Beta Preview
On this first day of un-embargoed goodness for Funcom's Age of Conan, Managing Editor Jon Wood shares his initial impressions of the very early stages of the game.
About a week ago, I finally got myself into the Age of Conan beta. With the embargo lifting today for us reporters, I thought I'd share my very early impressions of the game. There will be a full beta report coming in the next week or so, but even though I haven't had a chance to play a great deal, the game has already made some initial impressions on me that I can share.
From the very first moment that you enter the game (after what I would consider to be a long progression of associated company screens - Funcom, Eidos, Nvidia, Games for Windows... all easily skipped with a click), you get a real feeling of what you're in for. Your first glimpse of the world of Age of Conan is, appropriately, aboard a slave ship and you're the cargo. Your view of the ship is a dimly lit hallway. The camera sits at one end. On each side of the hallways slave men sit on planks, rowing the ship, far down at the other end a slave girls stands for... I don't know... slave encouragement? The sounds of the boat are crisp and clear (I want to be honest and say that the sound team on Age of Conan has done a brilliant job in all aspects, I am a fan of the sound in AoC).
Beyond that, character creation is pretty much what you would expect from an MMO. There are basic options that will allow people who don't care terribly much about the specific details of their character's appearance to breeze through with basic customization, but you also have the advanced options that open up sliders. Personally, give me the deeper selection of the sliders, but I do know people who will be eternally grateful to Funcom for the option to avoid them.
I should also mention here for you sticklers out there that this is also where you choose your race, your class and all of those necessary character building elements. For those players who aren't familiar with the lore of Conan, (and make no mistake, there are a lot of them out there who are still waiting for this game), handy little descriptions are given for the different races and classes that will make choosing just that much easier.
Your early game experience really helps you with the feeling that you're an escaped slave who has just washed up ashore outside of the city of Tortage (which is held currently by some really bad dudes). Armed with only a broken oar, you set about moving toward the city. Right away, you are thrown into combat and believe me when I say that oar can be a bit of a kick-ass weapon.
NPCs in AoC (at least those that I have come across up to this point) have fully developed voiceovers. It's not even just a small portion of the text. It's complete NPC dialogue. Now, while I do say that I like voiceovers, the thought of them often makes me cringe. It isn't enough, in my opinion, to just have voiceovers. I've heard too many really poorly acted voiceovers (the XBox 360 Conan game is a great example) to get too excited about them. Often, it's like the actors were just handed a script and told to read without knowing anything about the game, the characters or the situation. With Age of Conan, I felt like the actors and by extension whomever was directing the actors, took the time to know and understand the context of the dialogue that they were delivering.
