Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures

Feb 19, 2008

Age of Conan's newbie experience has been written about extensively: you're a former galley slave who's washed up on the shore of Tortage, an island more or less isolated from civilization (or what passes for it in Howard's brutal world). You're clad in a loincloth and armed with a fallen branch. Brigands patrol your vicinity (in fixed, scripted paths, of course) and there be dragons here, too -- or, at the very least, some man-eating holdovers from a forgotten age. Your job is to make it to town safely, though expect some distractions... like the helpless maiden chained to a crucifix about 30 feet from your starting point.

The beta version demonstrated by game director Gaute Godager today filled in a few blanks. Upon awakening on the shore, a mysterious benefactor informs you that the slave master of the galley has got a head start on you toward the city at the center of the island. The one problem: the city will not admit slaves through its gate. Thus, you have to find and kill the eunuch slave master before he gets to town. Don't worry; he's not actually racing you. This is an MMO, after all. Eventually you'll find him and bludgeon your way into freedman status. So yes, Age of Conan kicks things off with a newbie experience that is genuinely Howardian.

Godager's demo soon moved on to the late game. A party of five, composed of different classes, tackled a high-level "social dungeon" -- a persistent indoor playfield with populated quick-respawning monsters so as to permit multiple player groups to adventure simultaneously. This portion of the demo served to showcase that Age of Conan will indeed be governed by many of the same conventions that define MMO gameplay. Godager's own character was a Guardian, one of the game's tank classes. Accompanying him was a host of other characters, all filling the requisite roles of a well-balanced party. Pretty much standard fare, yes, but there were some significant deviations evident.

The most notable thing about the minute-to-minute gameplay was how it seemed to be less reliant on focusing on individual targets compared to what you see in most other MMOs. Normally, players controlling healer-type characters will pay more attention to their party members' status bars than to the stuff that's actually going on in the world. In Age of Conan, healings spells will typically affect any friendly players within a certain area -- one of the spells seeing heavy use in today's demo, for instance, had a cone-shaped area of effect. While this isn't necessarily significant in its own right, it could mean very good things if the designers are mindful of how this will inevitably empower healing characters to more fully engage their surroundings, and grant them abilities that take advantage of this.

Something similar is going on with melee combat: every attack in the game will have an area of effect, so in essence, if your sword comes into contact with an enemy character, it'll inflict damage on it. In this sense it's sort of like an arcade-style beat 'em up. The obvious downside to this is that combat lacks the sort of savage heft that the game seems to be begging for, with all its gruesome fatalities. On the other hand, this apparently enables the designers to throw larger throngs of enemies at players, making for battles that could turn out much more frantic than you'd find anywhere else in the MMO space. The only area where this "AoE is king" ethos seems to be absent is in the case of single-target spells and abilities. In particular, it's hard to imagine how ranged spell-casters and archers will avoid having to tab-target more often than not.

Godager then moved on to demonstrate mounted combat. With his coterie mounted on all manner of beasts, including horses, rhinos, and mammoths, they charged the badlands and made short work of a band of target dummies. According to Godager, the mass and momentum of your mount will factor into how much damage you do to enemies while in motion. The mounts themselves can also attack: horses will kick with their front and hind legs, and rhinos and mammoths will gore enemies with their extremities. Trampling is out of the question, though, which is unfortunate. In order to mitigate the obvious advantage that mounted combat grants, players and monsters will have a host of abilities that can dismount their targets.

The demo ended with a showcase of a player city. There are two types in Age of Conan -- ones that are built in PvE areas, and others (called "battle keeps") that are open to attack from rival guilds. The one on show today was of the PvE variety. When your guild acquires the largesse required to set up shop in the wilderness, you'll basically apply for a plot of land in an instanced zone you'll share with a few other guilds. Each guild's plot is preconfigured with nodes that can sprout various kinds of buildings and fortifications, depending on your town's focus. Resource nodes -- stuff like lumber and minerals -- are scattered around the zones that house the cities, and while they're plentiful if the mini-map Godager brought up was an indication, you'll still be competing with your neighbors for access to them. You won't be able to invade, however, unless you take it "outside" where battle keeps are buildable.

Thus ended Age of Conan's GDC demo. According to Funcom's PR reps, press will be admitted to the in-progress beta test in March, so expect more coverage then.