Well, AoC is about to launch, and many people were able to mess around in the Open Beta servers, but those servers had a lot of things missing...namely levels after 13, and a lot of the features themselves. I'm certainly not at the "high level content" myself, but up until around level 20 I've been able to experience quite well. I didn't want to push too far in beta and then end up doing it all over again at launch, so I have quite extensive experience at the lower levels, and with the core gameplay functions. Here are my feelings on it:
It kicks ***.
I'll get the obvious thing out of the way first--combat. Everybody's been talking about it, and many will pass it off as a gimmick (I did at first, and after the first hour or so of playing). You use your 1, 2, and 3 keys to swing your sword left, center, and right, respectively. It sounds cool, and then you jump in and start fighting some beach pirates and crocodiles in the tutorial and start wondering if it's really as cool as it sounds. All characters (NPC mobs and player characters alike) have "protection shields", almost like a Sci-Fi game. No, we're not talking energy shields or anything, but they're represented by white arcs around a character you're fighting. If the mob is protecting itself evenly, it will have one arc on each side, and one above it. Any swing you do from any direction will do normal damage in that state.
However, if you start hammering on a direction too much, you'll see the target shift defense that way, usually increasing to two arcs at first, and then quite possibly all three. What this means is that another direction becomes unprotected. Some mobs may charge you with full protection to the front. As soon as you swing to the right, they shift shields to the right, then left trying to guess where you're swinging. You end up in a rock/paper/scissors type fight where you're constantly trying to attack one way and then the other, outguessing the target you're fighting to do the most damage possible...at first it feels a little reckless, because it really takes some time to learn when to hit the button for the next attack (you can chain attacks into a fluid animation if you use left/right, or middle/left, etc). Combat has a whole different level of depth when you know you want to run with a middle/left combo, so you hammer away on the right key to viciously bash a target's right side until the shields pull over, then unload on the left. Quite satisfying, and unlike anything that's been done in an MMO before.
That by itself wouldn't really cut it for long, though. Taken at face value, it could appear quite gimmicky to have to choose each swing of your sword, almost like a mini-game of sorts (and it kind of is). What are introduced early are Combos...you get your first one at level 2 on all characters. A combo has a starter maneuver, and then the triggers and finishers. Now, the early combos have quite simple 2-key chains--starter, and finisher. You may press the trigger for your sweep ability and then have to hit your right attack for a powerful sweeping swing that cuts a wide arc in front of you. Speaking of which, anything in your weapon's path can be hit. There are no single-target vs. AoE attacks in Age of Conan. If it's in front of you, you can hit it if you can reach it. This adds an extra dimension to fights, not only worrying about shields and attacking, but also maneuvering and sidestepping to place two or three enemies together in your sword path to damage all of them at once instead of dealing with a single mob at a time. Enemies don't have protection to the rear (and neither do you), so you'll also see mobs try to surround you, and you must maneuver out of the way to avoid taking huge damage to your back. It's actually very engaging, and they managed to pull off what they claimed they were trying to do...make each and every fight feel a bit different, and force you to think quickly and move around a bit more than you may be accustomed to.
Back on the combos, however, you'll notice that your first combos are relatively simple, and don't give a huge reward. That's because they're just barely teaching you about the system. Give it a bit of time. You'll also see a small mark on the skill icon in your quick bar, letting you know where the finishing attack comes from...left, center, or right. This allows you to "get to know" your combos in order to use them fully. You may have an extremely powerful combo that finishes from the right side and bleeds the target as a secondary effect. You want to hammer away on the left side of the mob, and then unload the combo to finish on the right after it's pulled its attention away from the right side. Every class has different combos, so a combo-heavy class like the Conqueror will have a combo for just about every direction by level 14 or 15, while other classes may have one or two powerful combos for a specific direction and have to pick their spots in combat.
The last thing to think about during a fight (because I know you'll be so bored running around, maneuvering to hit multiple mobs at once, focusing on shields, and choosing where to attack...heh) is "active blocking". It can win or lose a fight against harder mobs for you. By default, hitting the X key puts your character into a "block" stance, which begins draining stamina. You have a MUCH higher chance of parrying or blocking an attack when you do this...which also drains a chunk of stamina. If you see a mob using a combo, and his countdown bar climbing, it may be a good time to throw up a block. Avoiding a hefty bleed effect or knockback can win or lose a fight, especially if you're dealing with [Boss] characters and several minions at once. An MMO that has you choosing where to attack and when, and also actively blocking (it will automatically block and parry like in other MMO's as well) is barely classifying itself as an MMO to me. I've never been so engaged in the melee fights as I have with AoC.
The last melee feature that somebody typically wants to know is about the "fatalities", or "finishers". AoC is not the typical MMO...you'll see blood gushing, heads flying, and all sorts of things. It's closer to a God of War type of gore level than watching a little critter fall over dead and then disappear like most MMO's have. If you whittle your enemy's health down and then use a combo to kill them, you have a chance of triggering a fatality. If you time it so your combo's finisher is the last attack when your opponent has a sliver of life left, you have the best chance, because you're "overkilling" the mob with an extremely powerful combo and they don't have much life left. What you'll then see is a special animation where your character might spin around and literally behead the mob, dropping it to its knees before it falls over. Or you might drive your sword right through his chest, twist it, and then rip it out to the side. Or plow it into his ribs and then kick him backwards off of the blade. Each of them "splashes" your screen with blood splatters (that fade as soon as the animation is done), and each of them give you that "oh HELL yeah" response...or at least they did for me. You're in there, fighting a mob, and suddenly your avatar lets out a battle cry, your screen splatters with blood, and mob's head goes rolling. Bring it on. Just remember that you will only trigger them with combo finishers, so learn to time your combos as the mob gets low on life and you'll see them left and right.
Spellcasters are the class that will feel most similar to other MMO's. You target a mob, you unload spell, and off you go. In the Age of Conan universe, however, all "magic" is demonic. The more magic you use, the more you "taint" your soul. The more tainted you become, the more powerful your spells are. The more powerful your spells are, obviously the stronger you are. The problem is, once your soul becomes very tainted, your character starts descending into madness, and his spells fire off effects on himself or groupmates instead of just the bad guys. That can obviously give everyone a very bad day if your extremely powerful nuker starts hitting the tank with his spells mid-fight. Priests can "cleanse" the soul, but how much cleansing you want will be the subject of much debate. I personally haven't played a spellcaster much at all, because I'm a brute who just wants to wade into combat with swords swinging, so I'm relaying information that I've read about in other previews or heard in the Closed Beta Global chat.
If anybody has any questions about the combat, I can try to answer them, though I've covered most of the core functions I can think of. It's possible that the combat could get old for some people, but for me, it hasn't yet. Every fight, even against low level things that you just want to slaughter, is a bit different. It's also very fast...the typical fight against an even level mob up to about level 20 lasts a matter of seconds. AoC is built to have you wading into combat with 3 or 4 baddies, slaughtering mobs in a one on one fight quickly and relatively easily. Since you're constantly fighting many foes at a time, however, be prepared to die more than you're used to until you get used to positioning and how to hit more than one at a time. Global chat is constantly filled with "mobs are overpowered!!" and "I die too much!!" from new players until they figure out how to avoid taking so much damage and really dish it out to multiple targets at once. It happens at such a hectic pace, though, it will take a bit of time to tackle more than two at a time with a good success rate.
So, I've typed a novel already, and all I've hit on is combat...*sigh*. The questing engine isn't like anything you've seen in an MMO, either. Gone are the days of "click target, click accept, go on quest". AoC has a quest system not unlike Bioware's RPG masterpiece Knights of the Old Republic. In KOTOR, you'd initiate a conversation, and the camera shifts to a 'conversation cam', showing a better perspective of the character. It's the same in Conan. You get a different perspective, and numbered responses. If you're talking to a female character and you're a male avatar, you may see lines like "I'd be doing much better if you were in my arms tonight" and things like that. Kind of corny, but they fit the Conan universe well. All of the "Epic" Destiny quests are fully voiced, as are most of the side quests. I've only come across a handful of quests that didn't have voice, but I'm not sure if that was by design or a bug. Note...many, MANY quests in beta were bugged all to hell and didn't allow completion. It's my one huge fear about this game, especially with release just days away--that they'll release it and players won't be able to complete a large number of quests, giving it a bad reputation early on. A huge patch was released yesterday that fixed a lot of them, but as with any MMO launch, don't be surprised if some slip through the cracks into retail.
Back on point (sorry for the tangent!), the conversations don't seem to change much based on your responses, but that may change later on. If an NPC has a quest to give and you start to talk to him/her, but choose the "wrong" responses, you can just start over and get the quest by selecting different responses. It would be nice to actually have branching quests or conversations that had different outcomes (like getting a separate quest from another NPC if your first one no longer likes you, etc), but that would be a nightmare to implement, I'm sure. What the questing system does is make it feel like a true RPG experience, instead of the MMO grind-to-the-next-level mentality. You'll switch between Tortage (the starter city) "Day" and "Night" a lot early on. Day allows you to group with other players and complete group quests and shared-location quests like killing the Native Picts, Panthers, and Tigers, etc, while the Night version is completely solo...you roam the streets, talking to NPC's (there's a story reason that you have to complete your Destiny quests under the cover of night, and I wont' go into that) and completing quest objectives. Overall, it's a very fun balance between single-player style quest completion and MMO-style multiplayer. Just running the Destiny quests alone won't get you to the tiers that you need to be at to continue, so players will be funneled back into the mutiplayer "Day" zones quite often (you need to be at level 10, 15, 20, etc., to continue Destiny chains).
So the combat is incredible fun, the questing is closer to a single player RPG as far as immersion goes...and it's flat-out gorgeous. You'll read a ton of horror stories on the internet about the performance of the betas. Stuttering or "hitching", horrible frame rates and load times, and other horrifying tales. Those aren't without truth...in the past. If you have a decent PC, the last couple of weeks' worth of patches have really kicked the crap out of the performance problems that it had. In my personal experience, I had load screens that would last anywhere from 2 to 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes when zoning somewhere. And yet I'd sit through them because I loved the game so much. Then they started patching, and I got 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB on Vista (4GB is really Vista's sweet spot anyway), and the load times are literally down to 4 seconds going into a Tavern or building, and 25 to 35 seconds changing instances or zones. That's a HUGE increase. To add to that, I have all of the visual detail sliders maxed in 1680x1050 and it's running around 35-40fps, with some insanely beautiful detail. For sake of comparison, in the Stress Test and up until the patch a week or two ago, the same settings would give me 10-12 fps on a Core2 Duo E6600 and a 768MB GeForce 8800 GTX. It's not tough to think that Age of Conan might kick an older PC's ***, but lowering some settings still has a game that is pleasing on the eyes and gets my machine up in the neighborhood of 90fps, so there's a lot of customization there.
So there you go...combat, questing, and performance. The 3 biggest things I can think of for an MMO's launch to cover. I haven't even hit on crafting (they have an entire zone dedicated to resource gathering. All characters can gather all resources, so you're like an Age of Empires resource crew...hunting animals, skinning them, chopping down trees, etc), PvP and Sieging (you can build entire cities as guilds, and take over PvP combat plots of land and attack/defend those plots as a guild). PvP in particular has a "mercenary" role, where you can whore yourself out to a guild for a set coin value in a war...excellent way for PvPers to actually make money. If you're good, you can charge whatever you want for your services. There are also PvP levels and PvP experience points completely separate from the traditional XP, etc etc...the list goes on and on, but we'll cross that bridge at a later date.
I'll be rolling my character on the 17th when the "early access" program opens up, so I'll post the server information in this board for anybody who's interested.
It kicks ***.
I'll get the obvious thing out of the way first--combat. Everybody's been talking about it, and many will pass it off as a gimmick (I did at first, and after the first hour or so of playing). You use your 1, 2, and 3 keys to swing your sword left, center, and right, respectively. It sounds cool, and then you jump in and start fighting some beach pirates and crocodiles in the tutorial and start wondering if it's really as cool as it sounds. All characters (NPC mobs and player characters alike) have "protection shields", almost like a Sci-Fi game. No, we're not talking energy shields or anything, but they're represented by white arcs around a character you're fighting. If the mob is protecting itself evenly, it will have one arc on each side, and one above it. Any swing you do from any direction will do normal damage in that state.
However, if you start hammering on a direction too much, you'll see the target shift defense that way, usually increasing to two arcs at first, and then quite possibly all three. What this means is that another direction becomes unprotected. Some mobs may charge you with full protection to the front. As soon as you swing to the right, they shift shields to the right, then left trying to guess where you're swinging. You end up in a rock/paper/scissors type fight where you're constantly trying to attack one way and then the other, outguessing the target you're fighting to do the most damage possible...at first it feels a little reckless, because it really takes some time to learn when to hit the button for the next attack (you can chain attacks into a fluid animation if you use left/right, or middle/left, etc). Combat has a whole different level of depth when you know you want to run with a middle/left combo, so you hammer away on the right key to viciously bash a target's right side until the shields pull over, then unload on the left. Quite satisfying, and unlike anything that's been done in an MMO before.
That by itself wouldn't really cut it for long, though. Taken at face value, it could appear quite gimmicky to have to choose each swing of your sword, almost like a mini-game of sorts (and it kind of is). What are introduced early are Combos...you get your first one at level 2 on all characters. A combo has a starter maneuver, and then the triggers and finishers. Now, the early combos have quite simple 2-key chains--starter, and finisher. You may press the trigger for your sweep ability and then have to hit your right attack for a powerful sweeping swing that cuts a wide arc in front of you. Speaking of which, anything in your weapon's path can be hit. There are no single-target vs. AoE attacks in Age of Conan. If it's in front of you, you can hit it if you can reach it. This adds an extra dimension to fights, not only worrying about shields and attacking, but also maneuvering and sidestepping to place two or three enemies together in your sword path to damage all of them at once instead of dealing with a single mob at a time. Enemies don't have protection to the rear (and neither do you), so you'll also see mobs try to surround you, and you must maneuver out of the way to avoid taking huge damage to your back. It's actually very engaging, and they managed to pull off what they claimed they were trying to do...make each and every fight feel a bit different, and force you to think quickly and move around a bit more than you may be accustomed to.
Back on the combos, however, you'll notice that your first combos are relatively simple, and don't give a huge reward. That's because they're just barely teaching you about the system. Give it a bit of time. You'll also see a small mark on the skill icon in your quick bar, letting you know where the finishing attack comes from...left, center, or right. This allows you to "get to know" your combos in order to use them fully. You may have an extremely powerful combo that finishes from the right side and bleeds the target as a secondary effect. You want to hammer away on the left side of the mob, and then unload the combo to finish on the right after it's pulled its attention away from the right side. Every class has different combos, so a combo-heavy class like the Conqueror will have a combo for just about every direction by level 14 or 15, while other classes may have one or two powerful combos for a specific direction and have to pick their spots in combat.
The last thing to think about during a fight (because I know you'll be so bored running around, maneuvering to hit multiple mobs at once, focusing on shields, and choosing where to attack...heh) is "active blocking". It can win or lose a fight against harder mobs for you. By default, hitting the X key puts your character into a "block" stance, which begins draining stamina. You have a MUCH higher chance of parrying or blocking an attack when you do this...which also drains a chunk of stamina. If you see a mob using a combo, and his countdown bar climbing, it may be a good time to throw up a block. Avoiding a hefty bleed effect or knockback can win or lose a fight, especially if you're dealing with [Boss] characters and several minions at once. An MMO that has you choosing where to attack and when, and also actively blocking (it will automatically block and parry like in other MMO's as well) is barely classifying itself as an MMO to me. I've never been so engaged in the melee fights as I have with AoC.
The last melee feature that somebody typically wants to know is about the "fatalities", or "finishers". AoC is not the typical MMO...you'll see blood gushing, heads flying, and all sorts of things. It's closer to a God of War type of gore level than watching a little critter fall over dead and then disappear like most MMO's have. If you whittle your enemy's health down and then use a combo to kill them, you have a chance of triggering a fatality. If you time it so your combo's finisher is the last attack when your opponent has a sliver of life left, you have the best chance, because you're "overkilling" the mob with an extremely powerful combo and they don't have much life left. What you'll then see is a special animation where your character might spin around and literally behead the mob, dropping it to its knees before it falls over. Or you might drive your sword right through his chest, twist it, and then rip it out to the side. Or plow it into his ribs and then kick him backwards off of the blade. Each of them "splashes" your screen with blood splatters (that fade as soon as the animation is done), and each of them give you that "oh HELL yeah" response...or at least they did for me. You're in there, fighting a mob, and suddenly your avatar lets out a battle cry, your screen splatters with blood, and mob's head goes rolling. Bring it on. Just remember that you will only trigger them with combo finishers, so learn to time your combos as the mob gets low on life and you'll see them left and right.
Spellcasters are the class that will feel most similar to other MMO's. You target a mob, you unload spell, and off you go. In the Age of Conan universe, however, all "magic" is demonic. The more magic you use, the more you "taint" your soul. The more tainted you become, the more powerful your spells are. The more powerful your spells are, obviously the stronger you are. The problem is, once your soul becomes very tainted, your character starts descending into madness, and his spells fire off effects on himself or groupmates instead of just the bad guys. That can obviously give everyone a very bad day if your extremely powerful nuker starts hitting the tank with his spells mid-fight. Priests can "cleanse" the soul, but how much cleansing you want will be the subject of much debate. I personally haven't played a spellcaster much at all, because I'm a brute who just wants to wade into combat with swords swinging, so I'm relaying information that I've read about in other previews or heard in the Closed Beta Global chat.
If anybody has any questions about the combat, I can try to answer them, though I've covered most of the core functions I can think of. It's possible that the combat could get old for some people, but for me, it hasn't yet. Every fight, even against low level things that you just want to slaughter, is a bit different. It's also very fast...the typical fight against an even level mob up to about level 20 lasts a matter of seconds. AoC is built to have you wading into combat with 3 or 4 baddies, slaughtering mobs in a one on one fight quickly and relatively easily. Since you're constantly fighting many foes at a time, however, be prepared to die more than you're used to until you get used to positioning and how to hit more than one at a time. Global chat is constantly filled with "mobs are overpowered!!" and "I die too much!!" from new players until they figure out how to avoid taking so much damage and really dish it out to multiple targets at once. It happens at such a hectic pace, though, it will take a bit of time to tackle more than two at a time with a good success rate.
So, I've typed a novel already, and all I've hit on is combat...*sigh*. The questing engine isn't like anything you've seen in an MMO, either. Gone are the days of "click target, click accept, go on quest". AoC has a quest system not unlike Bioware's RPG masterpiece Knights of the Old Republic. In KOTOR, you'd initiate a conversation, and the camera shifts to a 'conversation cam', showing a better perspective of the character. It's the same in Conan. You get a different perspective, and numbered responses. If you're talking to a female character and you're a male avatar, you may see lines like "I'd be doing much better if you were in my arms tonight" and things like that. Kind of corny, but they fit the Conan universe well. All of the "Epic" Destiny quests are fully voiced, as are most of the side quests. I've only come across a handful of quests that didn't have voice, but I'm not sure if that was by design or a bug. Note...many, MANY quests in beta were bugged all to hell and didn't allow completion. It's my one huge fear about this game, especially with release just days away--that they'll release it and players won't be able to complete a large number of quests, giving it a bad reputation early on. A huge patch was released yesterday that fixed a lot of them, but as with any MMO launch, don't be surprised if some slip through the cracks into retail.
Back on point (sorry for the tangent!), the conversations don't seem to change much based on your responses, but that may change later on. If an NPC has a quest to give and you start to talk to him/her, but choose the "wrong" responses, you can just start over and get the quest by selecting different responses. It would be nice to actually have branching quests or conversations that had different outcomes (like getting a separate quest from another NPC if your first one no longer likes you, etc), but that would be a nightmare to implement, I'm sure. What the questing system does is make it feel like a true RPG experience, instead of the MMO grind-to-the-next-level mentality. You'll switch between Tortage (the starter city) "Day" and "Night" a lot early on. Day allows you to group with other players and complete group quests and shared-location quests like killing the Native Picts, Panthers, and Tigers, etc, while the Night version is completely solo...you roam the streets, talking to NPC's (there's a story reason that you have to complete your Destiny quests under the cover of night, and I wont' go into that) and completing quest objectives. Overall, it's a very fun balance between single-player style quest completion and MMO-style multiplayer. Just running the Destiny quests alone won't get you to the tiers that you need to be at to continue, so players will be funneled back into the mutiplayer "Day" zones quite often (you need to be at level 10, 15, 20, etc., to continue Destiny chains).
So the combat is incredible fun, the questing is closer to a single player RPG as far as immersion goes...and it's flat-out gorgeous. You'll read a ton of horror stories on the internet about the performance of the betas. Stuttering or "hitching", horrible frame rates and load times, and other horrifying tales. Those aren't without truth...in the past. If you have a decent PC, the last couple of weeks' worth of patches have really kicked the crap out of the performance problems that it had. In my personal experience, I had load screens that would last anywhere from 2 to 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes when zoning somewhere. And yet I'd sit through them because I loved the game so much. Then they started patching, and I got 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB on Vista (4GB is really Vista's sweet spot anyway), and the load times are literally down to 4 seconds going into a Tavern or building, and 25 to 35 seconds changing instances or zones. That's a HUGE increase. To add to that, I have all of the visual detail sliders maxed in 1680x1050 and it's running around 35-40fps, with some insanely beautiful detail. For sake of comparison, in the Stress Test and up until the patch a week or two ago, the same settings would give me 10-12 fps on a Core2 Duo E6600 and a 768MB GeForce 8800 GTX. It's not tough to think that Age of Conan might kick an older PC's ***, but lowering some settings still has a game that is pleasing on the eyes and gets my machine up in the neighborhood of 90fps, so there's a lot of customization there.
So there you go...combat, questing, and performance. The 3 biggest things I can think of for an MMO's launch to cover. I haven't even hit on crafting (they have an entire zone dedicated to resource gathering. All characters can gather all resources, so you're like an Age of Empires resource crew...hunting animals, skinning them, chopping down trees, etc), PvP and Sieging (you can build entire cities as guilds, and take over PvP combat plots of land and attack/defend those plots as a guild). PvP in particular has a "mercenary" role, where you can whore yourself out to a guild for a set coin value in a war...excellent way for PvPers to actually make money. If you're good, you can charge whatever you want for your services. There are also PvP levels and PvP experience points completely separate from the traditional XP, etc etc...the list goes on and on, but we'll cross that bridge at a later date.
I'll be rolling my character on the 17th when the "early access" program opens up, so I'll post the server information in this board for anybody who's interested.
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