Fatalities, animalities and brutalities all in the….Conan world?
Rather than ramble into the history of Age of Conan, its developers (FunCom) and their past (Anarchy Online), it’s only fair to start by stating that Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is definitely one of the most competent and fun commercial Massively Multiplayer Online Games on the market today, and has enjoyed a record-breaking launch with a good deal of overall polish.
Despite being a whopping twenty-five gigabyte install, Age of Conan’s updates take a relatively short time to download and apply, ensuring the newest players get to leap in as soon as possible.
Creating a character in Age of Conan is relatively simple; you can choose from one of three ‘races’ – Aquilonian, Stygian or Cimmerian – but all are human.
Whilst conferring no bonus to character stats, the races determine which of Age of Conan’s twelve (yes, that’s a massive twelve) classes you get to play as.
Each race has one “Priest” archetype class, but only Stygians can select the “Mage” archetype, whereas Cimmerians get to choose from any of the classes under the “Soldier” archetype, so essentially it boils down to letting your class preference dictate your race, as opposed to the other way around.
Once you’ve chosen your appearance and selected your character’s name you are immediately shipwrecked on the pirate isle of Tortage, and undertake your first quest accompanied by (the rather suggestively dressed) Casilda.
The first ‘part’ of the game is played out here, and whilst you won’t generally be able to leave before about level nineteen, it is possible (if, like me, you insist on doing everything) to get up to as far as level twenty-two. Although doing this makes the next part of the game a bit of a breeze until about the mid-thirties, as you’ll find yourself about two levels ahead of every quest you receive.
Level twenty-two sounds like a lot, but Age of Conan uses a levelling pace similar to Tabula Rasa, where even the most simple quests give rewards in the region of 6000 experience points, and undertaking a ‘grey’ level quest can still net around 4000 experience points.
At the minute, Age of Conan has merely three large areas – Aquilonia, Stygia and Cimmeria – this might not sound like a lot, but the areas are enormous, and break down further into many levelled zones.
This means that the world isn’t “open” a la Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft, and travel involves “zoning”, much like Guild Wars.
This has the potential to cause problems on open world Player-Versus-Player servers, not because of ‘zoning’ itself, but because each zone also has multiple instances so that there’s no telling where your opponent has escaped to.
Which of the three main areas you are sent to after you’ve finished on Tortage will depend on which race you chose, at which point you will be directed to an NPC in your homeland who will inform you about the next “destiny quest”, which is Age of Conan’s main storyline.
It is within these levelled areas that you will undertake, with great frequency, Age of Conan’s brilliantly written, interesting and satisfying quests. Age of Conan heralds the end of boring MMO stories that you couldn’t care about, it heralds the end of not knowing your objective (especially as quest markers point you straight to them) and it heralds the end of getting nothing but junk at the end of your hard work and effort.
FunCom have, without any doubt, got the gameplay system for the MMO genre bang on in Age of Conan; no ‘corpse runs’, conveniently placed resurrection points and death penalties that are so insignificant that, well, they might as well not have bothered.
Item drops also mimic the type found in games such as Diablo, with them being frequent and of generally good quality, but not always useful.
Age of Conan’s real-time combat is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen in an MMO to date; brutal, bloody and fatality-licious.
Picking a melee class, the Barbarian for example, will mean that ‘combos’ make up the bulk of your combat prowess; simply clicking an icon is now no longer enough, Age of Conan follows through by making you hammer a certain button combination (luckily, they aren’t timed) in order to pull off a combo, which can easily end in a ‘fatality’ – increasing your size and damage for a short time.
The major downside is that the button presses do have to be paced, or you run the risk of not having them registered properly thus failing the combo and wasting valuable time.
Simple group quests are as action packed as whole dungeons in any other game you could think of, and the presence of just one enemy, however small, seeps threat and menace due to the fantastic design on every living thing.
Age of Conan has definitely raised the bar for graphics in the online fantasy genre; with full Direct X10 support and great optimisation even at higher settings it is possible to play Age of Conan on anything from a seriously modest to a seriously beefed-up graphics card, and still have your breath taken away when you reach the top of that yeti-infested mountain. Fantastic bump mapping, unparalleled facial modelling and mind blowingly-crisp textures are definitely Age of Conan’s strongest graphical points.
The interface used by Age of Conan is slightly different to those that are used (read: copied) by other MMOs, with character health, mana and stamina being on the bottom left on top of the hot-bar, and having extra skill bar space where you might traditionally find the menu buttons.
Most menus are also two-sided, but by using ctrl/alt plus the menu button you can choose to open one side or the other, in order to maintain maximum awareness of your surroundings.
Once you’ve gotten used to Conan’s fresh interface, it won’t take you long to realise that it is mostly a welcome break from the norm.
Age of Conan has – like most fantasy MMOs – a gathering and crafting system, but whilst most others follow the same format of find a node, gather, craft and repeat, Age of Conan has also managed to add the words ‘fun’, ‘challenging’ and ‘unusual’ to the mix.
Gathering in Age of Conan is split into many professions; prospecting, stone-cutting, skinning, woodcutting, weaving and mining, all of which can be learned by a single character.
The harvesting nodes are scattered around beautifully expansive areas in Hyboria which are designated as gathering zones. Here you can run across lush landscapes, with little threat from monsters, and mark out gathering nodes on your own map.
This combination of exploration, risk (of being attacked by others on a Player-Versus-Player server) and beauty makes gathering materials the most fun it’s ever been in an MMO.
Once the materials have been collected, you can craft with them (at level 40, and with a significant training cost) or donate them to your guild in order to help build your expansive and expensive Guild Keep.
This systematic method of farming, donating (or selling) maintains its fun throughout, as you know the effort you put into it is all going towards helping your fellow players fulfil their dreams of massive Keeps and awesome siege battles.
Player-Versus-Player is also a staple part of Age of Conan, with some servers being ‘open world’ PvP, whereas PvP on other servers must be done through the consenting medium of arenas.
Finding a PvP game is extremely easy, and can be done simply by opening the ‘players’ window and selecting from the drop down menu, then clicking ‘apply’.
It is then a simple case of waiting to be prompted once a game is ready, there’s no need to worry about getting back to what you were doing before the match either, as you are delivered back to the very same spot you were in before you entered the arena.
Whilst there are no world-based PvP objectives, Age of Conan does have the potential for huge siege battles between Guilds, involving trebuchets, war rhinos and even mammoths. Gu
ild Cities can be broken into and ransacked by opposing forces, walls can be smashed down, and troops clash on huge battlefields in Guild-versus-Guild warfare.
As far as MMOs go, FunCom have done a lot to raise the bar, and Age of Conan is a significant contribution to advancing and shaping the genre that quickly became plagued by copycats and a general lack of originality. With exciting battles, fresh gameplay and a very, very different tone, Age of Conan is one online game you shouldn’t miss this year.
The Bad: A lot of technical issues, full voice acting comes to an end.
Gold Y Award