Age of Conan's got the roughest install process out of all the games I've played for the project so far, although that's because I didn't want to install PlayOnLinux at first, despite others saying that its installation script for the game's the only thing that worked for them. The Steam install would either rapidly leak memory before crashing on launch, or crash upon opening the character creator. The standalone client wouldn't launch at all, with or without DXVK, neither under a fresh Wine prefix, nor under a Proton setup through Lutris. Indeed, the PlayOnLinux script worked, but the game doesn't close itself properly; it has to be terminated through PlayOnLinux. This shit's precisely why I set up games a solid day before we officially start, yet it's the first game that's actually needed the extra time.
Installing it wasn't my last problem, either - closing the game might do something to the local files making it unlaunchable; on next startup, it would immediately throw an 'out of memory' error and close, even after rebooting my PC to flush the RAM. Sure, a clean reinstall would fix it, but spending a few hours before each and every session just redownloading everything would render the game effectively unplayable, so I made a backup of the PlayOnLinux installation just before first launch. Fortunately, after reigning in my web browser's memory consumption, it's only happened once since then, and restoring from backup only takes one hour, as opposed to several for redownloading the game. At around 13.5 GBs for the game itself plus 26.7 GBs for the backup, Age of Conan's also the largest game so far on hard drive space.
The game's alright, I guess. It's sold as more of an action game than other MMOs, but it's actually just the same old tab-target MMO combat, but with three of your hotbar keys reserved for basic attacks. Most special abilities are queued, then activated after a short sequence of basics. Unless if I'm doing something wrong, this is just the usual skill rotation with extra steps. Throw in some quest markers to chase after and some NPC dialogue to skim through, and we've got ourselves an adequate single-player video game. Watching the graphics glitch out on low settings and the arduous setup process' more noteworthy than the game itself.
I haven't had much time for video games lately, and the time I do have's been split between Conan and Islet. The latter's still got holdouts long after it was officially swapped out, and it's become my backup game after Allods on the official server, which cucks out Linux users with kernel-level anticheat, was voted in. As such, I regrettably haven't done much with the current game. I'll focus on Conan for the rest of our time there, on principle since I voted for it itching for something western. For the next game, if I'm not just taking a two-week break to rest, I want to play an MMO from before the genre's conventions were firmly established; something that can't possibly copy World of Warcraft, Ragnarok Online, RuneScape, nor any other popular titles, because it predates all of 'em by at least a few years - either Meridian59 or NexusTK for something retro. Alternatively, I want to play Monster Hunter: Frontier, a game that should have real action game combat, if the hundreds of hours I sunk into Portable 3rd long ago are of any indication. I don't want to split my attention anymore, so unless something else gets voted which happens to be damn good, it's either one of those three games or back to Islet for me.