GDC 07: AOC Preview @ GameSpy

On the heels of THQ's recent announcement of a single-player Conan game, it seems like Funcom wanted to remind people, "hey, we announced the MMO Conan game first!" The company held demonstrations at both Microsoft's Developer Showcase (Age of Conan will be a certified Games for Windows title, and is the first MMO to take advantage of DirectX 10 hardware) and at its own hotel suite, giving journalists a near-full rundown of the whole game and how it's shaping up so far.

We've previously covered character creation, but here's a quick refresher for those of you who don't feel like clicking away. You start off as a mere galley slave, and after choosing a gender you then choose from one of three races: Cimmerians (barbarians), Aquilonians (Romans) or Stygian (Egyptians). Afterwards, you get a pretty in-depth physical attribute modification system, which lets you get as detailed as messing with eyebrow angle and thickness. Project director Jarald Tharaldsen joked that the character creation is flexible enough to let you create anyone from Ghandi to Governor Schwarzenegger. Note that you don't select a class or anything at this point: just a race, a name, and a look.

When the game begins, the slave ship crashes ashore, and you're the lone survivor. This is where the tutorial starts, though it's not just a "here's a quest and a tooltip about what each UI button does" type of tutorial... it's essentially a whole single-player adventure, made possible through heavy use of instancing. After performing a quest or two on the island and reaching level 5, you can select a basic archetype (priest, soldier, rogue, or mage). Later, at level 20, you select a specific class from within your archetype.

Due to the single-player nature of the tutorial, you can conceivably hit the level 20 marker without seeing another human soul (though if you're rolling a new toon, you can probably get yourself to the massively-multiplayer part of the world faster). During our quick demo of the tutorial portion, Tharaldsen pointed out that for quest dialogue, at least in these early quests, cues have been taken from Funcom's single-player adventure title Dreamfall. Instead of just a block of text with an "accept or exit" button, you have close-ups, voiceover, and honest-to-god dialogue trees; all of which enhance the single-player feel of the early portion of the game.

To Crush Your Enemies

While Age of Conan has a pretty interesting handle on the newbie zone portion of the game, Tharaldsen and his team know that people expect one thing from a title carrying the Conan name: action. Despite Age of Conan being an MMO, it has a pretty damn action-y combat system. Tharaldsen specifically cites games like Tekken and Street Fighter II (I'll get to this in a bit) when talking about the combat.

The main combat innovation is the combo system, complete with a combo meter. There is a six-way "clock" in the lower-middle of the screen, with each direction attached to a hotkey; each direction lights up when executing that specific attack. For example, "1" is a swing aimed at the upper-right while "3" is an attack going for the lower-left. Tharaldsen says that this mechanic was specifically inspired by Street Fighter II, in that everyone knows that a quarter-circle forward performs a fireball when playing as Ken or Ryu, and he wanted to impart a similar feel for the combo moves here. Before you folks with a total lack of fighter skills shriek about the possibility that only fighting game aficionados can be good at Age of Conan, don't fret. This clock also shows you how to pull off the combos; anytime you perform an attack, the next step in the combo will helpfully illuminate, effectively guiding you all the way to the end of the combo string.

Additionally, stringing enough combo attacks in a row increases your chances of pulling off a fatality, such as a straight-up decapitation or a not-fatal-but-still-painful limb dismemberment. Finally, though we didn't see much of it, we did see some mounted combat; Tharaldsen zipped around on a horse while shooting down mobs with a bow. As a balance mechanic, there is a special combat technique designed to dismount an enemy from their horse. Since mounts are a part of combat, there are gameplay differences between the various types of animals (as opposed to merely cosmetic ones); horses are fast, mammoths are tough, and camels are, er, we're going to guess they're either angry or hardy.

See Them Driven Before You

Another innovation that Funcom is bringing in is the "camp" gameplay. Think of camps as a mix of instances and straight-up mob camps from old-school MMOs like EverQuest. That is, these are fixed locations scattered around the game world, but they have AI scripts and triggers within that feel like fleshed-out instances as opposed to generic camps. Players can figure out different ways to take on a camp, such as sneaking around for a weak point in the guard patrol, or taking out certain guards to distract the rest of the camp (and draw those enemies away from the main targets). Tharaldsen made the camp gameplay look even more interesting by teaming up with five other players for a lean six-man squad; he also commented that when you factor in player pets and followers, you can theoretically have a force of twenty tearing its way through a Pict (non-Cimmerian barbarians) camp.

If the enemy camps aren't a big enough change to the MMO formula, wait until you hear Funcom's plans for PvP. Sure, you have traditional arena/battlegrounds-type stuff, and even drunken brawling (an "all players are equal, levels don't matter" system where alcohol intake is the main determinant in combat performance), but Funcom wants to make PvP into something bigger. One word: sieges. It's no longer just a team of players fighting another on a field, it's one army of players attempting to assault a sitting castle that the other team's defending. It's a combat situation that calls for the construction of ballistas, the rustling of hefty mammoths, and the coordination of multiple war mages on both sides. Epic. Alas, as awesome as this sounds, Funcom only showed the barest hint of a siege in action: a player wandering around a castle. We'll see the real siege gameplay in a later demonstration.

As for guilds, they don't just build a tabard and maybe rent a hall; guilds will be able to construct entire cities and keeps. The Conan lore already has an appropriate explanation for perpetual conflict: King Conan has opened up the Border Kingdoms for conquest, and everyone is fighting for the real estate, dubious property values though it may have.

There is still a lot to cover, such as a more in-depth look at the mid- to end-game play (we've only seen glimpses of mid-level in this demo, and none of the end-game). And Tharaldsen was teasingly evasive when asked, "Conan had to endure years at the Wheel of Pain, will players have to do a literal grind at the Wheel of Pain in tribute to Conan in the game?" We can only hope.

When we spotted Conan last E3, we named it the best new MMO, and the graphical polish plus the intriguing ideas add up to a hardcore-feeling, action-packed RPG that so far justifies our proclamation. We'll be sure to update with more info once we get our hands on the forthcoming beta.