First Look - Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

During the game's five-year development cycle, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has slowly but surely built up a great deal of support and engendered high expectations from the gaming community.

As playable code has surfaced, it has become easier to judge how successful Conan will be in meeting the expectations of the fans. The first 20 levels are to be a mix of single player and multiplayer modes - solo, you will dwell in the night, while venturing into populated areas means daytime play.

One of the more intriguing prospects of the game is the ambitious way player interaction will have lasting impacts on the game. In most MMOs, instances are unique, with virtually no action taken by the player making a difference in the long run, other than to moving him or her on a bit in the story.

In Conan, though, the aim is for actions taken in the single-player sections to have a substantial effect on the world around you, a la Oblivion. This is very much a "wait and see" feature, though. It is difficult to know how it will work, in the long term, just from a short play-test.

Developers Funcom initially planned to have an Elder Scrolls-style blank slate for players - that is, create a character and, over time, develop your character in the way you see fit.

However, as testing continued, it turned out that people didn't like it, so the developers have re-introduced the usual template - pick a character class and take that through the 80 levels.

The four major choices - Rogue, Priest, Soldier and Mage - are all pretty generic. Sub-classes, such as the Stygian Herald of Xotli, are fancifully-titled, canon-following names for established groups - in this case a Druid.

However, Funcom has been working hard to make sure the spirit of their initial plan is in place, with "feat" points and other such things combining to give a larger number of possible specialities than is usual.

Graphically, the game looks pretty damn good for an MMO. The Dreamworld engine has gone through a number of developmental stages since its debut in Anarchy Online, and the results are obvious. Clearly, frame rates will be an issue, but it shouldn't be too bad. MMOs have never been played for their graphics, so if you have to scale the finery down a tad, it shouldn't make too much of a difference to the experience.

Funcom's most ambitious plan is for the combat model, something that has garnered quite a few column inches in the past. Essentially, the fighting is a mash-up of traditional MMO decision making and a more action-based combo system.

Having experienced it, the system (which involves choosing a left, right or centre attack, then following a chain of key presses to build up the power of the attack) is one that would take some getting used to if it were to be mastered.

Collision detection, not a staple of most MMOs, makes the position of allies and enemies very important. A friendly character could well bugger up your brilliant combo by getting in the way accidentally, so it remains to be seen whether larger battles will be complete messes or graceful displays of sword-wielding.

This will be the main concern, and, on the flip side, the main reason for excitement. If the combat works, it could revolutionise the MMO genre, proving action-based combat can work. If it fails, Age of Conan will be swiftly decapitated by bloodthirsty players - if they can get the right combo going, of course.