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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (PC)

By Michael J. Catania on Friday, June 6, 2008 at 9:00 AM EST  

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures offers all the benefits of a mature (17+) rating in a genre that blood, gore, and sex are, more often than not, all but absent from. The very first quest introduces new players to the world of Hyboria’s fantasy-medieval setting, established by Robert E. Howard in 1932, with great gusto.

Hyboria is a place where every successful attack results in blood splatter. Where very attractive and hardly clothed dames chained to trees make it very clear how they’d repay any would-be rescuer. A place where players who choose to enter the world as a female avatar can take off their top and have their exposed breasts (with actual nipples *gasps*) that bounce with every parry made in combat. Then there is the random chance for a gruesome fatality where limbs are severed, axe heads get intimate with opponents’ chest cavities, and still-beating hearts are ripped out.

These may all be pretty shallow staples of mature-rated games, but to see them all occur in an MMORPG is, as I must admit, pretty entertaining.

But can Age of Conan offer enough to the massively multiplayer online roleplaying gaming masses to bother putting a World of Warcraft subscription on hold?

The running tutorial that encompasses the first hour or so of the game has Funcom providing an emphatic ‘yes’ to that question. First looks are important and Age of Conan excels above its MMO competitors in the graphical arena. The water looks gorgeous, the foliage is lush (and has an excellent area-of-visibility effect when a player is covered by shrubbery), the character models look great, and the world is designed in the most logical way that volcanoes and mountains in every area allows. The artistic style of the game is a very realistic one but, surprisingly, Funcom has managed to pull it off in a way that the Everquest 2 team could not.

It is a shame, then, that the game dominates the body and soul of the computer which runs it; sometimes, it does this for mysterious reasons. I played the game on my Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, and 640mb Geforce 8800GTS machine and was often running at less-than-twenty frames per second. And for some reason, turning on the game’s gorgeous loom effect halved my performance. But, at this point, PC gamers everywhere should be accustomed to upgrading or minimizing the graphics settings of new powerhouse games to get acceptable performance.

The next most-hyped bullet point for Age of Conan is its active combat system which, on its surface, is nothing particularly special. However, in practice the combat is an absolute joy to engage in. The method of input is still dragging icons onto a hotbar and then hitting their corresponding number on your keyboard to activate that particular attack, but it’s how the game makes the hotbar work that’s so special.

There are three attack directions to start, because novice warriors don’t know how to wave their weapons in the five directions that a level forty character does, and these can be treated as singular attacks for low-to-moderate damage. The real damage/healing/effects come from the skills on the hotbar which initiate a combo series where the player has to tap the correct directions to fully complete. Each tap of the combo does damage and, at the end of a successful input array, the skill itself activates. Even though players are still tapping the numbers and letters on their keyboard like every other MMORPG the gameplay interpretation manages to seem completely new and original.

And, what’s more, is that every attack affects every opponent that comes in contact with the spell/swing so a barbarian can easily take on three enemies at once if he or she assumes a proper position.

The first twenty levels of Age of Conan play a bit schizophrenically in that a player has to awkwardly jump back-and-forth between single-player (night time) and multiplayer (daytime) missions– and the multiplayer portion of the game takes place entirely in instanced zones which contain a fraction of the total player base within a certain area.

So Jim may be in Instance #12 in the City of Tortage along with forty-some odd, other players while Pam may be in Instance #13 of Tortage with sixty other players and, save for specially-bound instances reserved for a singular group of players, the entire game works like this. There is no seamless world here, all areas are reached by means of an entrance/exit point which will activate a loading screen and transport the character to the new zone. This whole system comes across as a bizarre hybrid of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars and, unfortunately, begs the question of why such a high ($15 USD per month) a monthly fee is necessary to play the game.

Furthering this feeling of game design awkwardness are the vast differences between the first twenty levels of the game and the following sixty. The first twenty consist of primarily single-player missions, an abundance of quests (several large quest chains can be completely ignored), and all feature fully voice-acted NPCs.

Once this introductory segment is finished the player is thrust into the meat of the game world and all voice acting stops except for the “destiny quest” that runs throughout the game at certain level iterations; this transition handled poorly and felt like a bug when, suddenly, I’m forced to read quest text for myself. The lack of voice acting throughout the entire game is understandable due to the game’s enormous size but the gap between the first twenty levels and the rest of the game is far larger than it should be. A player’s transportation from the introductory zones into the rest of the game should be a very cool moment but, as the game stands now, just leaves a player feeling kind of empty when the loading screen finishes its duty and the character just appears in an entirely new place.

It is that same feeling of emptiness that haunts aspects of the endgame as well. No MMORPG is ever perfect at launch and, while my time in Hyboria was marked by an amazing lack of bugs, there are holes in the amount of content available to players as they progress from level twenty to eighty. At the time of this article’s publication, Funcom has already announced that they are well-aware of holes in content from levels 35-40 and 50-60. It also remains to be seen how well the guild cities will function in the context of an enormous guild battle (and, for that matter, how well it will perform).

So, to return to earlier, is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures entry in the genre substantial enough to hold its footing in the wake of a giant? Absolutely. It’s the first MMORPG in years that manages to bring worthwhile game mechanics to the table while backing them up with a solid questing, crafting, and socializing foundation. The classes are diverse and well-balanced, the combat is fun, the gore is great, the women are attractive, the men are hulking beasts of human beings, and the adventures are a blast.

Also, fatalities in player-versus-player combat? Priceless.

This you can trust…

Primotech Rating: ★★★☆☆

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