With their first expansion, Rise of the Godslayer, acting as a "lateral" expansion, Funcom's Age of Conan is finally hitting its stride and showing off its potential

I noted that RotG is focused on creating specific content for specific demographics because most of the faction quests can be soloed by your average player. In fact, almost all of the content on the main playfields is intended for the solo player to work through. Of course, don't be fooled into thinking that you're just going to be doing some simple faction quests. While it is true that sometimes the quests can become repetitive, not all factions are simply for getting new gear. Joining Tamarin's Tigers, for example, opens up a quest chain for players to tame a tiger of their very own. Players can then either raise the tiger as a battle pet, or, if they have a high enough reputation with Tamarin's Tigers, they can purchase the right items to transform their tiger pet into a powerful tiger mount.

With regard to endgame, Rise of the Godslayer has pushed its "hardcore" fan base into a plethora of Asian-themed dungeons, all of which are absolutely crawling with Asian foot soldiers and other baddies. Most of these dungeons are quite difficult, but, obviously, some of the best gear can be only gotten here. Funcom seems to be really focusing on their emote system with Rise of the Godslayer as well, as a few of these endgame dungeons will require players to fully utilize their emotes in order to manipulate their fights properly. This definitely serves to immerse a player more fully in their dungeon crawling, and it really makes fights feel more dynamic in nature.

Of course, no expansion is without its problems, and, unfortunately, Rise of the Godslayer has one rather big problem: performance. While the team does note that their official client will be much more stable than their beta testing client, this is, unfortunately, something that we heard when Age of Conan was first coming out, and the severe performance issues at AoC's launch were grounds for a lot of player angst. Hopefully Funcom is telling the truth and you will never experience the frustration that can come from five minute load times and some fairly intense graphic lag.

With regard to the new content being introduced with Rise of the Godslayer, it is vitally important that players really consider RotG as being an expansion in every sense of the word. Most of us are used to simply abandoning old content in favor of new content, and players may miss the point of this expansion if they simply see it as being the only content that Age of Conan now has to offer. There's a good reason why Funcom didn't raise their level cap and, much like Final Fantasy XI, players shouldn't be so quick to phase out old content; instead, do the things you enjoyed doing with older content, and look at Rise of the Godslayer as being supplementary to the experience. Looking at it this way, you will be able to see just how much of an expansion RotG is.

In the end, however, while Rise of the Godslayer rounds out the Age of Conan experience in an incredible way, I find that I'm actually more excited about the further potential of this MMORPG. For example, trio-friendly dungeons would really appeal to casual players, who currently feel as though they've been "banished" from instances altogether, and, while Funcom hopes that PvP will come naturally as a result of the setting, some more incentives to PvP would really take advantage of the massive zones available in Khitai. Either way, Funcom is definitely taking a huge step in the right direction with Rise of the Godslayer-it's just a matter of seeing where they go from here.