Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Comments by Rob Fahey

/excited

Love the Conan books.. and the game does look awesome. The problem is that my gf is reluctant to join the fun as she probably has to wear nipple-protection and a thong as "armor".

Pie!

To crush your enemies. To see them driven before you. And to hear the lamentation of their women.

(In answer to the sub-heading).

Which was also answered in the article... ;)

I agree with Rob in this article that gaming's use of "adult" is very debatable. I have much more hopes for an adult MMO from "The secret world", from the creators of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall.

this is starting to sound very interesting, esp. with my quest to look for more indepth and story driven mmo's. Ill have to watch this one :)

It does sound kinda interesting. PC only I'm guessing, or is a Mac client possible?

"The extensive world of graphic novels from which Age of Conan takes its inspiration (the Arnie movies are simply another spin-off)"

err NO. If Funcom told you that I'm very worried for the game as it's not quite right. The Graphic novels are based on and a spin off from the original Robert E Howard stories, which did appear in pulp comic books in the 1920's but were not fully illustrated at all (usually a one panel illustration maybe 2 or three per tale) but the story was told using old fashioned text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._H...

And what's more the Conan series were an early high-watermark in atmospheric, dark fantasy. There's a lot more to them than arnie in a leather jockstrap.

The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair!

/smack

"OVERRULED!"

"It's Lord of the Rings Online, two bottles of vodka down, standing in the middle of a town square somewhere in Sweden with a crowbar held in a clenched fist, ready to brain anyone that walks too near."

Norway, dammit!!

Looks tacky, unsurprisingly.

/rants

And I'm getting really tired of all those magic glows (usually blue and purple) in everything. I'm thinking of the Bioshock intro vid where the player gets knocked down and cuts his hand on the Big Daddy's drill verses the actual gameplay vids from later on where it just looks like the usual MMO mush of spell effect spheres etc.

/ends rant

Conan doesn't have lightning bolts be a common occurrence, area-of-effect heals and spells, or 'healing classes', or 'good priests'.

The game may be okay, but it's not Conan.

@Red Panda, its PC and 360 I believe. I'd recommend anyone thats interested check out the thread in the forum, there are a few video dev walthroughs up that should pique some interest.

Plus, you can get camels or mammoths as mounts, and engage in mounted combat :) What more do you need to know quite frankly ?

Was that a pic of a man fighting an ape with a sword? If so, this is a definite purchase for me, is there anything better than that scenario?

MAMMOTHS \o/

'reinstalls bootcamp'

ta chimp :)

on the 360 too?!?

wires usb keyboard into the hummer

/tents in a manly barbarian fashion.

Sounds really quiet promising and its arriving as WoW experiences a down turn in popularity.

Where's this sitting in the development cycle then? Is it open beta sort of thing, or not very polished preview territory? It looks interestin'...

Darkedge - I'm aware of the Howard books, but as far as I could gather the game focuses on the comic series, not on the novels, for its inspiration. I wasn't really aware that anyone cared about Howard's novels for anything other than historical value at this stage; I picked one up while researching the game, and it was really quite spectacularly awful :)

Deepo - I do apologise. I mentioned Sweden since that's where I actually witnessed such an event taking place. I'm sure Norwegians are just as capable of being incredibly bad-tempered drunks, though!

Hypercube - It's in closed beta at present, which they're gradually opening up. It sounds like they should be moving into a fairly public beta phase early in autumn.

Before anyone gets too excited check out some of the odd-looking combat videos:

http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/743/74...
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/743/74...
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/743/74...
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/743/74...
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/743/74...

There's still time for things to change but the animations need some work - especially in reacting to being hit.

@Shinji: Really? I bought the hardback compilation recently and they're pretty enjoyable. Fuck the comics, and the movies weren't much either despite the governator.

you set us uuuuup, the cabinet minister, bullshit all of it..

it is of extreme importance that people listen to a band called arnocorps on my space.
do it. do it now.

The novels are still very good, bleak action fantasy. Sounds like you've got a bit of a chip on your shoulder to be honest Shinji.

Just on the off chance there's a misunderstanding here - Robert E. Howard didn't write any Conan 'novels' as such. His work is short stories, collected in the massive hardback CrawlingKingSnakes mentioned. Any Conan novels are pastiches, written by other (and, gawd bless 'em, much less good) writers. Some of them are based on Howard's original work, lots aren't.

Maybe you read one of the sucky pastiche novels, Shinji? The idea that someone could read Howard's original stories and not find *something* to like is too horrible to contemplate! :)

Really curious about the game, though. On one hand I'm intrigued by them playing around with the MMO sacred cows, and intrigued to see a Conan-inspired work. On the other hand they can fuck right off with their claims that it's true to Howard's original works - 'cos it bloody isn't, and Funcom's last MMO, Anarchy Online, could charitably be described as a glorious mess.

I dunno. I'm very intrigued, but don't want to let my hopes get too high...

Anarchy Online could charitably be called a glorious mess

You tell 'em Chris...


Twice! :-D

The first Conan movie was stellar and all the rest was quite horrible.

So could the previewer, or other savvy readers answer the most insteresting question of all please: will PC and Xbox360 players be playing on the same servers?

Chris - the book I picked up was The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, a paperback collection of a number of Howard's short stories. Sorry, shouldn't have said "novel" earlier, that just confused things :)

It didn't click with me at all, really. It's fairly typical of pulp fiction from the era, and I think I'm a fairly picky fantasy reader anyway. The comics worked better for me, probably because they're disposable nonsense, pure and simple - I felt like the novellas or short stories should have had a little more intellectual meat on them.

Neither here nor there with regard to the game, of course, which mostly lifts its inspiration from the comics, but obviously makes fairly significant changes to make things fit with the MMOG mould.

@Shinji read "Red Nails" - it's genius.

He's wildly considered to be on of the founders of modern fantasy. But he did write alot of pulp

All I know is that its requirements will be higher than my measly Radeon 9250 equipped PC can deliver, so I will stick to LOTRO for the time being.

I bought the collected Robert Howard Conan stories recently, my interest sparked by the MMOG and many viewings of the movie. I thought they were great - they definitely follow a formula, but Howard more-or-less created it so that wasn't a problem for me. I think if you read them all in one sitting you might get a bit fed up though.

To add to the multiple versions confusion, until fairly recently I think that the only in-print source for the Howard stories were the ones edited by L. Sprague de Camp to suit the tastes of a more modern American audience.

@Shinji: The book you read is original Howard. Shame it didn't suit, but tastes vary I guess.

Talking of intellectual fantasy, not that we are or anything, I'd recommend Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. Utterly brilliant - liked it more than anything in that genre since I first read Earthsea all those years ago.

That preview made it sound alot more appealing than I'd initially thought this game would be.

We'll see.

So no one knows if XBox360 and PC users will be able to play together on the same server?

@Chris Gardiner "Anarchy Online could charitably be called a glorious mess" - I'm in agreement with you there!

@Darkedge - "Red Nails" is indeed excellent! I'd forgotten about that one, I'll have to see if I can dig it out from somewhere again.

It looks interesting, and I'm probably going to get it when it's released, at least for a month or two. Not sure about doing a beta again after the emotional trauma of Vanguard... That did my brain in.

@Vickery: The game is part of the MS "Games Live" platform, so I do belive that owners of both the PC and the 360 version should be able to play on the same servers. Isn't that the whole point of the "Games Live" platform?

As for this being the wrong kind of "adult", that is probably so. I am hoping FunCom's other MMORPG in development, "The Secret World" wil be "Adult" in a more mature fashion. So - maybe Conan is for the kids, and Secret World for the grown-ups? That would be ok with me. Don't really see how Conan could be very mature anyway; it just doesn't add up. Odd how "mature" and "adult" has become synonymous with "sex" and "gory violence".

I hope so, but I've heard nothing but evasive answers from the developers on this issue, and surely it's got to be one of the most important selling points/points of interest that AOC has going for it.

Shinji - Fairy 'nuff. Strokes and folks and all that. I find there's something unique about Howard's stories that I haven't come across anywhere else, so I'm really fond of them. That first collection is pretty representative of the rest of them, though. If 'Rogues in the House' didn't do it for you, there's no saving you. ;)

One of the aspects of this game I'm curious to see in action is the mix of single- and multi-player. The switching between them by day and night is hugely clever, but I wonder whether it'll provide a nice, complimentary change of pace or just be a subpar experience of both game types.

So many questions! That's the interesting thing about the game, I guess - they're trying so many new things they'll either achieve something remarkable or fall flat on their furry jockstrap-clad arses.

And oops - apologies for repeating my comment about AO in my first post. I retyped the post and forgot to cut it out. It's not that I thought it was such a brilliant point it needed saying twice, or anything. Although, y'know, it was pretty good.

Good report on AOC. I wish I could play that game! The delays just sucks! Anyhow my buddy decided to create a pretty good AOC page to keep me up to date on things. You can see it here as well:

http://www.mmoabc.com/aoc/