Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

by: Eidos
Merupakan MMORPG yang ditunggu-tunggu

Age of Conan has finally landed and the internets (both of ‘em) are already filled with the fanboys warring over exactly how awesome the game is.

And now it’s time for us to throw our opinion in amongst the cacophony of other voices and tell you what we think about the much anticipated MMORPG, which is based on the Conan series by Robert E. Howard.

Age of Conan isn’t the standard MMO fare though – it definitely tries to be a little bit edgier and racier by explicitly aiming for an 18+ PEGI rating. There’s plenty of focus in here on spilled blood and spread legs – lots of combat and cleavage. Is the MMO audience ready for such a mature RPG though, or should we all go back to the cartoony World of Warcraft?

Here’s what we think…

Plot of Conan

Age of Conan, or Raarrgh! The MMO as it could also be known, is a online multiplayer RPG and therefore it doesn’t really have a firm story in the traditional sense. There’s not really any linear progression of the gameplay for players to plod through...in fact, if you really wanted to then you could pretty much avoid quests altogether and just use the game as an elaborate messenger service.

That said though, there is still a standard set of starting quests for players and before the game world opens up and you’re allowed to roam the greater part of Conanland, you’ll have the usual set of mostly tutorial quests to jump through.

Regardless of which class or nationality you choose to start as, you’ll always begin the game as a slave who is shipwrecked outside the Red Hand controlled city of Tortage and who, more confused than a ninety year old great-grandmother trying to fix a memory leak, must find a way to reclaim your freedom.

Unfortunately, these early stages of the game are incredibly dull and players will find themselves doing more grinding than that ninety year old great-grandmother trying to climb a spiral staircase with two broken hips. It’s combat after pointless combat for the first hour or two at least and it isn’t until you actually make it to Tortage that you’ll actually get to do some real role playing.

This isn’t to say that the combat is dull though, as it’s clear that developer Funcom has done all it can to make the combat more than just the click-and-wait combat systems of other MMOs.


While the controls are pretty much as you’d expect them to be and the enemies run the usual gamut of grunts and towering bosses, the game has an interesting shield technique which means you’ll have to constantly update your tactics to suit the battle. Enemies will guard certain sides of their body, represented by white shields surrounding them, so if you want to really deal out the damage then you’ll have to make sure you aim for the gaps.

Or at least, that’s what you’ll have to do if you’re playing one of the melee classes. If you’re more about the spell casting and the long-range attacks then you won’t have to worry about that stuff all that much.

Classes (along with player nationalities and the like) are a whole new aspect of the game though. It’s definitely one of the strengths of Age of Conan for players to be able to tweak their appearance so much, even if the limited choice of nationality (Cimmerian, Aquilonian and Stygian are the only ones on offer) do undermine the whole thing.

We’ll get to all that in a minute though, because to really understand how some of the character customisation stuff works, it may be best to look at the graphics in Age of Conan first. Flip the page and enjoy our full graphical analysis.

Bump and Grind

So, the graphical engine behind Age of Conan (or Raarrgh, if you prefer), is obviously quite powerful and nowhere is this highlighted more than in the character customisation section at the start of the game.

Where most MMO games enable the player to customise a little bit in terms of height and hair colour, Conan goes the whole hog. Everything from cheekbones to bust size can be altered – though given the mature rating slapped on the game and the audience that the game will therefore unfortunately but inevitably appeal to, most players won’t venture far beyond the bust size.

This is especially true once those people realise there’s nothing to stop your character running around in the buff. Well, nothing except a low armour rating anyway. The fact that hardcore RPG players can’t stop fretting over their defence ratings is probably the main reason that the game hasn’t descended into a full on naturist sex festival just yet.

Well, that and the fact that the dancing emotes are mostly pretty awful and there’s not much point in a sex festival if you can’t shake your jubblies properly.


At the same time though, one of the things that really limits Age of Conan is that there isn’t a huge amount of choice open to players in regards to character classes. There are only three nationalities for players to choose from – the Conan-a-like Cimmerians, the bland and non-descript Aquilonians and the obligatorily evil Stygians.

Each nationality has a specialty; melee combat for the Cimmerians, magic for the Stygians, but the classes themselves still feel very by-the-numbers, unimaginative and limited. The only one who really stands out as remotely original is the summoner class Demonologist. Everything else is predictable to the extreme and the fact that there’s only really one ranger type class seems a bit of an oversight.

This really isn’t a huge problem however, as the focus on the game is very much on the melee rather than the ranged combat. In our adventures throughout Hyboria, we found that archer and magic wielding characters were actually pretty rare.

Thankfully then there are other parts of Age of Conan which compensate for these relatively minor drawbacks. The interface, for example, is both robust and user-friendly, managing to be both familiar to hardcore MMO fans and massively accessible to those who can’t even define the acronym "MMO. "

What might put off newcomers to the genre though is the sheer amount of grinding to be seen in Hyboria. There’s a sweet spot to be found in Age of Conan in regards to grinding, as although the first few hours of the game are nothing but repetitive and intensely dull combat, the core experience of the game tries as hard as it can to be a bit more than “Gather X amount of Y to earn Z.” True, the game doesn’t always succeed in it’s attempts to go beyond the usual grind-fest, but it does try and should be commended for that at least.

Conclusions

It’s always a painful and futile experience to try reviewing an MMO. For instance, there are problems with credit cards and the inevitable fact that we forget to cancel the subscriptions after the review is done, therefore inadvertently charging a couple of hundred pounds to company credit card.

Most of all though, the review very quickly runs out of date as the game is constantly updating and how much anyone enjoys the game is massively dependent on the calibre of gamers they end up gaming alongside. That means you’re going to have to take any conclusions we offer with a pinch of salt – ok? Just so we’re clear.

That said, Age of Conan is a lot of fun once you get into it – the proviso mainly being that you do have to make an effort to get into and jump over the initial few hours of boredom.

Game designers seem to be labouring under the impression at the moment that MMO games as a genre have only one aim; to topple World of Warcraft as Lord of the Pings. To do this, they seem to think that you need a certain gimmick or hook – PvR gameplay or genre blending MMOFPS action for instance. So far, that tactic doesn’t seem to be doing to well – so it’s refreshing to see that Age of Conan bucks the trend and instead focuses on creating just a solid and persistent world to play in.

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures doesn’t bring anything hugely new to the table and the only real gimmicks it has going for it are the franchise behind it all and the fact that you can’t take two steps without faceplanting into the second biggest pair of boobs you’re ever likely to see. It’s a fun and accessible RPG though, and on that front it can’t be faulted.