Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

I haven't pulled one of my kikko prophecy cards in a long time but I'm gonna pull one with little research on this game title. Why? Conan is marketing the game 100% to ADULTS.

The sheer innovation put into this "MMORPG" is unbelievable. The biggest deal for most of you will be the combat system, which I will touch on shortly. One of the nicer touches is the fact it has a single player game too.

Everyone starts at level 1 in singleplayer. Multiplayer doesn't even start until level 20. That means when you finally meet people online, they actually know what they are doing as do you. So the first 20 levels focus on your skills; Level 20-40 focus on guilds and making social friends; Levels 40-60 deal with large scale combat; Level 60-80 focus on dealing with King Conan (dynamic story line); Level 80+ focus on end game play.

The game has PvP aspects which are very inviting as well. There are hardcore PvP servers, PvP-RP Servers (Racial), Cultural PvP servers (Guild vs Guild), and PvE servers. End game in PvP servers have seige against player cities and all. The PvE servers have PvP but only in a mini-game type mode. The mini-pvp game modes looks like Unreal Tournament...

Noting again that it is an adult MMORPG (18+), the game has everything from the detailed gore to nudity. The game has lots of extreme thoughts finally used. A necromancer can literally have 11 pets at once if so properly equiped while no one person can dominate a game just because of their equipment, which is due to the combat system.

Combat is the kicker. It's FPS style. That means when you shoot a bow, you literally have to set crosshairs on your target. You miss, the arrow misses. Swords have 6 slashing styles, being from different directions. You can then combine those to create more damaging hits or multiple targets. The AI won't just stand there either. If you line up some massive over the head blow and he see's it coming, the AI will attempt to counter so everything is skill on the second. Spells follow suit by having "loreboxes" that let you combine magic to attempt to create massive blows, assuming it doesn't blow up on you...Trash talk in this game is duely backed up by your proven skill in all apsects.



The game has already launched but the public date is May 23, 2008. Most places have already sold out and Best Buy is crying that there will be a line Friday morning for the copies on the shelf. Beta had over 1,000,000 applicants and preorder has already sold 2,000,000+ which is unprecidented for an MMORPG.

I do believe I shall be playing even though I hesitate to attempt an MMO due to time consumption but this one seems like a good temptation, even though I'm sure it will prompt me to rebuild my computer system...so if you too wonder to the dark side, give me a shout out.

Already bought and installed it since Circuit City had it on sell for $40 this week and one of the stores not too far away had it in stock.

The starting scene where you are on an island looks like FarCry 2.0 yo~ I haven't played Crysis yet so I don't know what it actually looks like but Conan is pretty cool thus far. The combat system is pretty h4x and I hit level 6 in about 15 minutes so looks like advancement is fair compared to the total levels.

My system can barely play it on low @ 1280 and skips like mad. I'm either going to have to reduce resolution or man up to a new system. The game is very gorey for an MMORPG and when they say take off your gear, they mean take off your gear. All organs are detailed appropriately as another female character was prompt to show me. I kept mine on though cause I'm shy.

Also, with my first run X-Fi card, sound is absolutely amazing in 5.1.

i heard about this coming out a couple of years ago, my friend was telling me that it was gonna be awesome, but i wanted to wait and see if it was worth it before i dove in

Yeah, it got a LOT of publicity about two years ago at the E3 where it won some award for best upcoming PC title. It was the same year that Company of Heroes won game of the year across all platforms. It's hype died down over time due to lack of information and beta infos but now it's out sneak attack style.

The game is massively demanding but it's actually a good thing. No one can turn off all terrain details so PvP ambushes are insanely realistic. I was running through teh woods on my way to little red riding hood's house last night when all of a sudden, something jumped out of a bush and knocked my character and camera onto the ground. The blade weaving warrior went to slashing so I, being the champion I am, tried to take off and runzorz but by turning by body, a long diagonal slash hit my character's throat and blood splattered massively on my screenzorz along with a you have been served message. Long story short, he was twice my level and head shotted me, insta-glib style.

The graphics and dynamics are really amazing and teh PvP servers are slam full of PvP combat. There are no corpse runs (at my level at least) so deaths are meaningless to me so far, being the biggest negative. Give it a week or two until mainstream reviews come out and you can easily determine your playability then.

I'm going to start playing this in the fall when I get back to Valdosta and have a connection again. I got a new laptop that has 2.1ghz Core 2 Duo 8100, 4 GB DDR2 PC5300, ATI Radeon HD 3470 256MB Dedicated (1024 MB total shared from my main ram), so I think I should be fine hopefully for playing it. I like the idea and hopefully a few of my old wow people will be moving over to have some people to play with. I'll let you know when I get it. I'm not in a hurry right now because I had to move back home for the summer for a couple of months, but then I'll be back in Valdosta around first of August. Keep me posted as to whether you think it is still worth getting after you've had time to play into it more. I was definitely interested when I heard about it because I wasn't playing wow anymore and didn't really have any mmo I wanted to go to.

I don't keep up with ATI cards anymore since AMD got a hold of them but since I know that computer will play it, you're almost already set to roll. Just disable the power stepping before any gaming~ As for connection, the first 20 levels are majority single player instances. I don't know if it would actually run well though. It's a shame to not be able to play an MMORPG at launch though so you get to be apart of the initial city sieges.

I haven't picked a server yet but if you already have friends playing, need to synchronize a server down so it isn't divided love. I wish I already had a new system so I didn't have to play on low.

I think it looks like a cool game from what i have heard and seen from the kikko. I watched him play for a while and i have to say the ladies in the game are quite revealing.. there was this one quest where he had to help out a prostitute madam. I thought that was different but interesting non the less.

This is a really good video that gives you an idea about the game. 12 minutes

The game video features a fun PvP system. Prison system. You grief massively, you get a bounty. You get caught with a bounty, you try to bribe or go to jail. Go to jail, and you have to literally do hard labor to get out. lolz


http://www.g4tv.com/mmoreport/videos/26 ... ecial.html

Pay close attention to what he says at the end of the video about the fence~ and roey says she's one of the three.

Yeah, I'm not sure whether I want to buy it now and attempt to play on 56k or not. I remember wow being bad with its 1k ms latency >_<. I couldn't pvp nor could I raid. Though like I said, I will not be here that long before I will be back in civilization and have my dsl connection restored. I'll let you know if I get it, and get with you on your server.

Here's some ingame videos for you guys to get a decent preview. Too bad there isn't any sound recorded~








**Note that Xfire compression killed the video quality

Also, a note on PvP after indulging today~ my record for teh day was 7 deaths to 42 kills (only 2 grey). I must say the PvP completely owns even though there is no penalty right now. Massive adrenaline pumping and non-stop action. I got into some really nice battles in the caves below Tortage playing tag. I give it two kikko thumbs so far...

Microsoft Sam, Mary, and Mike...Conan style.