Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Previews

A large batch of new hands-on previews of Funcom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures have made their way to the ‘net. The first is at IGN:

One of the big changes to Conan comes in the melee combat. The combo system has been rearranged to be a little more familiar to those that have already been playing MMOs in the past. That’s not to say they’ve complete abandoned the combo system they originally intended to use. Now, instead of all combos being initiated by hitting one of the directional attack keys, combos are initiated using skills in the hot button bar (much like you’d see in WoW or LotR Online) followed then by the appropriate key strokes. This change was apparently carried out after some focus testing.

The second is at Voodoo Extreme:

Unlike typical MMOs, the first tier of character progression (levels 1-20) in the game will be single player. During this time the player will become familiar with the game mechanics, determine their class specialization and be immersed in Conan lore. Following this single player stage the MMO progression tiers of 20 levels each will follow, up to the level 80 cap.

The third is at 1Up:

In practice, the combat’s immediately impressive simply because it does feel different — even to this jaded World of Warcraft/EverQuest/Ultima Online veteran. Not having to tab-cycle targets makes combat quicker and makes handling multiple foes at once more viable, even if you’re not a “tanky” type (though obviously AOC’s not the first to try alternative targeting methods — recently, see Tabula Rasa). Things seem to change, however, once you level up some and gain access to your class’s key abilities. Warped to a group dungeon with a beefed up, level 20 Bear Shaman (one of Age of Conan’s healer classes) and a few other comrades (including the usual tank and mage), I found myself taking a more classical healer role: standing on the sidelines, tossing out heals and nuking with my direct damage spell — left, right, and overhead barely registered.

The fourth is at MMORPG.com:

When playing MMOs, I have a tendency to get too wrapped up in combat, and push too far ahead, where I subsequently get overwhelmed and die. Age of Conan encourages this kind of play (at least from me) with combat momentum, where you swing your sword to the right, and your whole body follows through to the right. The motion captures for this were well done and it adds to the feeling of immersion, and helped make the combat more intuitive by appearing more natural. It also encourages you to pay more attention along with the directional attacks and combos. One problem I often have with MMOs, especially at lower levels, is the lack of a (coolness factor) for my character. But with the style of Age of Conan, and the satisfying combat, you feel cool right from the start, swinging a crude wooden club and dodging rivals in a loincloth.

The fifth is at WarCry:

The strongest part of the first few levels – and I would suspect the game in general – is that for the first time in a long time it feels like a world and not a guided trip through Disney Land. There are challenges and creatures along the way that have nothing to do with the mission at hand, and combat doesn’t always wait for you to get ready. For example, right out of the tutorial, I started on a road that led down into the town. My goal was to gain access to that town, and had I wished I could have stuck to the path and got it done, but unlike so many games, there were not sheer cliffs to make sure I stayed on the rails. To my left, I saw a camp of bandits, way above my level and clearly not on my side. The simpleton that I am, I decided to fight them, and I even got one’s head before they took me out. I died, but I had fun, and it had nothing to do with the mission at hand.

The sixth is at GameSpy:

The next portion of our demo focused on PvP combat in the Capture the Flag mode. While remarkably similar to World of Warcraft’s Warsong Gulch in many respects, Age of Conan differs in one major aspect: how combat figures into the flag-capturing equation. While frustrated Funcom developers circulated, desperately trying to wrap the quarrelsome minds of the pack of game journalists around their concept of active combat, we attempted to grasp the fundamentals.

And the seventh is at GameSpot:

After our swamp hunting session, we then jumped into a few sessions of competitive player-versus-player matches, which can be searched for from an in-game interface your character can use anywhere, not just at a predetermined dueling spot. (This means you can actually queue up for battle and still take care of other things while you’re waiting, such as hunting down some more monsters, or doing some quests.) We jumped into a few team-based capture-the-flag matches, which took place in a lush valley bordered on either side by a high hill where each team’s flag was located. As you might expect, the team with the strongest group coordination did best, and our role as the bear shaman seemed to primarily be making sure all of our protection spells were currently cast and affecting our group members, as well as doing some light healing, but also wading into battle and caving in skulls. The game’s action-based fighting system seems to add a subtle but satisfying element to fighting enemy teams and chasing down runners. You can hammer on your action keys to actively deliver blows, as opposed to the way things work in other games, which have an “auto-attack” feature that cycles randomly.