Waking Dead

Now that the NDA has been lifted I can talk about my experiences during the Age of Conan PvP beta weekend. First of all, let me say that this wasn’t a full PvP beta client, but rather a handful of Deathmatch and Capture the Flag arenas to play around in. After downloading (6.9GB) and installing (26GB!) I set to work on creating my character.

The character creation screen is excellent, giving you a massive amount of control over how your character looks and sounds. I decided I wanted to start with a Stygian Herald of Xotli, and after finally settling on her looks I hit the Play button.

Even though this was a PvP beta, FunCom decided to include a short tutorial to take you from level 1 to 5; this is ostensibly the opening single player section of the game. Short though it was, it was enough to introduce me to some of the subtleties of Age of Conan, in particular the real-time combat system.

Combat in Age of Conan uses full collision detection between characters and weapons, so you have to line your strikes up or you won’t connect. You can string combos together, either using the special combo abilities, or simply by manually chaining attack directions. You also get to dodge and block, and combining all of these together makes for a very intense fight.

I should point out that, even using DirectX9 (the DirectX10 client didn’t come with the beta), the game looks lovely. Its certainly leaps and bounds ahead of the competition – World of WarCraft included. Audio is also of a similar high standard, with plenty of bespoke incidental effects and a fantastic musical score.

Back to the game. After completing the tutorial, I was warped to the PvP lobby in the city of Tortage, and upgraded to level 20. From here you have a choice of which minigame to take part in, from a choice of 1 Deathmatch arena or 3 Capture the Flag maps. Both game types are fairly straightforward, and if anything a little limited, but it does give you a fair overview of the combat mechanics.

After a few games with my Herald, I decided it wasn’t quite what I was after and decided to roll up a close approximation to my old WarCraft Frost Mage. I decided to pick Tempest of Set, and had a much happier time staying out of combat and nuking from a distance. Complete with snares and burst damage, the Tempest is a pretty good match for the Mage, and plays similarly. There isn’t as much variety in spells, certainly at level 20, but you also get to wear medium armour and wave a polearm about.

Lastly, and itching to get a taste for proper melee combat, I decided to go for a Conqueror. This is where I had the most fun – whether through the class or simply because I understood more of the subtleties in the game mechanics. Either way, this class really clicked with me. The Conqueror is your classic off-tank, with two fighting stances (and attached Feat trees) to spec Defensive or Frenzy. You can really take a lot of punishment, particularly when you augment this with some of the buffs you get. Most of these buffs are command abilities which let you temporarily boost you and your allies’ abilities, although I found the cooldown a little harsh for their usefulness.

Although these were the only classes I played, I did get to have a look at the others as I fought. Your main tank seems to be the Gaurdian, with heavy armour and lots of hit points. Dark Templars seemed quite underpowered in the beta, but they look to be the main DPS warrior class, with magic-enhanced abilities.

The weakest class seemed to be the Priest of Mitra, largely because there are no point-and-click heals in this game. Whilst I’m on the subject of that, I should point out that healing works very differently in Age of Conan. Basically, healing isn’t some “get out of jail free” card; it isn’t powerful enough to change the course of a fight, but what it can do is keep your party alive long enough to out-DPS the enemy. Basically, the game seems less focused on having to have a healer in your party to succeed, but having one keeps you upright for longer. I quite like this approach in principle, but I need more PvE time with it.

The other priest classes are Tempest of Set, and the extremely popular Bear Shaman. These are arguably better all-rounders than the Priest of Mitra, with similar healing spells but better armour and DPS. The rogue classes round it out, with your traditional dual-wielding Assassin (no snares in Age of Conan though!), over-powered Ranger (which is getting a nerf – I got fed up of being 1-shotted) and the obvious Barbarian. Barbarians are DPS machines if spec’ed right, although they can only wear medium armour. Still, dual wielding a pair of axes whilst in Frenzy pumps out the damage, so hopefully you’ll get them before they get you.

All in all, I had great fun, and I’m eagerly awaiting the full release. Despite some niggles with the combat initially, it really started to click towards the end of the weekend, and I think I can start to understand how it all works. Having said that, PvE is always going to be my favourite way to play, so hopefully I’ll get accepted onto the open beta. See you in Hyborea!