Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

When The folks at Norwegian MMO specialists. Funcom, first teased us with rumours of a brand new online title based on a huge licence (due for a new film), boasting a rich cross-media heritage and beloved by people around the world, naturally we all jumped out of our seats here at Towers at the thought of a brand new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game. Try again, said Funcom. Ah, we thought -Transformers then. Brilliant! Nope, came the response. At which point we walked away more puzzled than ever.

Luckily, we didn't have to wait long for the mist to clear. We were recently invited by Funcom to unveil the brand-new online world of everybody's favourite muscle-bound barbarian warrior-king - Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

First let me point out how serious we are about the Conan legacy," says Gaute Godager, game director for Conan and the man previously responsible for shaping Anarchy Online into the success it is today. I've always been a huge fan of Robert E Howard's novels and his Hyborian universe, and to direct this game is a dream come true. To create a game true to Howard's dark vision is important to us. Luckily, the entire Hyborian world forms a great canvas for amazing stories since it's a twisted mirror of our own world.

Indeed it is. If you're not familiar, the world of Conan is set on 'Earth' (give or take) on or around 10,000 BC. Taking in themes from prehistoric life, mystical fantasy and even old Atlantian mythos, the gameworld recreates Conan's current kingdom of Aquilonia, the Stygian desert to the south and Conan's homeland of Cimmeria.

"We've built on this a storyline where players become the victims of a sinister, grand-scale plot by an age-old enemy of Conan," says Godager. "Through this plot Conan's kingship, his kingdom and your very soul are at stake."

A Game Of Two Halves

Unlike most MMOs, you're likely to have a lot more emotional investment in that character thanks to the unique online single-player game that sets your backstory. "As an RPG. the game is divided into two parts." Godager describes. The first 20 levels are driven by a personalised story where there are four story arcs woven together to affect several different endings. This part marks the beginning of your life as a Hyborian adventurer. It sets you on the path to the second part of your life as a traveller (the last 60 levels), where you gradually cooperate more and more with other players."

These four arcs are split across the four major character archetypes - Rogue, Priest, Mage and Warrior. This in turn enables the award-winning writers behind adventure titles The Longest Journey and Dream fall to provide a detailed, atmospheric and above all engaging plot to engage your interest - certainly more than the typical thrown in the deep end, back-story tucked away in the manual' approach taken by most MMOs.

Traffic Conans

By the time you reach the end of the story, the plan is to have you eager to take the next step with your now fully-established character. When a great RPG ends, you must have felt the urge to have your character live on and interact with fellow travellers, to enter an even greater world, says Godager. This is that opportunity - to have a RPG all about you, your choices and your character, and if you win to share that victory at an even greater stage, where you can adventure with others and share in much, much more.

Your progression through the story is in stages, starting as a commoner in one of the three aforementioned regions. At level five you get to choose one of the four archetypes, with three further subclasses available at level 20 - the entry point into the MMO game. From there you work your way past level 40, choosing a secondary profession on the way (including becoming master to your very own apprentice), until finally reaching your last choice of two further specialised classes at level 60.

Play It Your Way

Of course, it's all customisable along the way explains Godager We've tried to make a simple but deep character creation and visual customisation system, letting you create unique visual appearances by modelling looks, skin tone, degrees of muscles, skeletal structures, hair style and more. You can also choose permanent changes to your characters through displaying battle scars, for instance, visually showing what you've been through." Speaking of battle scars, what about arguably the most important aspect of the game - the combat? Perhaps the most enduring mental image of the Conan world is watching Arnie swinging a sword twice the size of a London bus about his head while lopping the heads off passing unfortunates. Luckily, Godager seems to have the same memories as us (as one of the images on these pages amply demonstrates), and the combat sounds thrilling.

Into Battle

There are three stages to the combat experience: Real Combat, in which you get direct, hands-on control over your actions; Formations, which see you teaming with other players tactically; and Sieges, which do what you'd imagine.

"Real Combat is our revolutionary multi-point melee system," Godager explains. "The unique aspect of this system is that you swing your weapon where you direct it. Imagine standing in front of your opponent and dividing the area around your opponent into six different areas. We use these to let the players direct and combine the swings to create brutal and effective slashes and thrusts, or combine them in combos or special attacks that do additional damage. You should really feel' the power of your character when you fight, feel the power of each and every blow."

The idea is to create a fast and intuitive targeting system that feels as close to actually swinging a sword as you can get online. It works for both melee and ranged weapons, with the camera flowing to an over-the-shoulder view for aiming if you're opting to play in first-person mode. The other aspect to remember is that the system combines player ability with traditional RPG attnbutes. You're still likely to get beaten to a pulp if you misjudge your opponent's power though, no matter how good your mouse skills are through years of Counter-Strike.

Hold... Hold...

Formation combat comes into its own once you're in the online world and teaming with others. This is a completely new aspect of multiplayer gameplay," Godager tells us. In previous RPGs, with indirect point-and-click movement, you've seen partybased formations. In Conan, for the first time you can not only have a formation, but be in direct control of both your character, NPCs and other players. The leader can decide on different formations and the degree of freedom the various players and NPCs can have within them. In some cases, it'll be essential to pick the right formation to survive. How will you stop a line of ten mounted knights thundenng down on you with furious anger? With an equally impressive line of pikemen digging in, naturally!"

Finally. Sieges will see you teaming with other players to protect cities, towers, keeps, houses and so on from bandits, monsters and enemy races or, alternatively, taking the fight to their fortified walls with siege weapons and hundreds of players. Combining Siege combat with formations and Real Combat gives us a truly unique, powerful and outright fun combat experience, never before seen in one game." adds Godager happily.

Hungry Like A Wolf

An impressive combat system is nothing without impressive enemies though, so aside from the PvP side of the game (which Godager fails to elaborate upon beyond indicating that it will exist in some form or another), the team at Funcom has been hard at work creating brand-new Al routines for monsters and creatures that behave both intelligently and realistically. Godager gives an example: In most RPGs, when you meet a wolf, it will attack, run up to you and stand there growling while attacking in a round-based manner like any other monster. In Conan, the wolves hunt in packs. They might evade you if you travel together, while if you're alone they'll hunt you down, circle you and even try to pull you off your horse."

The main tasks for the team have been realism and going beyond the formulaic nature of MMOG combat to provide something new. "You will never fight rats in Conan, I solemnly swear that right now!" laughs Godager. Most prey-like animals will flee when they sense you as all NPCs have vision, hearing, smell and sense, as in real life. To hunt something, you must approach silently from down-wind. One well-placed arrow should be enough."

On the flip side to that, huge boss' monsters will require plenty of strategic thought, more so than the usual simplistic MMO group combat options. Fighting a huge boss will be like fighting a hurricane." continues Godager. warming to his theme, "and you can't expect to stand there fighting his foot' as you'll be stomped and thrown around like a ragdoll. Only through locking shields in formations and using long spears might you win. On the other hand, who says you can't climb his back and stick your sword into his eye? I'm sure Conan would..."

Cimmererian Away

Naturally, there's still a fair amount of work to go on Conan - indeed, the already impressive-looking screenshots on these pages are all early alpha and being enhanced even further as we speak - with a first public showing of the game due in May at the E3 tradeshow.

It all sounds incredibly ambitious and if it weren't for the oodles of enthusiasm that pour out of Funcom and Godager whenever you get them talking on the subject, (and had Anarchy Online not proved to be the massive success it is), we'd probably be more worried than we are. As it is, we can't wait to strap on our furry boots, oil up our pectorals and practise our best Austrian accents. And it takes a lot to make us admit to that kind of behaviour.

Jargon Manuals At The Ready, It's Conan's Graphics Engine

With Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, we've really tried to push the envelope on the visual quality with something we call 'Magical Realism', says Godager of the game's graphic engine. The 3D engine will support DX9 standards. We've many technical features that make for an excellent eye-candy machine. For instance, trapezoidal shadowmaps for soft and beautiful shadows from everything, on everything. Per-pixel diffusing, specular and environmental lighting system, localised environmental maps, aerial perspective light scattering simulation for the day sky, ambient occlusion... Actually, it's all a bunch of fancy words that only the guys over at ATI really understand.

One standout feature of the engine is the layered animation system, blending many levels of animations on top of each other. Let's say you're wounded, visualises Godager. You still walk and run, possibly with a limp. Perhaps you get drunk to drown your sorrows and dull your pain? Now you still walk with a limp, but also an unsteady gait. This would perhaps make you stumble into a heap of snow. If so, you must lift your legs, as they sink in - giving a limping, drunken walk in the snow...

No Sex Please, We're Hyborian

The world of Conan was always a brutally misogynistic one, understandable given that Howard's novels were originally written in the 1930s: A long time before WWII, Martin Luther King or the '60s sexual revolution, says Godager.

This is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. The game will clearly be made for mature gamers, with raw violence, beheadings and brutal action. There will be scantly clad men and women and a sinful' sense of darkness through the game. This is Hyboria, and this is what appeals to so many fans. But, and this is important, it won't be done in a tasteless or exploitative manner. You will not be having sexual intercourse, nor will we ever look at women in a derogative manner."

It has been important to everyone at Funcom to lift Howard into the 21st century: Not all hardcore fans will agree to the choices I've had to make, he says. But I can promise you that Hyboria will never, ever be politically correct.

Making an online game these days is tough, as there are few interesting settings left to force into the bizarre mould that is the MMO. Luckily for us, there's a chauvinistic lore-trove waiting in the wings: Robert E. Howard's Hyboria -the world of shirtless sword-swinger Conan the Cimmerian - which has now become the most brutal MMO in existence.

At the start of Age of Conan you can pick one of 12 classes, split into four different archetypes - Soldier, Priest Rogue and Mage - of which most fall into the generic roles of tanking, melee and ranged damage, healing and spelldamage. The few exceptions to the genre standards are classes like the Herald of Xotli (a mage that morphs into deadly melee characters), The Tempest of Set (an area-of-effect healer and damage dealer) and the bizarre Demonologist (who must balance the damage his spells do to himself, against the awesome damage he does to opponents). While these innovations don't break the MMO format, they certainly crack it.

Pirate Hell

The first 20 levels have you hidden in the fully voice-acted pirate haven of Tortage. Here, you learn the basics of your chosen class through a mixture of single-player questing - your Destiny Quest storyline, which happens only at night - and the more standard MMO quests, which are accessed by manually flipping the island into daytime mode. The single-player fare is a series of missions that take you from being a newly arrived slave to the one responsible for the overthrowing of evildoer Strom and his Red Hand troops.

Throughout this you get introduced to the combat mechanics, the strange way in which AOC does conversations (see Dialogue with the barbarians box out), and some of the more engaging parts of AOCs overarching story. The Destiny Quest is an interesting and innovative way to teach you about your class, and is a joy to play thanks to the reasonably involving storyline, decent voice-acting, and the fact that you're basically playing in a solo instance - something that MMOs have needed for a fair bit of time. The single-player quests offer the potential to level your character as you would during the standard daytime quests too - meaning your midnight story adventures aren't at the expense of your character's development.

The Destiny Quest is certainly one of the most engaging parts of levelling to 20, but it doesn't completely satiate the levelling curve, which requires you to jump into daytime to reach milestones (10,15 and 18) before going on with the next part of the nighttime yarn.

These day-based quests are standard MMO affairs, with dungeons to crawl through, massive plants to kill, and even the crypt of someone's dead wife to look into only to find out she's turned into a monster. They dissonate alongside the story-heavy solo content, replacing calls to arms with monster bashing, but overall this is a well-executed ride through the first levels of the game.

Problems arise in that not only is Tortage the only starting city in the game, it can't be skipped. Getting through this tutorial stage takes at least six hours, and on your first go you'll find you have to do most of the quests available to scratch your way up to the end of the nighttime saga. The Destiny Quests change depending which class you're playing, but the different chains lead towards the same conclusion, and most of your time will be spent in the daytime picking up animal parts and killing tribesmen in the same few instances. Even on the first play-through, this can get repetitive.

While there's always the possibility that Funcom will allow us to skip Tortage altogether one day, perhaps introducing another city and storyline in a paid-for expansion, I'm not sure how likely that is. And preventing players having even a modicum of choice is a mite silly - even the nine year-old EverQuest let players begin in more than one area.

Fight Night

The most talked about element of AOC is its approach to combat Unlike most MMOs, there are no automatic attacks, with the basic blows dealt by hitting hotkeys for left, overhead and rightside attacks with either melee or ranged weapons. You choose the most effective one by watching the enemy's shields (see Protect your neckbeard box out), and drawing their defences to one side, letting you cause more damage by attacking the unprotected flank. But you need to take care you don't fall victim to similar tactics.

| Melee becomes complicated when you add combos (see below), which are special attack routines engaged by hitting a hotkey. This brings up a prompt box that tells you to press a series of left, overhead or right (and at later levels, lower-left and lower-right) strikes to unleash the combo. These are mostly par-for-the-course MMO skills and in practice can be a mixture of hilarious, visceral fun and unbelievable frustration, depending on how the user interface feels at the time.

The combo system is imperfect in that it depends on the floaty lag of a keyboard. You'll find you often break some three-button combos because there's a latency between key presses and the game registering them. In the heat of battle you have to tap in combos slowly enough for the game to take them in, which really gets in the way of what should be a fast-paced experience.

This awkwardness isn't entirely noticeable until you get to the later levels and you have multiple combos to put together in a sequence, requiring you to play a game of Dance Dance Revolution with your 1,2 and 3 keys. While this is doable - if your fingers are fast enough - it fast becomes annoying enough that you'll tend to use simpler combos.

This is a valiant attempt to reinvent the wheel - and it almost works - but the combo system needs smoothing out And as it existed throughout most of beta, I can't be sure when that will be.

Beyond The Island

Once you make it to 20 though, you're bundled onto a ship and out of the loving embrace of noob-dom. Gone are the voice-acted quest givers, replaced with distressing mutes with unmoving mouths, gesticulating in place of speaking. This worrying shift to lifelessness sadly epitomises what the rest of AOC turns into - a drab disappointment. While Tortage has had much love poured into it, the subsequent hub zones feel barren, the map barely helps you find your way around and quest-givers, and vendors and traders (AOCs guild banks and auction houses) are placed awkwardly and sporadically.

Once you're through the first nonTortage quests and receive the one pointing you towards the nearest grind zone, you talk to an NPC and get magically teleported to a hub full of yet more quest givers and, inevitably, peril. This is where AOC finishes transforming from story-based action MMO to an utterly monotonous experience. While it's not an entirely unenjoyable slog, cracks in Funcom's work begin to show.

Quests predominantly involve either collecting objects, killing 20 or so of a particular animal or bandit, or taking down a particularly nasty individual creature to receive some kind of remuneration at the end. Sure, this is much the same as WOW - but there's far less impetus here than in its rival grind-'em-up. Occasionally - and we're talking in the space of every five or so levels - a number of quests will point you obviously in the direction of one of AOCs dungeons. These are of much the same variety as the outdoor quests, but the change of scene and slight increase in danger make for some enjoyment until (as the retail game stands at the time of review) something immersion-breaking decides to creep in.

For example, on two separate occasions 1 found myself having to smash down an object - in one case a gigantic wall - only to have the thing disappear instead of shattering dramatically. There are going to be patches that will fix some of these problems, but from what I've seen there's going to have to be a lot of work to cover the sinkholes that litter Hyboria. While a lot of people have said that this has been a very stable launch of an MMO, which is certainly true, there's a big difference between stable and polished, and I'm afraid to say that several cans of Mr Sheen are evidently missing here.

Overall, Age of Conan is a complete MMORPG. The lore itself, while hardly outstanding, is functional enough to fit the requirements of things to kill, places to go, dungeons to chop your way through, and big, bad enemies to eviscerate. There are 80 levels with a curve that seems a bit tougher than World of Warcrafts, rewarding both solo and group play fairly equally, even at the higher levels.

There's also a fair amount of support for guilds, with the ability to build cities and eventually have supposedly gigantic siege battles - though I have to question how an engine that has frame rate drops when a few enemies get on screen can handle potential tens or even hundreds of players at once.

The player-versus-player side is also available, but this too still has great big holes in it, with no death penalties (you are resurrected in pretty much the same spot as they're killed), heavy balancing issues, and high levels of griefing make playing on one of the PvP servers an inadvisable experience - at least until Funcom delivers some much-needed method to the madness. When you're in a balanced fight PvP combat is fun, but (much like any game in which arseholes are given free reign) higher level players love to wade into areas not built for them and stomp on newer players for giggles.

Check Yourself

Finally, we have to touch upon how much AOC demands of the average PC. While (the admittedly far older) WOW will run on most PCs, to play AOC on any graphical setting above "A bit rubbishlooking" requires a dual core processor, at least 2GB of memory and a decent video card (with at least 512MB of RAM). AOCs minimum specs resemble EQII and preposterous system requirements, striving to become "future-proof," but the game lacks payoff. At the higher-end, AOC looks reasonably good but it still manages to judder on anything less powerful than Deep Blue. When you're desperately trying to pull together that last combo, you'll find yourself switching to lower settings in case your 3D card can't take it The much-touted DirectX 10 support won't be available for a while either.

Overall, AOC isn't a bad game, but it has been over-hyped. Once you pass by the initially impressive first 20 levels, you find yourself stuck in the same monotony that plagues lesser titles working with less-promising lore and it only gets more repetitive and generic as you level up. Even the class feats and progression feel dull, with classes gaining too few abilities to ensure that making that extra push through the last of an area's unappetising content feels worthwhile. The Hyboria lore itself doesn't have the lustre to make a convincing world, or (more likely) hasn't been exploited well enough; no matter how many hours I ploughed into AOC post-Tortage, it was always hard to give a shit.

This is a genuine shame, because somewhere near the beginning AOC gives the feeling that it's revolutionary. However, once you pass the infant stages of the game, play becomes all too familiar, all too repetitive and all too unpolished. I'm not saying avoid Age of Conan - feel free to give it a go and enjoy the early stages with your free 30 days of play. But when Funconi starts to demand $8.99 a month, AOC becomes harder to recommend.

Some fixing and additions would improve Age of Conan, but at its core it lacks the fight and soul to evolve into a truly amazing MMO.

Protect your neckbeard

Fighting, shields, Age of Conan and you...

In battle, you'll find yourself having to change the direction of your attacks to adapt to where your enemy is concentrating their defences. This is represented by three shield icons -one overhead, one on the left and one on the right - that can be moved and stacked. Doing this increases protection at that spot but leaves the others vulnerable. You can move your shields' positions by holding down CTRL and hitting an attack key. But at times AOC doesn't show you which direction the enemy is attacking from, which can be frustrating.

Each combo attack also has a particular direction, adding a fun tactical element to each battle where you throw off the enemy by making them pile their shields on one side, leaving the others open for an assault.

If there's anything that can be said about the combat system, it's that when it works it's genuinely more fun than we've had while grinding in years. While it's not as effective as Funcom planned, or as complex as the original combo system was, it's an improvement over the drudgery that is traditional automated attacks in MMOs.