you continue to keep making them for a long long time!

I love the dayman reference, a great nod to youtuber screenslayer's shadow of modor video :)

Fascinating. The game intro never got changed since the time I played this game. And that was pre-unchained.

I loved this game when it came out. Every so often I go back and have to relearn everything I forgot, then once I have everything down pat again, I get distracted by another shiny game. I will note that this is the ONLY game I play with the music on. I really dislike music when playing games (it always distracts me from world sounds, but I once found myself really wanting to hear Conan music so played the Arnold Movie soundtrack and then went, "Duh, I just need to turn the music on." Music is spot on for me in this single game.

I like the part where Bronan said "It's Bronin' Time!" and bro'ed all over the place. Once again, another fantastic video and top tier narration

Woah, wasnt expecting a mitchmanix collab. One of your greatest episode yet.

Ahhh, I got this with a bunch of friends when it first came out. I fondly remember walking down a small flight of stairs in the main town, getting to the bottom step, screaming and dying from fall damage. I also fondly remember walking up stairs in some of the first missions, which was impossible because they had very random hit boxes, so it was really best to circumvent them or try to relentlessly hop up them. Or going to the first adventure area, and max level people with bows would stand by the spawn, and insta kill you infinitely until you logged out. Hahaha... Good times, good times.

Played this when it launched, was a fun and unique experience in what would soon become the era of the WoW-clone. Late in the main storyline you lose the tatoo you get at the start, but back at launch it was bugged and didn't get removed, so you had a kind of symbol of "i was there". i still remember the combo Assassins had where they could charge up their strongest combo and then before finishing it use their charge ability to basically 1 shot anyone that wasn't a tank, fun buggy times.

I remember when this game came out, it had the best mmo graphics ever released, and it's mechanics revolutionary to me and my friends. It had some of the best pvp montages videos ever with the execution like finishers

10:47 okay that pun took me a moment. Good job.

The bit with Kai was so wholesome, god gave us two monitors for a reason

Top memmory I have of Age of Conan. 0 (Zero) was in the random loot roll numerics, so you could random NEED ROLE, an item.. roll a 0 (Zero) and it would say you "Passed" on the item. Lost out on a staff that would have carried my Priest of MItra for 10 levels or more at the time because of that.

The game I NEVER got to play because my parents KNEW what the Conan the barbarian/Hyborian Age setting was like. Thanks for the video.

First game I worked on (before it became unchained)… what a ride that was

Speaking of "No Name" the wall, I'm reminded of a prop from City of Heroes. Occasionally, Rikti enemies would be found fiddling with an alien bomb, called "Doesntmatter". I remember someone joking about it being the third state of existence. Matter, antimatter, doesntmatter.

10:15 bro you got me good. i do look at the second monitor every time you say jiggle haha

This game still has the best classes and class balance. Everyone is equally as valuable solo, group, raid, and pvp. The base rotation is very fun. The games opening 20 levels are just a fun rpg id recommend to anyone even if you have no interest in continuing My favorite unique class is The Bear Shaman is a melee healer who does dps to boost healing and healing to boost dps

One of your best Josh! Seriously funny and dare I say it, bloody entertaining to boot!

I would absolutely LOVE you doing a list in how you would rank the games you have gone through, maybe as a 100th episode or so? So many seems like they could take the place of the worst so far!

Yeah, probably. Definitely going to enjoy this one after spending years playing it _ages_ ago.

I was laying in bed with my eyes closed listening to the video. I admit that I opened my eyes when you said jiggle. I am not ashamed.

this video came in the perfect moment, i really needed this.

@30:15 "For you. For all of us." am I spying a cheeky Loki reference?

Got to level 60-something on there, leveled solo up until 15-ish then joined a Guild and they weren't on all the time bc from what I've gathered from playing on and off for a while was that mostly Euros play, I barely see any NA people, which caused me to not play as much as I struggled grinding solo after level 50, it gets gnarly, and I think that has to do with the fact that the exp needed goes up exponentially due to all the group content available at that point, but there's NOBODY to run dungeons with. So I quit.

I played this for a few months when it was released, then again for a couple months when it went f2p. I'm looking forward to this! While I enjoyed it, it does have its faults, and Josh never disappoints with his thoughts!

Absolutely beautiful work. I’m very glad you haven’t quit. I hope this all pays off for you, and I hope to be able to donate one day.

Every once in a while, you play an MMO that I personally have dumped hours into... and bro do I love watching and listening to you describe stuff I already kinda know or remember. Weird. Thanks Josh.