Age of Conan: The Hyborean Adventures

The Design

You will start out on the beach, having escaped from the slavers, armed only with a broken paddle. Nearby, you will find your first missions; these exchanges take place in a letterboxed style, with dialog choices allowing you to do a little role playing. From there, you'll head into the jungle. Perhaps you'll find more missions along the way, but you will definitely learn how to fight. Melee is much more nuanced than is usual, with several different buttons dedicated to specific attacks. You can sweep around, attacking multiple baddies, or you can leap up and land a devastating blow, or you can stabby stab.

And not only will mounts be available, but you can fight while riding. You may want to stick with your trusty sword, or you can grab a lance for a surprise jousting match. It's up to you. Your combat options are more limited, but you can of course move around the battlefield much faster.

Magic also gets an interesting treatment. The Herald, for example, described as a "melee mage" casts spells on himself for protection and damage. You have to ride a fine line, however, because casting too much magic can turn you into a demon, and that will have some affect on gameplay. However, if you can manage the tightrope, there's Spell Weaving. Basically, you can create your own magic effects; there's a "container" spell, another action inside this that builds upon the first spell, and a "lid" spell to finish things off. This type of magic can be quite powerful, but you will accumulate "soul corruption" and may eventually die, even as the corruption grants you extra powers. When you die, you must fight your way out of Hell. Literally.

The Game World, and Beer

As we mentioned, there's a single-player aspect to this. In fact, you can play the game up to level 80 before you need to enter the online portion. Or you can play this section in "co-op" mode, with a small party of other players. However, the MMO half is where the action is. Here, you can join clans and build your own villages, if you have at least thirty players in your little tribe. It can be your travel hub, trading post, repair shop, and more. You can hire NPCs (non-player characters) to guard the place, peons to do the dirty maintenance work, and there are upgrade tiers for all buildings.

Unfortunately, you could spend hours with this game and only scratch the surface. That's the way it is with MMOs. The universe is complex, in the hopes of keeping people interested in it. Our tour eventually had to be cut short, but not before the Funcom guys showed off the drunken brawling mechanic. No, this ain't a joke.

As it turns out, getting drunk and punching someone in the face can actually turn out to be a good thing. Nobody dies, mind you; instead of death, the loser is just knocked out for a little bit. If you find that the whole thing is not your bag, you can hunt down virtual water and coffee to quicken the path to sobriety (which works a lot faster in a virtual world than it does in Real Life). Adding depth to this minigame is a rock-paper-scissors approach: Different types of alcohol will give you different abilities -- and weaknesses. So you can't simply chain wins together because you press buttons faster than the other violent wino.

We were also shown some Super Secret stuff we can't talk about yet, so keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for an update. It's hard to wait, but at least you don't have to contemplate it on the Tree of Woe.

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment