True to the series’ amoral and brutal ethos, Age Of Conan’s Hyboria certainly lacks the popular colourful high fantasy aesthetic of worlds like Azeroth. The emphasis here is on gritty, with dismembered corpses littering various areas and semi-clad prostitutes hailing your character as it walks through the cities.

In fact, the grittiness goes right down to the character creation toolkit. Though
it works in a way very similar to Oblivion’s, it triumphs at producing fabulously ugly characters, replete with scars and tattoos for added effect. It’s easy to imagine, however, growing happily attached to the gaunt-cheeked, bug-eyed freak that we managed to conjure up in our session.

Funcom is instead tailoring Age Of Conan to offer what it hopes will be a more accessible MMO experience. That said, some of the inventive ideas to achieve this that Funcom has described at earlier presentations of the game have been watered down since the beta test.



New players were originally going to have to play through many levels before entering the multiplayer world in an attempt to make sure that everyone would be thoroughly experienced by the time they could mix. Now, the early game – instanced so the player does not encounter other players – is a matter of a few hours between the player character being shipwrecked and washed up on a beach on the small island of Tortage, doing a few quests before making their way into Tortage city and the wider world.

Still in place, however, is the decision to delay choice of character class until level 20, so players can base it on proper experience. Conversations with non-player characters also drop WOW-style text boxes in favour of singleplayer-friendly cinematically framed shots of the speakers.



Age Of Conan’s big ‘casual’ draw is its active fighting system, inspired, we’re told, by the likes of Ninja Gaiden, God Of War and Dynasty Warriors. In a move away from the D&D-esque turn-based systems of most MMOs, attacks are initiated in realtime, with players having to orient their character properly to be able to hit their target.

Characters open with three possible directional strikes: from the left, the right and above. As they gain levels another two directions will become available. Strikes are made by either clicking on a special ‘combat rose’ representing the directions set at the bottom of the screen, or on the keyboard. Equivalents to WOW’s abilities are combos – special attacks initiated by hitting sequences of timed strikes. Characters are also equipped with dodge moves, achieved through double taps on directional keys.

Further depth to the system is afforded by being able to assign different weighting to armour to defend certain parts of the body better. Enemies will be differentially armoured, too, with their appearance revealing weaknesses: absence of a helmet will suggest susceptibility to over-the-head strikes, for example.



To new players, the system feels somewhat cumbersome. Despite its active nature, all moves are still subject to animation cycles and cooldowns, rendering most fights we had strike-for-strike exchanges until one combatant fell. Many fights also seem rather chaotic, especially, as we found, when parties are entirely melee fighters. And how the system will cope with lag remains to be seen. However, things are likely to smoothen out with balancing (system designer Jason Allen Stone acknowledges that there’s much more to be done here), and greater player experience and character abilities, though this rather contradicts the game’s touted accessibility.

From what little we’ve seen of Hyboria, it’s already highly detailed, featuring towering mountains and complex cities. The huge Pict Aztec-style pyramid on which much of our playtest was based was breathtaking in scope – Funcom intends for much of it to be able to be explored. Other locations span the usual deserts, jungles and icy wastes.

Hyboria promises to be rather more dynamic than most MMO worlds, with non-player characters assigned AI schedules similar to those found in Oblivion. We witnessed a caravan being attacked by monsters: helping defend friendly characters in such unscripted encounters may also lead to rewards. Such dynamics will also extend
to behaviours such as AI enemies setting up camps outside and attacking player cities.



A big feature of Age Of Conan will be its three tiers of PVP combat. At the lowest level will be drunken brawling, in taverns, for which levels are disregarded and attacks are based on how much characters have drunk. Drinks will have certain effects, and there will be no penalty for losing. The second will be more traditional arena combat, and top-level PVP will be non-instanced siege warfare. Player guilds will be able to build fortified cities – although the locations will be limited to encourage conflict – and non-player factions will also set up cities and attack guild ones. The battles will involve siege weaponry such as catapults and techniques such as formation horse riding, with different formations conferring defensive and attacking attributes.

At the moment, Age Of Conan’s innovations are causing it to fall uncomfortably between the twitch-thrills of singleplayer games and the methodological strategising of more traditional MMOs. Whether it can hone them enough in the few months until release remains to be seen, but it’s hard not to feel that the divergence from both of these bases is currently threatening the accessibility that Funcom is aiming for.