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What is best in life?
[quote=Conan]To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women![/quote]
That's right folks, due out in just under two weeks now is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures! I have had the ability to experience the Open Beta over the past week or so here and here is what information I can give you.
[size=18]Character Creation:[/size]
The character creation process is fairly straight forward as one might suspect. You choose your gender, then your race, then your class (some classes are not available to some races).
There are three races to choose from during character creation. The Aquilonian, Cimmerian, or Stygian. Each race of people have their own backgrounds, I will not get into those here.
There are 12 classes you can choose from, there are four basic class types, which are then broken down into 3 specific classes.
[b]Soldier:[/b]
Guardian, Conqueror, or Dark Templar
[b]Priest:[/b]
Priest of Mitra, Tempest of Set, or Bear Shaman
[b]Rogue:[/b]
Barbarian, Assassin, or Ranger
[b]Mage:[/b]
Necromancer, Herald of Xotli, or Demonologist
[size=18]Feats and Skills:[/size]
The feat and skill system in the game are not very unique to most who have played their own fair share of MMOs.
Some classes have multiple feat trees they can go through. For example, my level 13 assassin has 3 feat trees available to him. The generic feat tree that I believe everyone gets, and two specific feat trees that focus on two very different aspects he can choose to go. The Lotus tree focuses on poison based attacks that drain the enemies mana points, or the unholy tree that does additional damage. Each feat has a 5 ranks, and feats down the chain require that you have spent X number of feat points on various feats.
The skill system is pretty straight forward as well. Each class will have a selection of skills from seven that are implemented. The skills are as follows.
[list]Perception -- Allows you to spot potentially hidden enemies and traps.
Bandaging -- Allows you to heal faster outside of combat.
Regen Mana -- Same as Bandaging, except for mana points.
Concentration -- Determines how prone you are to having your spell cancelled due to distraction.
Hiding -- Allows you to hide and become invisible to others, higher the skill, less likely to be spot.
Climbing -- Determines the difficulty of objects that you can climb (such as ladders and slopes)
Taunt -- Higher the skill in taunting, greater chance of making enemies aggressive towards you.[/list:u]
The max skill points you can spend on a skill is 10 x Current level. So if you are a level 5, you can have 50 skill points in hide and 20 in climb if you're so inclined.
You gain skill points by fighting enemies. You do not always get skill points, but occasionally you will.
[size=18]Server Types:[/size]
It looks like on release, there will be three types of servers available. PvE, PvP, PvP-RP.
[size=18]Combat:[/size]
Here is where it gets kind of neat. It uses a real-time combat system. Think less like WoW in a sense that you can't just "set it and forget it" (thank you Ronco for that one). You have to be monitoring where the enemy is defending himself more, and use that to your advantage when attacking. It uses a three bar, three position system to determine how blocking is working. If you see 2 bars on the left side of an enemy, it means he is blocking more to that side than the right, so use attacks that focus on the right side. What makes it neat is that the enemies will adapt to how you are fighting them (assuming they live long enough), and will adjust their blocking stances. You as a player can also setup your own blocking situation similar to the enemies.
Also as you level you gain combos. Which in turn are basically special attacks, that when you activate it, you have to follow what may be an easy sequence of attacks to execute. Currently in the Open Beta, I have not seen any that go past a single attack point in order to score the combo. This will more than likely change as levels go higher.
In addition to the real-time combat system, they have added fatalities to the game. You get a small percentage when you finish off an enemy to score a fatality. When this happens you get an special strike used on the enemy that is fairly brutal. When you gain a fatality, you gain some bonuses and regain some Stamina/Mana quickly. Pretty neat.
[size=18]PvP[/size]
I have not had a chance to experience PvP as of yet. There are three styles of PvP.
Open PvP -- Everywhere except cities are PvP zones. Watch your back here, as your buddy could turn on you and take you out.
PvP Minigames -- These are nearly like the FPS style matches. Capture the Skull and Team Annihilation.
Massive PvP/Seige PvP -- Guild vs Guild essentially. You can if you're so inclined become a hired mercenary for a guild if you are not one of them. There are a limited number of battlekeeps in the game to fight over.
Also there is a completely separate leveling up system in PvP, but the items obtained I believe are kept for PvP only, not the regular game.
[size=18]Side Notes:[/size]
Something neat too is that there is a single-player portion to the game that you can do, they are considered "night quests" which you have instances all to yourself while you try to accomplish what appear as "destiny" quests. I believe after level 20 it changes.
I am unsure of the current level cap when the game goes live, there are some NPCs that are level 80, but that does not signify the level cap.
There is mounted combat in the game. I know at least for certain in PvP.
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I know this info is sloppy but its there.
I was having fun playing it. Currently the level cap on the open beta is 13, so getting high up in level isn't possible. They have plans on opening it up to 20 this weekend and converting all the servers to PvP.
If you know what you're doing you can get a character up to level 10 or so in around an hour so that's not the hard part.
[i]So, did Conan return the wayward daughter of King Osric to her home.
And having no further concern, he and his companions sought adventure in the West.
Many wars and feuds did Conan fight.
Honor and fear were heaped upon his name and, in time, he became a king by his own hand........ [b]And this story shall also be told*[/b].
[/i]
[b][size=24][color=darkred]CROM!!![/color][/size][/b]
*they meant 'played'!
Just pre-ordered this from Amazon. Major selling point for me? The ability for the priests of set to turn into a giant snake!
While others will be learning lame combos I'll be turning into a giant snake and calling down the wraith of the great and powerful snake god upon my enemies.
Muahahahahahahahahahahahaha
A quick mini review.
Over all Age of Conan is just another mmo, it seems very polished, but doesn't beat you over the head with its awesome in any particular way. Where games like City of Heroes/Villains stand out with amazing character creation (and poor everything else), or pirates stands out with revolutionary strategic combat, Conan is just an incremental improvement on the genre.
Over all the graphics (including animations) and sound are really good. Far better than any other mmo I've tried. The animations are varied and all of the attacks are easy to distinguish. The illusion of interaction between character is quite good. Full voice acting for everything I've encountered so far has really helped with immersion. The music is good and appropriate to the setting.
The character creation system will be instantly familiar to anybody who has played world of warcraft. You have a number of races and a number of classes available to each race (with some overlap). You can then set a few physical parameters (this part is more similar to EQ2 in scope). Once in game you mostly customize your character with dropped loot and talent points invested in three trees.
Combat is more interactive than any other mmo I've tried. In order to use your special attacks you need to use combos. To kick off a combo you select it like you would in any other skill in an mmo, but then to trigger the effect you need to perform a specific series of attacks. Practice will certainly improve your abilities to get the most out of combos. Additionally you need to keep track of the direction from which your attacks come, npcs and characters will guard more heavily against certain directions. Attacking an unguarded direction will do more damage and be less likely to be parried. An enemies guard may change during combat, so it keeps you from getting in a rut. Magic works exactly like WoW and EQ2, however, there is supposedly a combo like system that is unlocked at level 50 for magic.
The single player 'night missions' are very well done. In the day missions you'll do the usual mmo activities of killing 50 whatevers, or collecting 10 doodads. In day mode there are a few interesting multipart quests, but they are rare. However, in the night missions you'll follow a fairly well written story arc that is somewhat different for each general type of class (warrior, rogue, priest, and mage). In this arc you learn why you are in Tortage, what the evil leader of the red hand is up to, and you'll work towards regaining your 'lost' abilities. Over all the night missions are high quality, and with a little more work and less static zones would have made for a decent stand alone game. The story is interesting, the characters are interesting, and the night missions as a whole don't feel like a chore.
Now that I've mentioned pretty much all of the cool things that I've noticed, I'll get into the bad. Pets are nearly worthless, the pet implementation is the least interesting of any mmo I've tried. Your pets can't tank for you, and do not appear to be a significant portion of your dps. On the plus side your pets don't attract adds and Conan allows you to have a lot of summons. Talents and more beefy summons might change that, but at level 12 I was disappointed by the necromancer. It doesn't seem like the demonologist (the other pet class) fares much better.
There are some bugs, but they haven't detracted from the game yet for me. When loading a zone occasionally I'll get some graphical glitches (mostly textures loading slowly, npcs taking a long time to show up, etc). I could probably fix these problems by turning down my settings, but they don't happen all the time. Also when I try to close the game, it will crash. Since I was closing the game anyway this isn't a big deal, but I hope they fix it.
Items are screwy, there isn't an easy way to tell if one item is better than another. Going strictly off of displayed stats there is very little (if any) difference between cloth, leather, and heavy armor. Similarly it is hard to tell which of a vaguely similar stat should be optimized (ie, do you concentrate on defense, con, hp, damage reduction, or resistance?). Also you never know where a damage mod is being applied. Mostly I've been finding the articles of clothing that I believe look most awesome and keep those until something obviously better shows up (for instance I have a sweet hat that makes it look like my characters face is poking out of the mouth of a giant snake *thumbs up*).
In conclusion, if you are looking for a different take on the fantasy mmo genre with a slightly more mature bent and a fresh coat of paint Conan seems well worth checking out. The game is going to go through a rapid series of patches since several key features (like the item bank and auction) are currently disabled because of potential exploits. Similarly the individual classes are going to evolve quickly, the Tempest has already had several major changes in the first week after the launch. The graphics are pretty hefty, so you might want a moderately beefy machine if you want to see the prettiest pictures.
Can you walk wherever you want, like WoW, or are there those freaky fake walls that are so prevalent in Pirates and DDO that keep you from just walking the coastline? Oddly, I find this is a big factor in an MMO for me.
You can indeed walk almost anywhere. There are a few places that are inaccessible due to grade, but for the most part you have free reign to explore. Typically if there is an arbitrary wall it is represented by an actual honest to goodness obstruction.
There are a lot more instances than in WoW (where only group content forced you to look at a loading screen). The starting island (which I have yet to leave) has four or five dungeons, a few mansions that you can infiltrate, a few caves, a barbarian infested island, a ghoul infested valley, and the stronghold of an evil witch. There is also an island hub that contains the city of Tortage and the entraces to all of these locations. I imagine that the main lands are setup similarly, except probably without the fun night mission mode.
So do you like the beta at all? I'm the biggest conan fan, but i was NOT impressed when I saw this at GenCon.
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Official Gamer Hooligan