Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
There’s something about high-fantasy settings that just seems to work well for massively multiplayer games. We’re not sure if it’s the pointy ears on the elves, but for some reason, the addictive gameplay of online role-playing games–the fighting, the questing, the looting, and the adventuring with other like-minded players–seems to go hand in hand with the colorful fantasy worlds that authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien helped inspire. However, not all fantasy stories are suitable for all audiences. For instance, the works of Robert E. Howard, creator of the antihero Conan the Barbarian, tell bawdy tales of violence and debauchery. These tales will come to life in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, an online game in which you’ll actually play a character in Conan’s savage world and use real-time action commands to attack your foes and dispose of them in all kinds of brutal ways.
Our session began with a fleshed-out version of the game’s early hours, in which you create a new character from scratch as a prisoner on a slave ship with a severe case of amnesia. Despite your character’s mental state, you can still use the game’s many, many, many customization options to create a character from one of three points of origin: Aquilonia (the kingdom of Conan), Cimmeria (the barbaric lands of Conan’s origin), or Stygia, a land of dusky-skinned sorcerers. Not all characters of all races can play as every different character profession, and different flavors of the game’s four archetypes (soldier, priest, rogue, and mage) are available to different races. We chose to play a hardy, pale-skinned Cimmerian male character with scruffy blond hair, a braided beard, and various scars and tattoos across his body. The game features simple options to tweak basic face types and hairstyles, as well as tattoos, scars, and other details, but if you care to, you can go extremely in-depth and spend a great deal of time tweaking facial features and proportions. Given that we knew our time with the game was limited at our play session, and because we’d had experience playing a soldier class before, we decided to try the bear shaman, the basic Cimmerian priest class whose abilities include group-based healing, strengthening spells, and some minor damage incantations.
Once we created our character, we again found ourselves washed up on the jungle shore just outside of Tortage, the game’s starting city, after our slave ship was attacked by a mysterious warship. As a new character, we awakened on the beach and were greeted by a mysterious old man who, like many of the characters you’ll encounter in the game, addressed us with full audio speech. He recognized our character’s amnesia problem, and chose to advise us in a brief cinematic cutscene with a close-up camera angle reminiscent of the conversations in BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, complete with different dialogue options to choose. The old man informed us that the slaver captain of our ship had also survived, and that we could not let him reach Tortage alive. We then set out after him into the jungle, but came upon a comely (and scantily clad) lass in chains, strung up across the jungle path and blocking our progress. The wretched young woman recounted a sad tale of kidnapping and rough treatment by lascivious bandits, and explained that her chains were locked by a key that had been picked up by a scavenger. We hunted down the man along the beach and used our trusty chunk of oar (a large slab of wood we wielded like a club) to pummel him into submission. At our service was the game’s real-time combat system, which lets you press different keys on your keyboard while moving your character around to deliver different strokes and combinations. The scavenger was no match for us, and with key and maiden both liberated, we made our way into the lush, densely forested jungle in search of the slaver.
From what we’ve seen, Age of Conan’s environments will be densely packed to give the game a lush, lived-in feeling. The jungles are thick with vines, shrubs, and tilted trees, as well as the ambient noises of cawing birds, but we didn’t have much time to contemplate the scenery. We were constantly attacked by small packs of bandits, aggressive jungle apes, and finally our target the slaver, who was lying in wait for us. After trading a few insults with the potbellied, oily-looking scoundrel, we attacked him, slew him, and finally made our way to the city with our rescued companion in tow. Once we reached the city gates, we started to get some idea of the game’s lore and its most powerful figures. For instance, our first quest at the city gates was to aid a nearby blacksmith, and in exchange, the surly tradesman shattered the slave’s chains on our character’s wrists, which gave us clearance with the gate captain to enter the city. The gate captain himself mentioned that he belonged to a faction of influential buccaneers who were making inroads into the coastal area, but refused to elaborate. He instead sent us on another quest to deliver a letter to a tavern maid in the town.
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