Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

By the end of 2006 MMORPG genre seems to have reached a height it hasn't been dreaming of. Imagine: the first game that was considered to be a massive multiplayer RPG had a server maximum of 200 players. Nowadays this number is good for a local PvP arena to capture a garbage dumpster. Point and click actions and following strict mathematics to build your "unique" character have got hundreds of thousands of people seated in front of their PC with bloodshot eyes spending hours robot-style. Seems like there is no place left for a hero...

Having fed up with looks of that sad picture we turn our gaze to a, hopefully, grasp of fresh air: a promising action-packed MMORPG game based on Robert E.Howard's notorious Conan novels. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is to come next year when Funcom and Eidos finish stirring the magical ingredients of action gameplay, role-playing complexity, and an amazing storyline.

Age of Conan is going through a closed beta-test. So all the information available comes out from the game director Gaute Godager which showed the game's innovative concept through a quick tour of gameplay.

You start out as a level 1 character, an ex-slave having run off from the master's galley. But hey, where's everyone? Age of Conan differs from the rest of MMORPG in that it is first played single-player. Having got hold of the game's principles and evolving to level 20 you get to choose your class (soldier, priest, mage, rogue) and advance to multiplayer environment. But if you choose to start over with a new character after that, there will be no restrictions so you can join the fun sooner.

The port city of Tortage will be home for you until level 20 puberty period. It appears in front of us in its breathtaking beauty. The detalization of the game is truly impressive. The city is interestingly planned: monumental stone towers built on a cliff are slightly covered in humid fog which gives us a hint that a harbor is situated nearby. Having enough climbing skills it's possible to get a better look from the top of nearly every building. We like interactive stuff don't we?

Now let's get to the more fun part. The PVP system: which is presented in an own style: Drunken Brawling Player-Versus-Player battles is one of them. Cities in the gaming space are filled with such opportunities.  You drop into a tavern, get yourself a drink (which will boost some of your fighting skills), get drunk, get into a fight. No strings attached. No interest in killing someone specific, no interest in capturing some piece of crap. It's all about getting into a bar fight. Pretty fun and social. Because instead of a super-enchanted-mega-rare-ultra-long-sword which usually solves all problems everyone will be using anything in their vicinity: furniture, bottles and so on. Of course there is also place to put your mega-sword to use - the other two pvp modes will be Capture the Flag and a, more massive, City Siege. With one side attacking and the other one defending. Now about the real difference between Age of Conan and the rest. There's no autocombat. The melee clash is not a click-and-watch process. You'd have to control all of your character's moves and chain up combos which are pretty spectacular, like piercing the enemy with a sword and kicking him off it. To our delight Gaute Godager was definitely heavily influenced by brutality of barbarian world. This brings some bloody spirit to a battle making it more than simply a contest of equipment and characters' levels that we usually get in an MMORPG. And things get simplified: developers say that for an X-box 360 version of the game a gamepad would be enough. Having that you also use game's voice chat for communicating.

Having got around with that we might want to try out the game's mounts. These include a horse, a camel and a mammoth. You get melee damage bonuses and horseback attacks there, you can also equip a bow and fire from that position (which involves you into some mouse aiming).

That only covers most of the soldier's and rogue's everyday life issues. The routine of priests and mages will also have a share of developer's originality. Spell-weaving is the new word here: a mage or a priest can mix two different spells to cast a new one, with more effect than just casting those two in a consecutive way.

But that's not all. There's a large element of real-time strategy in the game, as it has a number of prestige classes starting from level 40: lord, commander, crafter and more. These will define your role in a guild. You will be doing more than going on raids and engaging in wars - a guild can advance and build its own city. Yes with shops, blacksmith, headquarters and everything you wish. Craftsmen will come in handy for some architecture work, lords would do their best to find resources for the precious city, commanders will lead troops to conquer new territories and to defend existing.

Everything we have seen about this game from gaming exhibitions is inspiring and mind blowing. Funcom doesn’t hesitate to put to life anything you can think of  would be a good in a MMORPG. So all we have to do is see if different complicated pieces will fit into a perfect picture by the first quarter of 2007. Let's hope.