Hands-On with Age of Conan (Part 2)

By Alan Bell

Last week we had a look at the basic ins and outs of the upcoming (28th of May in New Zealand) Age of Conan MMO from Funcom. This week, we take a look at combat as well as the technical breakdown of this would-be World of Warcraft.

Questing soon leads to combat and, yet again, there are differences to what you might be used to should you be coming at this with mmo experience under your belt. Instead of the old "target, right click to attack, occasionally select a special move" method of yore, AoC spices things up with combos and defensive techniques. Mobs (short for mobiles - in short, the enemy creatures that inhabit the world) will defend themselves against attack with three "shields". These shields can be placed overhead, to the left or to the right. The more observant of you will have already made the conneciton but for the rest, this directly correlates with the three attack buttons on the user interface, as mentioned earlier.

When you enter melee combat with a mob, the mob will set its defenses in a random pattern. This could be, for example, all three shields defending against attacks from above, one of the sides, or spread out amongst all three slots. Attacking a mob overhead, for example, when he has one shield on that slot will do less damage to that mob than it will if he has no shields there. Additionally, repeatedly attacking one slot will cause that mob to adjust his shields so as to provide better defense against an attack there - since he can only have three shields, this will expose another area. Moving your attacks to the new area will make a big difference as to how much damage you will do against that target. Exactly how this will work in a multiplayer environment is something we unfortunately were unable to experiment with.

Casting is a far more familiar affair; select the target, choose your spell and voila - pretty much everything you'd expect, complete with casting bars and cooldowns. One nice addition is the inclusion of enemy cast bars in the default UI; no need to install an addon or even enable an option to see what the enemy is casting and how far away they are from singeing all the hair off your head with it. Your cast bars are presented on the left of the screen, the enemy's on the right. Simple, unobtrusive and available for your inspection should you so desire.

The UI of the game as a whole can be summed up as both elegant and simple; it doesn't get in your way yet everything you expect and more is at your fingertips. It all looks, animates and behaves very nicely - far from the "first generation" user interface mmo players would otherwise expect from a game which isn't even at retail yet. When you learn a new skill, it will automatically be placed in your skill bar - there's no need to hunt for it in a spell book here (you can, of course, move or remove it if you want to).

Once you get to the first town, you'll be immediately introduced to a "hybrid" gameplay mechanic which, as far as we're aware, is unique to Age of Conan. When you're at an inn, you can talk to the innkeeper to change the time of day between day and night. Why would you do that? Because at night, Age of Conan is a singleplayer game. That's right, it's not even multiplayer - let alone massively. It's at night that the story side of things take place - a story which the developers feel would get somewhat lost if, whilst you were discussing the latest exploits of King Conan with a quest NPC for example, some tard called n00bedurmomlol was tea-bagging a mountain gorilla's corpse in the background.

The "time of day" mechanic shifts more than just your perspective (as well as the hues in which the game is rendered, naturally), rearranging the layout of NPCs and how they'll react to you as well. For example, you'll be unable to get to certain areas of the game during the day, as the guards on duty will obliterate you with their level +20 sword of great smiting. Fortunately, come night time, they're drunk or otherwise occupied, granting free passage to otherwise unexplorable parts of the map.

Otherwise the game behaves much the same in both modes, combat is identical and even with a 350ms average ping, there was no real difference in how we interacted with NPCs. There are no other players around, of course, and it seemed like the mobs dropped much less loot (95% of the singleplayer mobs didn't drop anything, compared with most multiplayer mobs dropping something). Otherwise you still get xp and you still level up, just as you would otherwise.

Performance on the test pc was fairly average - on medium settings at 1280x1024, it looked fairly mediocre and topped out around 20fps. Dropping detail to low and the resolution to 1024x768, as well as shifting from full screen to windowed mode sped things up quite a bit. With 4GB of RAM, a 7900GS videocard and a dual core cpu, this was disappointing. Still, it's not ugly with those settings and it's always nice to know that the game you're playing will get better if you upgrade your rig - not always the case with mmos! Word on the street is that a grunty CPU / videocard combo with 64bit Vista / DirectX 10 makes AoC look out of this world.

Animation of characters and the various NPCs that fill the world vary from nice, subtle detail through to fairly awkward movement (jumping, for example, looks odd in the extreme). The animation was particularly garish when viewing an in-game cutscene, as NPCs or the player jerk in and out of pre-canned sequences back to the idle animations they perform when not actively doing something. It's nothing major but it can be pretty disconcerting - a sign in itself that the game is otherwise fairly polished, as it stands out to the eye.

NPCs and other players actually block your character from freely moving around the environment. That is to say, as in the real world, you can't just walk through someone/a mob; they will block your passage. This is a pretty significant departure for MMOs as a genre and it will be interesting indeed to see how significant a problem this will ultimately be - the potential for other players "griefing" you by preventing you from leaving a town, accessing a quest NPC/inn etc is extremely high.

So, with nipples (they're currently in the game), hot graphics (if you've got a rig capable of driving it), a polished interface, streamlined levelling (getting to level 80 should take you less time than getting to level 70 in WoW) and the Conan universe to tootle around in, is AoC going to be worth your attention? Things are looking very promising - its chances likely ride on the ability of Funcom to handle the opening days (then weeks) after launch. All going well, Age of Conan is going to be one to look out for. Look out for our review soon after release, followed by post-launch updates on our progress and that of the servers and community held therein.

You're excited? Feel these nipples!

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