Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures updat ...

http://pc.ign.com/articles/853/853174p1.htmlIn development for close to five years now and finally releasing May 20 on PC, Funcom's Age of Conan is looking much better now than it has at past events. At GDC 2008 in San Francisco, they showed off an extended demo of starting out, high-level dungeon crawling, mounted combat, city building, and siege warfare.

As you probably know if you've followed our coverage, you start the game as a slave with no sense of identity. After washing up on the beaches of an island known as Tortage, you enter a section of gameplay that you can choose to play solo or skip past. Tortage, a forested island populated with winding paths, tall trees and ferns, stone ruins, and a massive volcano represents the first 20 levels of the game. Your main quest line, called destiny quests, is supposed to be dynamic, says Funcom, meaning you'll have a degree of choice as to how you proceed through to the level 80 cap. For instance, before heading out from Tortage, you'll apparently get the option to climb up and trigger the island's volcano to erupt, burning the village to the ground.

Before all that you'll be required, as you usually are in MMOGs, to customize your character's appearance. Funcom wants players to be able to recognize each others' faces as easily as their names, and have provided numerous sliders for facial modifications to allow for different appearances. We're not sure how effective this tool is for creating distinct appearances as we haven't had any extensive experience with it, but there certainly are a lot of sliders.During a fly-through of the forest, we noticed the framerate is much, much smoother than we'd seen in the past. This is certainly promising, as framerates in this particular section at past events ranged from irritating to more or less unplayable. But what kind of system will you need to run it? According to the game's director, the recommended specs are a 7900 GTX, 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo, and 2 GB RAM. According to Funcom, a three or four year old high end PC will be happy. The game's director also added about Age of Conan's performance, ''It's a greedy plant. If you want to spend $3,000 on a PC, Conan will be happy.''

In the game you'll find 12 clas ses, a few of which were shown off in a dungeon below Kheshatta, an end-game desert area. In the party was a demonologist magic user, who's most distinct feature along with a generally evil appearance is a succubus slave clad only in underwear. A melee focused conqueror, stealthy assassin, and a priest were also present. The conqueror wore heavy leather, a spiked metal helmet and wielded a heavy mace. The rest are draped with elaborate robes with an impressive amount of detail embroidered on the fabric. Each can be customized by dumping points into a feat tree, which Funcom described as being similar to WoW's talent tree. For each cla ss different feat arrangements will allow for varying types of weapon attacks and damage types.

Moving through the dungeon, the party encountered lizard-like giants called scaleskin brutes, including an even more massive boss version. At this point Funcom showed off its dynamic shielding system, which works with the weapon swing hotkeys in an attempt to create a more engaging battle system. At higher levels you get five options for attack, which are bound to Q, 1, 2, 3, and E keys. Each key corresponds to a directional swing of your weapon, which if pressed in proper combinations can inflict more damage and trigger gory finishing moves.

In addition, when fighting an enemy you'll notice thin silver scale-looking icons pop up on your selected monster. These will appear on a particular side of the monster, indicating they have extra shielding in that area. The more scales on a side, the more shielding there is. Your job, at least as a tank, is to try and maneuver yourself around a monster so your powerful attacks can hit the unshielded side, since the shielding shifts depending on your position relative to the monster. Or, instead of moving around behind or to a different side of the monster, you could try using attacks that swing from another direction. As a player, you have your own shielding and can adjust it's orientation around your avatar as you see fit. While this may not be all that useful for PvE gamplay, Funcom says it's instrumental for successful PvP play since dynamically altering your shielding based on opponents' attacks can have dramatic effects on the damage you take. It reminded us a little bit of adjustable shielding systems in space combat games like Freespace 2.Aside from those features, the combat seems pretty standard. In high level dungeons, like in many other MMOGs, your party huddles around powerful creatures and hammers away with attacks for a span of minutes until the thing falls over. There are a few more distinctive elements, however. In battle characters actually collide with each other, letting characters block for others and giving an advantage to those with long range weapons who can hide behind a front line of party members. Sneaking, something all clas ses can do, will let you pass through others, all small creatures and pets have collision turned off, and it's off in social zones as well.

Healing and weapon damage are dealt with a little differently as well. Instead of being limited to a single target, weapon slashes target an area, with larger and more powerful weapons having a greater area of effect. The same goes for healing. Priests shouldn't resign themselves to hiding in the shadows behind a battle, as some heals like the high-level cone heal are area of effect, requiring the healers to run around and get the best vantage point to unload their magic on the optimal number of targets. Funcom suggested the tactic of calling out to teammates to line up so their health can be replenished simultaneously.Moving beyond the dungeons, we were shown a brief demo of mounted combat, which differs depending on what animal you're seated on. Special animations are built in as you climb aboard, such as the epic mammoth mount bending down to accommodate you. There's also an epic rhino mount, which according to Funcom was put in because they liked the movie 300 so much. While riding you can still use your left attack, right attack and such on the quickbar, and the horse mounts can kick backwards and forwards. Momentum plays a role in attacking as well, as the faster you run on your mount, the more damage you'll do. The damage calculation is also based on weapon type and skill as well. Every mount has a different kind of handling, meaning something like the mammoth will require more room for acceleration and a larger turning radius. Funcom states it's similar to how the cars' handling in the Grand Theft Auto franchise differs.

In PvE you can use these mounts to break outdoor camps and access new areas. In PvP there's more to it because movement and speed come into play. Mammoth and rhinos can even be used to attack walls and buildings while assaulting cities.

The demo then shifted concentration to northern Sumeria, and area of open plain upon which players can build their own cities. Initially they're used as crafting cities and you need a guild of about 30 to 40 to set them up. Resource nodes are littered around on the map and you click on them to check requirements of wood, stone, and the like. Once gathered the structures can be build up, represented visually with large scaffolding structures emerging from the ground, and the main structure rising slowly behind like in an RTS. Initially you'll need a keep, the city's central structure, but can add inner and outer walls in addition to unique crafting stations which make available special items to your guild. to let you build your city.

If you're a member of one of the eight or nine best guilds on the server, your city is entered into PvP eligibility, which means others can attack, break apart structures, and if they manage to smash your keep, can take over. After a keep is destroyed, there should be enough resources lying around so the conquerors can at least build a keep of their own, so they don't have to wander around scouring for resources to merely claim ownership. For defending, the city's owners have the ability to parade along the spines of the inner and outer walls. Funcom has built in a system to give those higher up a distinct range advantage as opposed to those trying to attack from below, which seems to mean the attacking guild will need to bring along some serious siege equipment.

All in all we're still looking forward to this one. It sounds as though Funcom has implemented some interesting ideas, and we're especially relieved to see the previous framerate issues have been addressed. We'll of course have more in the months leading up to release.Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures updat ...
GOTY?Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures updat ...
so far the beta's have rocked, so i can't wait! :D under the user agreement i can't reveal anything so... :( but yeah its great so far and runs soooo smooth on my brothers comp!
[QUOTE=''Rigga911'']GOTY?[/QUOTE] yeah, its gonna be big...i just wanna know how it will work on 360 with only 512 mb of ram!

[QUOTE=''LibertySaint''][QUOTE=''Rigga911'']GOTY?[/QUOTE] yeah, its gonna be big...i just wanna know how it will work on 360 with only 512 mb of ram!
[/QUOTE]Looks interesting, I hope its ok.But it is a tank/healer/dps type of MMO right? We really need something new for MMO's. WoW nailed that archetype about as well as it can be done IMO. No matter how good it is if it still uses that archetype it is not goty material.I also hope it has a lot of solo content. I want to try it on the 360 because I here you can tell it was made with a control pad in mind and it would be nice to play an MMO from the comfort of my couch with just a pad, as long as the gameplay is fun. But if there is not enouph solo content and I am forced to find a group on XBL every time I want to play, well... forget that.
[QUOTE=''Coyo7e''][QUOTE=''LibertySaint''][QUOTE=''Rigga911'']GOTY?[/QUOTE] yeah, its gonna be big...i just wanna know how it will work on 360 with only 512 mb of ram!
[/QUOTE]Looks interesting, I hope its ok.But it is a tank/healer/dps type of MMO right? We really need something new for MMO's. WoW nailed that archetype about as well as it can be done IMO. No matter how good it is if it still uses that archetype it is not goty material.I also hope it has a lot of solo content. I want to try it on the 360 because I here you can tell it was made with a control pad in mind and it would be nice to play an MMO from the comfort of my couch with just a pad, as long as the gameplay is fun. But if there is not enouph solo content and I am forced to find a group on XBL every time I want to play, well... forget that.[/QUOTE] its not all like wow, thank god, yeah it is a system with healer/tank/dps, but solo is so easy and fun, imo its a types of controls that split the ****s up. each ****has diffrent abilties meaning diffrent combos and way to attack.On the 360 its rumored to have cross-platfrom servers soo....