Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures E3 Previews
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We ended our tour with a brief visit to an extremely high-level dungeon known as "Black Ring Citadel," a level-80 dungeon (80 will be the highest character level you can attain at the game's launch) intended for the game's full "raid" contingent of up to 24 characters. The dungeon itself seemed to be an elegant temple under construction, alternating between rooms floored with red marble and pillars adorned with golden serpents, on the more developed side, and stony caves being carved out by slave crews. Apparently, the dungeon will be the base of a mad wizard who has discovered the secret of animating stone gargoyles and bending the beasts to his will, so players will be attacked by smaller stony creatures before confronting the sorcerer himself. The sorcerer, when defeated, actually tumbles out of his robes and becomes a gigantic, stony monstrosity. After this form of the wizard was ultimately destroyed, our party delved further into the dungeon to a gigantic hall in which an enormous gargoyle creature much larger than the full screen's size stood in wait for us, and summoned additional gargoyles and apprentice wizards while it swiped at our party with its huge claws.
The second is at Destructoid:
It was refreshing to see gigantic landscapes reaching out in all directions and actually have enough foliage to fill each huge scene, although the game did crash once during gameplay. Age of Conan obviously destroys World of Warcraft graphically, but they stress that they're not trying to compete, but instead offer a different gameplay experience to players by giving them more freedom. I was curious how Funcom would handle the players when their freedom reached out to eBay and selling in-game items. However, they feel confident that their years of experience with Anarchy Online has them prepared enough to be their to help and monitor everybody.
The third is at RPGFan:
Since the world of Conan isn't a happy place, PvP is a large part of the world. While there are battleground-style PvP objectives in Minigame PvP, most of Conan's PvP is oriented around Border Kingdoms and Drunken Brawling. Border Kingdoms is the name of Age of Conan's massive PvP system, allowing players to capture territory and build battle keeps, defending territory from enemies. However, there are no set factions like the Horde and Alliance in Conan, a player's faction is determined by his guild and friends. Drunken Brawling, on the other hand, discards most hallmarks of RPGs. There are no regular statistics or gear in this brawl. All of a player's stats are based on what they've drunk and how drunk they are. A player who's had a bunch of tequila will fight different than a player who's been imbibing mead. It's a unique idea, and it's an interesting way to balance PvP duels.
The fourth is at RPGamer:
Targeting in Age of Conan also takes a turn from the norm. In most MMOs you select the mob you wish to attack via the mouse or a hotkey. However in AoC the nearest enemy is automatically targeted once the player draws their weapon. This may sound ineffective at first, however it allows for fast paced combat in large groups of enemies. If you want to get to an enemy behind a group of mobs you can charge through them hacking and slashing all the way through. Even casters use this same method of targeting. All combat spells are manually aimed by the player via line of sight or a mouse selected AoE area. The controls did confuse us at first but within two minutes we were quickly able to adapt and found them to be quite fun and effective. Having this kind of control over our character really does make the gameplay experience more immersive. If you enjoy leisurely drinking coffee while watching your character autoattack mobs, you might have trouble adapting to Age of Conan.
The fifth is at Kotaku:
The pet system, while interesting (necromancers summoning multiple pets using eight "points," with various pets costing different amounts) has really goofy pathfinding, which kind of drew me out of the game. A group of eight scorpions bounced around like air hockey pucks instead of seeming like actual creatures with legs.
And the sixth is at The Escapist:
Rather than your typical auto attack, players have five different directions in which they can swing, ranging from straight on to about a 200-degree arc. During the demo, the guy running the play-through was actually trying to hack under a frost giant's shield to do more damage, and what really threw me off was the giant picked up on what he was doing, adjusted his shield, and resumed fighting. What's more, casters have an actual area of effect, in that they have a cone in which their spells do stuff. For instance, if you're casting a fireball-type spell, anything within your 30-degree cone will get hit by it, as opposed to targeting individual monsters. Really, it seems as though Funcom is forcing the MMOG genre to make real games as opposed to convenient places to hang out with your e-friends.
