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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

Innovative Combat Mechanics

The most obvious innovation in Age of Conan is the melee combat. While spellcasting is very much standard stuff, melee is far more twitch-based. Collision detection, no autoattack and melee swings that hit based on positioning - with multiple enemies getting hit if your swing connects all of them is definitely new. This also means that every swing of a blade comes only if you press a button. This fresh take on MMO combat is probably the reason why so many have praised the game as "new" and "fresh", but once you have spent couple of evenings spamming couple of buttons constantly to fight off even the weakest trash monsters, the practical benefits of an autoattack system become apparent.

Age of Conan isn't dramatically different from its competition - anyone who has played Warrior, Rogue of Feral Druid in That Other Game knows very well that high level melee combat involves plenty of button mashing over there as well, and same is true for most other MMO games. The remaining differences are minor - sure, you hit multiple opponents if they are in your frontal arc, but that's as innovative as hitting Cleave with your Warrior. All Age of Conan really did was to add collision detection and turn almost every attack into an area or cone effect, capable of hitting multiple foes.

Cone-based melee attacks, coupled with very AOE-heavy spell lineup and group or cone based heal spells also has an unintended side effect - try fighting anything with a large group, and it's all about spamming AOE spells and special multi-target combos as fast as you can while the healers mash their multi-target heals. Funcom claimed this brings strategy to combat, but I call that a bald-faced lie. The only upside is that healers can play without staring at the group window and playing whack-a-mole with the health bars. Naturally Age of Conan replaces that with "nothing" as you can just close your eyes and spam the group heals until the monsters are down. I preferred the whack-a-mole; at least it required some skill in prioritizing targeting.

Then there are the melee combos - great in theory, nothing too special in practice. A combo is a special move that is followed by a set of normal swings. Early combos are simple - hit special attack, then swing from upper left and you execute a special hit. Later combos turn the battle into a Street Fighter derivative with three or four directions required after the special move. While NPCs are happy to stay put while you hammer in the multiple normal swings needed for the combination, this innovation breaks into small bits when you try to apply it to PvP combat. In fact, the whole combo system degenerates melee PvP to circle running as each player keeps running around so the enemy can't pull off a potentially devastating multi-hit combo - at least until a third player comes along and nukes both melee characters into smoldering piles of goo. "Exciting".

Spellcasters also have something called "Spellweaving", which is apparently a system where you combine your existing spells for greater effects (with the potential to kill yourself while doing so). I don't have any practical experience, as my highest level caster character happens to be a Tempest of Set - and their Spellweaving is currently disabled due to a zone-crashing bug.

While Funcom has at least tried to innovate with the combat system, I'm not convinced that it's an improvement over the status quo. It's fun for the first few days, but in the long run it just turns combat into a random mess in groups. If action is what you desire, there's plenty of that, but it comes at the expense of strategy.

Death - A New Way To Travel

Combat also loses urgency once you figure out that Age of Conan has effectively no death penalty. If you die and don't have a groupmate around to resurrect you, you just end up at the closest respawn point with a very minor combat debuff applied to you. Should you venture back to the spot where you died, you can get rid of the debuff by clicking your gravestone. No XP loss, no repair costs, no running back to your corpse as a ghost.

This system has also two unintended side-effects. Should you venture into a dungeon with couple of friends, and you happen to be the healer and kick the bucket, there are two options - either the rest of the group suicides and you start from the beginning, or you have to work your way back to where your group was, fighting alone through respawns while your friends twiddle their thumbs. Most choose to suicide, as it's faster to just re-do the whole dungeon as a group.

It also turns death into a cheap teleportation tool - just check where the closest spawn point is, and get killed. I don't mind non-existing death penalty from PvP combat - that's only smart - but when people go suicidal just to avoid walking, something is seriously wrong with the game.

Server Types

There are three different rule sets for servers, PvE, PvP and Culture-PvP (plus "RP" or RolePlay variants of the main types). PvE is your normal carebear server type, where all PvP happens only in specific areas designated for just that. PvP is a pure free-for-all gankfest, glamoured by all no-lifers but in reality enjoyed only by very few. With the number of bored high level characters growing daily, full PvP is exactly as much fun as stabbing yourself repeatedly with a butter knife. The only real way to survive in the PvP servers of Age of Conan is to be a part of a large guild that is happy to dash to the rescue every time some dimwit decides that ganking you over and over again is "fun". Part of the problem comes from the aforementioned lack of a death penalty that makes ganking completely risk-free.

Then there is the Culture-PvP rule set - the silly land. It's a PvP server where you can kill people that are from a different race. Sounds good in theory, but then you figure out that Stygians are mostly playing mages, and can't roll melee classes at all. On the flipside, Aquilonians and Cimmerians have no mage classes. I'm sure there are fine lore-related reasons for the limited race/class choices, but it means that Culture-PvP is fundamentally broken. Bit like playing Horde vs. Alliance where Alliance would have no mages while Horde would be without any tanks.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Visuals, PerformancePage 3: Combat, Server TypesPage 4: GameplayPage 5: Gameplay, cont.Page 6: Gameplay ProblemsPage 7: Bugs and Little PraisePage 8: Conclusions, Scoring

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