Game Title: Age of Conan
Genre: Fantasy
Status: Closed Beta
Developer: Funcom
Publisher: Funcom
Official Website: http://www.ageofconan.com/
Game Video: http://video.mmosite.com/game_vm.php?gid=26
The Preview is from gamespy.com
A little over a year ago I trekked my way across the globe to become the first person outside of Funcom to go hands-on with the developer`s highly anticipated MMO Age of Conan. It was with some anticipation, then, that I trooped up to Eidos` San Francisco offices for a pre-E3 event to check out the game`s progress. To my delight, what I found was an MMO that`s come a long way toward fulfilling the promise of the crude pre-alpha version I played in Norway. Funcom`s got a lot of testing, tweaking and smoothing left to do between now and release, but based on my play-time with the title, the developers have overcome at least two hurdles -- capturing Howard`s dark vision and creating a bloody-handed combat system Conan himself might envy.
Return to Tortage
My latest adventure began where my previous one had -- as a slave in the bowels of a Stygian ship. The character customization system had been turned off for the demonstration, leaving me with only the opportunity to select a sex and race. Selecting an archetype would happen at level six and picking a class wouldn`t be an option until level 20. After selecting a male Stygian, I found myself back on the beach at Tortage, listening again to a fisherman mutter about my strange mark and my destiny. Running up the beach, I discovered something new -- a buxom young woman chained to a wooden post. She offered me my first real quest in the game, slaughtering her captor and his cannibal companion before she was either sold or ended up as the dish of the day.
"You wouldn`t believe how many versions of the combat system we`ve gone through," said Jorgen Tharaldsen, Funcom Product Manager and my sensei in the world of Hyborean combat. I was going to need his help because my first reaction upon seeing her captors was to hit the "Tab" key to target them. Wrong move, since the "Tab" key in Age of Conan actually switches the player between in and out-of-combat modes. While in combat mode, players cannot speak to or interact with NPCs or world objects.
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