I recently spent several hours at North American co-publisher Eidos to get some hands-on time with Age of Conan, starting off with a new character and briefly jumping to higher levels to check out some team-based PvP combat. The game shows a lot of potential and evidence of fulfilling many of its promises, but also a fair amount of room for improvement.

I started off choosing a character from one of the game's three overarching factions: the hardy Cimmerians, the mystical Stygians, or the more in-between Aquilonians. There are four class archetypes--soldier, priest, rogue, and mage--each of which in turn has three classes. Different classes are available to different races; only the Stygians can become mages, which contain demonologists, heralds of Xotli, and necromancers, but they cannot be soldiers, which contain paladin-like guardians, tank-like conquerors, and melee caster dark templars.

I chose a Stygian demonologist, mainly because that sounds badass, and because demonologists, like necromancers, are "pet classes," able to summon fell creatures to do their bidding. Sadly, in my playtime of just a few hours I was not able to achieve the necessary level to acquire such demonic aids.

Character creation itself is fairly in-depth, with an available advanced mode that allows detailed tweaking of individual features down to noses and eyebrows.

Upon creating my Hyborian warrior, I entered the game, which began with my character washing up on the shores of the island of Tortage. An old man greeted me and somehow was able to inform me that I had lost my memory (how did he know?), which reminded me I was playing a video game.

This started a quest chain to reach Tortage City, kill the slaver who had apparently abused me on my wrecked ship (seriously, how did that old guy know all this stuff?), learn the game's combat system, and leave the island for more exciting things. Before long, I encountered a captive woman in a chainmail bikini (yep, still a video game) and was tasked with hunting down her captor and retrieving the key to her shackles.

Age of Conan uses an unusual melee combat system. Drawing from more conventional action games, it features three directional attacks, executed with the 1-3 number keys. Icons superimposed above enemies indicate from what angles they are most vulnerable or best protected. As you level up, you gain access to actual melee combos, more powerful sequences of directional attacks; these can be complemented by skills from a more traditionally MMO-like skill tree.

This combat system does succeed in adding a more active element. Most MMO combat is not particularly engaging for brand new characters who are not yet stocked with interesting abilities, so Age of Conan's system deserves special credit for being a distinguishing factor right from the start.

The earliest parts of Age of Conan are technically single-player. Initially, it was reported that the game would remain offline up until level 20; that has now been scaled down to level 5, which corresponds with when you get into the city.

Presentationally, Age of Conan has its hits and misses. For the most part, the art direction is fairly standard, so in more open areas, the environments are unexciting and not particularly unique. Meanwhile, denser areas such as thick forests look better, as there seems to be more to show off--lots of foliage, rays of light streaming down, and so on. NPC models often exhibit the "Oblivion effect," with heads that can jar with their torsos in level of detail and skin tone. Even on the beefy Dell XPS machines we were using, it didn't seem like texture and model quality were where one would expect, but it may be the case that with the game still deep in development it has much more optimization work to be done. And while there was an impressive level of NPC voice acting--even in this early unfinished state--much of it is not hugely convincing.

Despite not being best-in-class in certain presentational aspects, many gamers will look to Age of Conan for its rawer content compared to most MMOs. The game is rated "M for Mature," and features many quests and situations with more explicitly violent or sexually-tinged themes. A "fatalities" system is integrated into combat, decapitations and all, and it even extends to spellcasters such as my demonologist--one possible fatality leaves an enemy corpse bathed in flame.

On that note, I was told there is also a "spellweaving" system for magic users that serves as an analog to the active combat system for melee classes, but I did not achieve the necessary level to take advantage of it during my playtime.

Around level 20, your character progresses beyond Tortage and goes onto bigger and better things. After a while, my character was bumped up to level 22 and teleported to the valley of Conan's birth in Cimmeria, whose residents are under constant siege. I completed a number of quests that introduced me to some of the local NPCs and had me join in the town's defense. The same presentational ups and downs seen earlier were present here, though the scale of the enormous valley--which developers said is several square miles in size--was impressive.

Like many modern MMOs, Age of Conan has a penalty for death, but not a lasting one. When you die, you are slapped with a modifier that drastically reduces your damage and toughness; this modifier can stack up to three times upon multiple deaths, and can be removed by returning to the site of your death and locating your gravestone.

Player vs. Player Combat
It wasn't long before I was warped into some PvP. Age of Conan features a few varieties of PvP: standard player-on-player combat, large guild-scale siege PvP, and what the developers call "minigame" PvP, which makes use of 6-12 man teams. I participated in the latter variety along with a number of other present journalists.

At any time, from any location in the world, you can request to enter team-based PvP; if a game is not immediately available, you will join a queue and be notified when you can begin. After the completition you are returned to your previous location.

I played several rounds of capture the flag with six-man teams; those who have played in World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds will have a basic idea of how it works. The structure is very much like CTF in an online FPS, while the actual mechanics are based on the MMO combat gameplay. Like any team-based online game, success is greatly contingent on your side's coordination and team strategy.

In order to balance out uneven player levels in team games, Age of Conan separates players into three PvP tiers: levels 21-40, 41-60, and 61-80. Any players who are more than one level below the maximum for their tier are bumped up to one level below the maximum--i.e., a level 31 player will become temporarily "apprenticed" up to level 39, or a level 61 player will become temporarily apprenticed up to 79, while a level 60 player retails his or her existing level.

While in the apprenticed state, all of your skills and stats scale up proportionally, though you do not gain any new skills or points with which to assign new skills. This means you won't actually be quite as versatile as a true character of your apprenticed level, but it does avoid severe imbalances.

Though I got a basic familiarity with a number of Age of Conan's systems during my few hours of hands-on time, the nature of MMOs and the sheer number of features I didn't get to experience firsthand means I can't help but feel I was only able to skim its surface. Outside of some specific mechanics and to an extent the tone of the world, it is tough to tell how much the game really does break away from its peers.

We'll be checking up on the game again in early January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and we're sure to be part of the beta test as soon as it is open to press, so hopefully we can check back with more in-depth coverage in advance of the game's planned release in March for PC, and later in 2008 for Xbox 360.