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AoC interview Product Developer + Vidéos gameplay : Massively ( anglais )
Désolé amis traducteurs... encore du boulot pour vous ! Merci encore !

by Akela Talamasca

http://users.skynet.be/fb557918/photos/aoc/103.jpg

On December 5th, I was invited to the Eidos/Funcom Age of Conan press event, where I was privileged enough to be granted access to both the game itself and the development team. I was able to play the opening area, leading into the first town. I sussed out the combat and the conversation interface. I spoke with Jørgen Tharaldsen, the Product Developer, and he let drop a metric ton of knowledge upon my fevered noggin. I reprint here our conversation, interspersed with my handheld-shot video pieces, the first of which is shown above, which is where the game starts, with you as a survivor of a shipwrecked slaver ship. I'd like to thank Jørgen and the entire Eidos/Funcom team, all of whom I found to be gracious, witty, and enthusiastic about their game, which is refreshing to see. My take? The game looks incredible, and it's extremely immersive from the get-go. They say they're on schedule for an early 2008 release, so this is something to anticipate indeed.

exploration_CD.mov

More videos and the interview after the jump!

Conversation_CD.mov

This is a shot of the conversation interface, where you can choose from a list of responses in the lower left, by either clicking on the line of text, or pressing the appropriate number key. Note the scaffolding around the main building, looking like something humans might actually build.

Massively: So first of all, one of the big questions is, we know that this is more adult-oriented, so I expect that you're probably going to get that AO rating?

Jørgen Tharaldsen: No. We're going for Mature rating because with the AO rating we're going to be locked out of retail chains pretty much all over the world. And Conan was never an AO universe per se; it's not that gross. We're not really speculating that kind of violence, it's more like an inherent nature of living that kind of life that Conan did. So we've done everything in our power to push the barriers in terms of how far we can stretch it for the ratings boards to be within what's reasonable. If anything, when you read the comics and novels, they're a lot more brutal than what we are doing. We're going to the ratings boards right now. So actually you have seven different ratings boards to go to in the Western World, and they allow us to place certain parameters of what we'd like the game to be, and then we can twist like the horror value, the fatality value ...

So then it'll be localized by region?

It will be server-side. Through your IP we can control what kind of content you'll see, so let's say you come from Germany, you might not see all the fatality moves, but we hope you will see all of them, we'll know soon when we hear back from the ratings boards, whereas in the US you might not see nipples. But you probably will see nipples in Norway, for instance.

So it's not so much what client you download that makes the difference, you guys control it.

Yeah, we have to. Because we are the first mature MMO and there has been a lot of attention on this fact of our game, you know, Conan license, heads will roll. But since the beginning as we've said, we do not make this game for kids, we're all grown-ups, we'd like to make a grown-up game. We'd like to stick to the license, but we're not just about chopping off heads left and right and tearing off limbs. You have the ability to do that every now and then if you're good at what you do in the game.

Yeah, even then, it's not like a close-up, slow-motion sort of fountaining of blood ...

You've played it, you've seen the kind of level we're going for, and as you learn the game more you'll have better ability to use these combos and unleash yourself with these combos, but it's not gonna be like a blood-soaked kind of [makes exploding gesture with hands]

First combat! Fighting is based on a three-swing system, with each weapon sporting its own combo system. Experimentation will provide the best combinations of swings -- that is, which swings lead naturally into each other, thereby reducing time between strikes.

The violence is fine, it's acceptable. So, when I was running through the game, I had picked an Archer class, even though there were no bows to be had, will all the weapons be class-specific, or can anyone pick up any weapon?

In theory, a lot of them can be picked up by a lot of different ones, but all the classes have different weapons they will carry. So say, the Archer, obviously you have the bow, but also several other classes can use the bow, but then, not until level 50, for instance. Some classes can dual-wield daggers, whereas others can only wield one dagger. Two-handed swords can only be equipped by, you know, some classes have specialties with two-handed swords, others will have one-handed swords.

There will just be advantages for different classes.

Advantages and disadvantages. And then you roll your class according to what kind of role you think you'll go through the game, and as you learn more about it as you learn more about the game, you can either continue with that class, or restart and go in a different direction. We're pretty open in terms of what the players can do and not do in the game, but this also goes for the armor. Like, only the Guardian can wear the full plate armor, and no one else can have that kind of armor set, simply because that's part of the lore. So there are a lot of restrictions, but there are also a lot of opportunities.

Can any class use magic?

No, it's a hotly-debated topic how much magic is there in the world of hyboria. Well, more or less all of Robert E.] Howard's stories had elements of magic in them. But only a few of the classes are magic classes. Obviously, you would move toward the Priest and Mage classes, those are the key ones, but you have elements of it in, for instance, the Dark Templar. Whereas the Barbarian class cannot use magic at all.

Well, Conan always hated magic.

Exactly. So we're trying to stay true to the lore there as well. We even have it that you need to be a certain culture to have this kind of class. It's just a running theme throughout that we're trying to stay true to Howard's universe.

So will there be creatures from the series in the game?

Actually, creatures, monsters, NPCs, background lore people – Thoth_Amonthe archvillain of the series is the archvillain of the game. Even the first guy you meet on the beach; there are multiple characters you can speak to, and with the story and setting we have, we are also allowed a certain revival of the dead through Thoth-Amon's skills. You're pretty much journeying in the footsteps of Conan, so you can expect to see all the same stuff he did, and the place you're going into now is the home region of Conan, where he grew up, and you can meet the clans around the region. This is the stuff that I think very few people see because very few have this depth of knowledge of Conan. For most people, it's Arnold_Schwarzenegger, they know the name, but those who are fans, they'll see that wow, this universe is pretty deep.

[b]So it's from both the novels and the comic series that was running on Marvelfor a while?

Yes, both. In addition to stuff we devised ourselves. But the novels from Howard are the key inspiration. That's the creation, that's the start of it all. There's some really cool pacing as well, it's written in a very page-turner kinda way, and then it's a matter of what makes the best game? What is the coolest to get in there? What should we focus on? Because we have a lot more to think about than one cool thing that Conan did in one of the stories; we have to think about what are you gonna do throughout this entire world, and we need to give you multiple adventures in the entire universe. And that's one of the challenges, that we have to bind all of this together, because if you look at the novels, there's many Conans: Conan the Conqueror, Conan the King, Conan the Barbarian, so forth and so on. And we're giving you a chance to follow in many of these directions. If you like Conan, you should be like 'Cool!'


He's the original badass.

Yes, definitely!

Combat2_CD.mov

Single combat, where you can see the white icons on either side of my opponent, and one over his head. These represent where he's shielded, which according to one of the devs, changes over the course of the combat to reflect how he's being attacked. You can see this in the video -- watch for the left side icon move over to the right, to better protect the side that's getting more hits.

So, what was it that drew the team to Conan in the first place?

We started off in 2003, in January, and we sat down and said Do you wanna make a new online game? We'd had anarchy-online before, and then that was well up and running, and we just worked on the new major expansion pack called Shadowlands, and we knew that after Shadowlands we wanted to start on a fantasy game. So do we make our own property, or do we see if there are any licenses out there? So we started a process of both, looking at what we could do ourselves and what licenses are out there. At the same time, by coincidence, some Swedes, you know, our neighboring country Norway, actually bought the rights for the Conan license, and they started looking for a company to create an MMO. Back in 2003, there weren't a lot of companies who could do that. There still isn't a lot of companies who could do that, so we were a very good match. And Stockholm is like an hour away, same timezone, and Conan has a very special fanbase in Norway. I can go to any grocery store in Norway, I can go to any gasoline station in Norway, I can buy Conan, still. I've been reading it since I was a kid.

It was meant to happen.

Meant to happen! We also have of course, Norwegian views on how to treat violence, so I think it's a fresh way to treat the license.

I really like the fact that the fighting is skill-based, rather than by the numbers.

And now you've seen a fraction of it, because as you move through it, you get one nugget here, one small skill there, you get access to a horse at level 40, or a War Mammoth, and you can fight from the horse or the mammoth or the rhino, and then it goes into the Siege gameplay, and it just escalates up to level 80.

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Is it possible to solo your way through the game, or do you need to group?

You can solo all the way to level 80. 'Cause we've seen that in a couple of online games that you have to group, and of course we've been doing online games, we know all about the fact that the social gameplay is like the essence that takes you through the game. But we also know that a lot of people, some nights, they just want to be alone.

They may not have the time to commit to ...

Exactly, I need to leave in 2 hours, or today I just want to play for an hour, I wanna do this, I wanna complete this, but of course going solo all the way, you miss out on a lot of content. And it's gonna get harder, but it's possible.


Is there a system in place to hire mercenaries?

Yeah, in the Siegeing. Other players. So you can be a mercenary in the game. If it's a siege battle going down, and you see you're about to lose, or if you wanna take someone out, you can actually send out a call for mercenaries, and give them in-game credits to join the battle and they will be teleported into the siege battle. Those are other players, and there are five mercenary levels as well.

So when you do that, are you pretty much the de facto leader of them, or are you all on equal footing?

Well, of course there's a risk hiring mercenaries. They teleport into your battle, and they are on your side ...

So they could turn against you if they wanted?

Well, that would be friendly fire, so that wouldn't hit you, because they're defined as being on your side, but you could count on them and spend your money and they could be standing in the corner idling, but of course the serious mercenaries would like to go out and kill stuff because that will also reward them with levels.

And then their reputation would suffer.

Exactly. So that's like a subgame. You don't necessarily have to be in a guild to be part of the guild gameplay, which I think is a pretty nifty approach. But that also has its limitations, of course, not being in a guild, so there's always this risk versus reward tradeoff, how you want to play the game, and this goes all the way back to the basics of our class design. Which route you want to go is pretty much up to you.

Combat3_CD.mov

Melée combat. It's important to know that your strikes don't just hit the opponent directly in front of you. It's a cone of effect; anyone standing inside the cone gets hit! And check out the smoothness of the animation -- nice work, guys!

Is there anything in the game where you can follow a god, or a deity?

Yeah, many of the classes are tied to it. For instance, the Priest of Mitra. You would then see how to do spells, you would see avatars of the god being represented. So let's say you wanted to revive some of your friends who have died on the battlefield. And to revive them you would see three avatars with Cups of Blessing being held over them. But you can't call down gods. And according to the lore, meeting a god is something you almost never do. Like Conan getting to a villain who's been messing around for 5 years to get this demigod or demon to come to him, but there will be smaller versions like people worshipping demons, black magicians, like that.

So basically, having the support of a god will be like buffing your stats.

Exactly. You would have skills according to your dedication or following.

And is that based on your character class?

Yeah, but the gods are also around, and you notice that by the way the particular culture is speaking, how the cities are built up, how the architecture is built up, how temples are built up, so like in Cimmeria there will always be Crom.And you will speak to someone and they will say 'By Crom!', and how this culture looks at their god. But if you go to Stygia,they will look at their god in a whole different, obedient way. Whereas with with Crom, it's 'Well, he gave us life, but he also gave us shit.' And this is something we really tried to give throughout the game as well.

What's the death penalty when you die, what happens?

Depends on how you die. In PvP, obviously, less penalty, if you die in PvE, you'll be teleported back to your spawn point and you can run back to reduce your death penalty by finding your tombstone, but there will be a timer where you will have reduced skills. So let's say for two minutes you'll have reduced skills, but you'll soon be back to full again. And these penalties can stack, so if you die within the two minutes, you receive another reduction on top of the original.

Can you have pets?

There's two key pet classes. And there are pet points, you get up to 8 as you move to level 80, and you can divide these pet points, you can have 8 small pets, or you can have one 4 point healer pet, and you control these pets the way you do a squad in a team-based FPS. But they're not gonna be tanker pets, like you see in other games, they won't agro all the time. They can help heal you, but the main agro target will actually be you.

What age of history do the players inhabit?

In terms of the lore? That would be the novel called Hour of the dragonby Robert E. Howard. And Conan has just become king of Aquilonia.He has a wife, he's actually expecting a child, and in Stygia, his ancient enemy, Thoth-Amon, is stirring, a lot of weird things happening in the world. At the same time, the Vanirare invading, you have the Kushites invading, the Pictsare invading. There is constant conflict going on, the way it used to be in medieval Europe, for instance, a hundred kingdoms. So the conflict is everywhere.

So is Conan someone you can visit?

Yeah, your Destiny Quest that's taking you from level 1 to 80, the one with all the voiceovers and stuff, ties into Conan. So as you progress through it, depending on your archetype, there will be different interaction points with him as you move forward.

Are there any advantages to choosing a male over a female, or a female over a male?

Well, it depends on if you like to beg for coins and stuff. [laughter] No, that's one of the things we actually changed from the lore. Because Conan was created in the 1930s, and it'll be 2008 soon, and in Conan there were very few strong females, and in general, the female would be the wench, or something, but in our game, everybody is strong. And all of them have male-specific armor, female-specific armor, we're just trying to make everything specific for the chosen gender.

I noticed that in the trailer you were showing some housing being built. Is that in the game as well?

That's a player-made village. What you saw was a Battle Keep going up. So depending on whether you want a peaceful city or a PvP city, you stake your claim on land, and in the peaceful areas, obviously, no one can actually siege you, but in the border kingdoms, you can lay siege to other's lands and take the land from their guild. And that's where the mercenary system comes in as well. And there will be opportunity where you can actually attack these places. The system is somewhat similar to a strategy game, where you have a grid of land, x amount of space for the group, say nine buildings or whatever, and you need to choose which buildings should my guild build, what can I afford, how should I build it ...

So you can build, say, a barracks or something ...

Let's say you build a stable, which will boost how fast you can travel, but if you build all stables, you lose the benefit of an armory. And you can upgrade some of them, and of course, you need resources to gather to build them, four base resources, and that's where the crafters come in, for those who like to play that part of the game, and obviously the killers would defend it. So this is the beauty of the MMO, I think, you can find your role in it.

I would assume that if you're a builder, you're not limited to just building, you can fight as well.

No, it's just a role that you take through the game where you actually spend more of your time, more of your points increasing this aspect of your gameplay experience. And this ties into something we call Prestige classes, which you get when you get higher up in the game. And it sounds very complex when you take it on a base level, but it feels very natural and intuitive when you move through the game, because when you get to level 35, you say Hey, I wanna experience something new, and when you get to level 40, you can choose which of four branches you want to pursue through the game. And then you would choose the Architect way, because that's what you see your role as being. Or the Commander, because that's what you like to do.

Earlier I heard someone say that there were four tiers of 120, like 1 to 40, 41 to 80 ...

PvP tiers. There are a lot of people who are saying that my friends have more time than me, they play a lot more than me, if I'm out of the game for two days, they won't even talk to me anymore, so we implemented some stuff to make the game more playable for people with families, and less time. One of these is the PvP tier system, almost like a master/apprentice system, where you can actually have someone of a lower level follow you through the game. Most of us have families, we're developers, we have kids, we see that we're not able to play as much as we did when we were 18. I'm not gonna say that there won't be hardcore stuff in there as well, but the main bulk of it should be accessible to pretty much everyone.

I noticed that the game has a much more realistic and muted palette, and the environment looks natural.

Do you know a game called The longest Journey ? The co-creator of The Longest Journey and the art director of Anarchy Online, a fantastic man, Didrik Tollefsen, and the first thing was the definition of what it was supposed to be, do we go for the cartoony look? What do we want to do with this? And the word was Magical Realism; let's push it. We are a technology company as well, everything we do is proprietary, so we're also interested in pushing our engines. It's very lush.

It's gorgeous. Everything looks natural, like you really are in a living world.

Exactly. And we have six audio people in the game, and they've been working on the music for the past 4 years as well, and it all blends with the acting and the storyline.

I noticed that when you're running along it sounds one way, and when you get into combat, it changes to match.

Yeah, and it's actually different depending on your culture, and the time of day, and what region you're in. And we got an MTV nomination for our latest game – we didn't win, but hopefully for this one. We upped the budget even more for the music on this one. And I think we'll actually be the first online game ever to have 5.1 surround music in the game. So the music is all mixed in 5.1, and if you have the right equipment, it's a world of difference. So we've been getting a hundred percent feedback on immersion; the most immersive online game ever.

source
lol mais arretes avec tes titres là !
deja que massively j'ai cru a une video de pvp massif, là j'ai cru au report
faut que je me couche moi, mais encore merci à toi
Age of Conan: Hands-On Preview warcry ( anglais )
Bon beih encore un ca n'arrête pas ! en anglais pour le moment donc...

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Age of Conan has been consistently demonstrated as a mature MMOG with a special emphasis on barbaric combat. At an event in San Francisco last week, the Funcom team got together and really let the press dig into the game. It was the first time they showed it, not with hype and circumstance - this summer, they demoed it with beheadings set to 100 percent - but with the confidence to let the game live or die on its own merits. Over four hours, I was able to play through the first seven levels, experience a mid-level dungeon and zone and get acquainted with their instanced PvP.

Based on the famous novels by Robert E. Howard, Age of Conan provides players with all the usual MMOG trappings. It has everything any AAA MMOG needs to have -quest-driven character development, dungeons, instanced arena PvP, combat, crafting, AAA graphics and a strong story. Then, as any successful MMOG must, it throws in a few ripples. They rethought the basic combat mechanics, added a territory control endgame and introduced a fresh look at the traditionally sterile first few levels. The question is now, have they pulled it off?

A big promise Funcom made is a single-player experience through the first 20 levels that makes the player feel like a hero, not a rat-slaying peon. It sounded great on paper, but while the first few levels were a solid MMOG experience, that's all they were. Full disclosure: I am so programmed to grind through those levels that it was not until a day after the event that I even remembered the "single-player" aspects. So to me, the experience was not altogether different than what I am used to.

Age of Conan has been in development since 2003 and it occurs to me that in this area, the genre may have passed them by. The much-hyped single-player experience does have cut scenes, tree-based dialogue and some good sequences, but from what I saw, it is not a heck of a lot different than what any MMOG has to offer. Back in 2003, these innovations were hallmarks of the RPG, not the MMOG, and really would have set it apart. Today, they're part of the mainstream MMOG experience.

Perhaps aware of this, Funcom seems to have played the feature down both in rhetoric and action. It's also not a pure single-player experience. Players start in an MMOG area and work through a basic tutorial mission before they come to Tortage, the first city. All the while, other players are running around. The single-player experience amounts to an instanced class quest that players can weave in and out of. Go into the bar, talk to the right person, and you shift into the evening, which is the instanced single-player experience. Every so often, it boots you back to daytime, which is a traditional MMOG shared space. Players can power through that epic quest and gain their levels, but they can also play in the MMOG world. This is not a strict single-player RPG followed by an MMOG, but a weave of the two.

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It certainly felt a lot more like an MMOG than a single-player game, but that is not an indictment of the experience. The story was solid and definitely referenced the mature tone without clobbering the player over the head, and the whole experience was refreshingly polished. The best indication is that as I worked my way through the first few levels, rarely did I feel stuck, lost or an urge to check my watch. It is a solid start. It had a fair bit of typical "fetch me this, kill that," but I can say I was genuinely entertained.

The strongest part of the first few levels - and I would suspect the game in general - is that for the first time in a long time it feels like a world and not a guided trip through Disney Land. There are challenges and creatures along the way that have nothing to do with the mission at hand, and combat doesn't always wait for you to get ready. For example, right out of the tutorial, I started on a road that led down into the town. My goal was to gain access to that town, and had I wished I could have stuck to the path and got it done, but unlike so many games, there were not sheer cliffs to make sure I stayed on the rails. To my left, I saw a camp of bandits, way above my level and clearly not on my side. The simpleton that I am, I decided to fight them, and I even got one's head before they took me out. I died, but I had fun, and it had nothing to do with the mission at hand.

That wasn't the only example, either. Later on, in the instanced mission, my goal was to reach a warrior and deliver a message. Most MMOGs, that's check the radar, point due west, hit "num-lock" and wait. Here, the island was filled with encounters that blocked my way. There were bandit camps I could storm, if I wished, and alligators that jumped out of the dark swamp, whether I liked it or not. I delivered my message, but this was a perfect example of a FedEx quest used properly. At its most basic level, Lord of the Rings (the books, not the game) is a big FedEx quest. It's the adventures along the way that make it interesting. Too often, designers seem to focus on the end that they make the means an all-consuming straight line. Funcom brings back some of the variety of earlier MMOGs and is better for it.

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Last week's event marked the first time I was able to get hands on with the controls, and it was interesting to see that they'd already addressed my biggest concern: clunky combat controls. Combat is much different in Age of Conan than most MMOGs. Rather than targeting and using special moves, players simply face an opponent or opponents and swing their sword in one of a few directions. At one point, Conan had six directions players could swing the weapon, all controlled from the keyboard with the same hand that directs movement. The mechanic sounds brilliant with an Xbox 360 controller (where a flick of the right stick does the job), but for those who want a mouse and keyboard, it sounded like a recipe for carpel-tunnel syndrome. More recently, at E3 2007, they'd simplified it down to five directions in an arc over the WASD buttons (namely Q-1-2-3-E), but still, that seemed a bit much.

Fully aware that any shift to a basic assumption of MMOGs requires adjustment time for players, they've wisely cut it down to three directions (controlled with the 1-2-3 buttons) over the first few levels. Ultimately, the five-button arc from E3 will be how it works, but players get their feet wet with the exact buttons that usually control combat in MMOGs. It made the experience original, yet intuitive and should make the transition to the full five-direction much more fluid; although, at this particular event, we never did get to try it.

They have also simplified their combinations, which was a highly controversial decision in the community. It used to be that they would trigger automatically, and the player would click the lit up direction (there is a UI for your swings in the center-bottom of the screen) in sequence to perform a special move, such as a knockback, agro or stun. Now, players trigger the desired move much like they would a feat in another game. They're equipped to a hot bar and act on timers. Once you click it, the sequence lights up and if you follow it, the move is performed. This change accomplishes three important things: It keeps the player's focus on the action and not the UI, it is easier to grasp for traditional MMOG players and lets players fight how they want, with less risk of accidentally performing the wrong move. Under the previous system, players needed to remember that for example, "1-2-1" was a knockback, while "1-2-2" was a stun. With self-activation, you quickly learn what combination follows and can instead watch the blood flow.

The system is not perfect, though. For one, even when leveled up to the 20th level, my character never had a "combination" that required a second move. I simply activated the tactic and then hit the first direction to light up. Boom, move performed. There is such a thing as oversimplified.

Outside of tactics, there's more to combat than just randomly hitting one of the three directions. With each weapon and direction, there's a follow-up move that naturally flows after. If you hack from right to left with your sword and then quickly hit the left to right button, the second blow flows out of the first and is delivered more quickly. You know it's working when it feels right, and over time you're able to develop a rhythm. This means that like real life, a switch from polearms to swords won't just depend on the character's stats, but actually require the player to learn the best way to wield the weapon. It's subtle, and it's a nice wrinkle that keeps the players on their toes.

Beyond that, Funcom also promises directional weaknesses among opponents. For example, if an enemy has a shield in his left hand, it is likely not as effective to hit him there. They even tell us that the AI will actually move a shield to a weaker side if they find themselves being pounded there.

After a few levels of the low level experience, we warped forward to an outdoor, level 20-plus dungeon. This is just about the point where the game was supposed to go full on MMOG and gave us a chance to try out a more advanced character. The transition was OK, as I quickly decided I wanted to be a sword/shield guy over using polearms, and we went in groups of five to explore.

The previously mentioned oversimplified tactics aside, combat held up at this level and gave me enough variety. There were some traditional MMOG problems, like agro-intensive casters that I just couldn't keep the spiders off of, but in general, it was positive.

The dungeon itself, though, was a bit of a letdown. As far as I could tell, it was divided into individually themed quadrants. In one, we took down a giant spider; in another, some humanoid enemies. However, the whole thing seemed artificial. The humanoids mingled with spiders for no apparent reason, and each one just seemed to be a dungeon crawl without the purpose. Granted, the artificial nature of the demonstration was likely to blame (we were, after all, artificially leveled up and teleported to the start of the dungeon). So, we wandered in circles and killed things until it was time to move on. I suspect it was just a chance to get used to fighting in groups, which seemed to work as one would expect.

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Quickly, they shot us on to Conall's Valley, an enormous outdoor zone where the local Cimmerian clans are in a brutal war against the conquest-oriented Venir savages. One developer dared us to find the end of the zone in the time allotted, and I never did. It is not just huge, it looks huge. That's a key difference between Conan and too many MMOGs that boast acreage statistics. It's one thing to have a huge seamless zone, but it's an altogether difference challenge to create the sweeping views and towering mountains that give that scale heft. Funcom pulled it off.

There, we got a chance to run out of the besieged town and throw our swords into the enemy. It was not until a bit of time here - on the heels of the dungeon experience - that we learned our characters and the group dynamics. As we ran out against a seemingly endless stream of enemies, people started to pull off some neat tricks. I personally beheaded my first enemy at this point, which without the cheat codes on, does pack an emotional punch. To pull it off, you need to strike the killing blow using one of the tactics and then hope for the best on a pre-determined percentage. It's rare, but it definitely whetted by appetite for blood, as my enemy sprawled out, blood spewing all over the place.

We also started to realize the meaning of death in this zone. For anyone who played Dark Age of Camelot, the death penalty will be pretty familiar. There's a death sickness - a long term debuff on the character - and if you fetch your gravestone, you can mitigate it. In all honesty, I like the challenge of running out to find the stone. The game was never so complex that finding it was the issue; instead it just encouraged me to avenge myself on those who took the life in the first place. They were always nearby.

Once we reached a point where we were comfortable talking to each other, Funcom then set up a five-on-five capture the flag PvP tournament. We all entered the queue and waited for the game to begin. In a normal situation, this would be much like other MMOGs. You open the UI, tell it what you (and in this case your group) want to do and then leave it in the corner while it finds a match. Once matched, you teleport in.

In a slight twist, where most games kind of shield enemies from each other to make it as anonymous as possible for fear of abuse, Age of Conan encourages it. They put all the players, both sides, on a little bridge together while everyone loads into the area. Only after everyone's had a chance to make a rude gesture or two do they finally send you back to your base and kick off the fight.

Player vs. player was a much different beast than bopping monsters, as it usually is. Monsters sit still, players don't. While the controls in this case did create some stationary and epic encounters, there was a lot of chasing people. That said, they seem to have struck a good balance with the endurance thresholds and sprint speeds to make sure it's not an eternal twitch stalemate for the hand-to-hand guys.

In fact, for one of the first times in recent memory, I didn't feel like a useless piece of fodder against the ranged classes. The best kill ratio in both matches belonged to a caster, but when a warrior got in close, he could shred them pretty quickly, and with a bit of cleverness could pull of some fun signature moments.

In one situation, our group was running up the hill to the other team's flag when one of their casters hid himself on the ramparts and rained lightning down on us. I sprinted ahead and came up behind him. While he frantically turned to face the onslaught, I quickly activated my knockback tactic and threw him down from where we came. Let's just say, fall damage is very much enabled. That move led to our first and only flag capture.

Suite et fin :

I'm shamed to admit, but I was also humbled by an enemy who chopped my head off as time expired. We had a clear moral victory in that first match, but it's hard to get excited about your kill ratio when through the transparent UI pop-up all you can see is your body on the grass, blood spewing out of the place where your head used to be.

Age of Conan has impressive character customization with more sliders than anyone could humanly wish for, much like many MMOGs. The difference for them is that everyone has this cave-man feel, and it makes for a twist on the norm. On top of the regular sliders for nose length and how much the guy's ears stick out, they also put some time into scars, broken noses and other brutal tokens of life. At the end, I spent 20 minutes building the ugliest characters I could. I made some really ugly guys and quite a few I'd run from on a dark road, but the tools do not go so far as to let people leave reason behind.


http://users.skynet.be/fb557918/photos/aoc/109.jpg

needed more varieties of face textures and hair. I never felt fully comfortable with any of the hair options. Hair is one of the hardest things to do in 3-D, but I've definitely seen other games do it better. There was also some sloppiness to iron out in terms of penetration issues and floating beards. And, the much anticipated Age of Conan females? They were not in the version shown.

The game world has been strongly crafted to feel like the world Robert E. Howard described. Each climate feels unique and true to the nature. Icy, snowy lands look and feel cold, and the warmer, jungle areas are just as true to life. Visually, they captured both the spirit of the novels and did it with some really high-end artistry.

However, I cannot say the same attention was given to the story. All the quests were fine and did a good job of weaving the game's themes into adequate situations, but they were not anything special. I still found myself wrestling with the dialogue trees and quickly began to skip through to the end. The only thing that kept my attention was the fact that they put a lot of effort into truly top-notch voice acting. It is by far the best I've seen in an MMOG, but sadly the words coming out in my limited experience didn't match.

The most obvious example is the first story. The player begins as a rowing slave from a wrecked ship. You wash up on shore and of course undergo the forgivable artificiality of a tutorial, but while I understand and applaud the need to explain things away, the logical leap they make is laughable. Funcom wants players to feel like a hero from the start, and they succeed in that, but I'd say they do it in spite of the story. Quite literally, your character has hit his head and remembers nothing of what he was before his years as a slave. The epic quest, from the first few levels I played, seems to be all aimed at unlocking the memories of your undoubtedly heroic past life. The story neatly wraps everything into a nice generic package, as is necessary, but it's been done and done to death. I saw the Bourne movies and I beat Assassin's Creed, and those two were already using a tired cliché, albeit effectively. I was disappointed to see it recycled into Age of Conan. I had hoped for more from a game with such a rich intellectual property behind it.

The amazingly detailed characters and world help the game overcome that story and really capture the IP, but they could also be the game's ultimate commercial Achilles' heel. I am all for the advancement of 3-D graphics technology, and I love a pretty screenshot as much as the next guy, but I also want a game that I can run on my computer at home. I was surprised and impressed that Age of Conan was as stable and polished as we found it. There were minimal glitches and the game ran smoothly, but it did so on a PC with more neon lights than a suped-up Honda Civic.

This to me is the biggest mistake MMOG companies have made since World of Warcraft. At every conference, the MMOG developers gather around and talk about what lessons they learn from WoW. Yet, I have yet to see one get the single most important thing WoW did correctly: run on a PC that a huge percentage of the population and likely anyone who halfway considers himself a gamer, owns. The system requirements are sane, and they open the game to a huge audience that these boundary-pushing titles cannot. The barriers to entry in an MMOG are already so high, why add another with system requirements? Let Crytek overheat people's 8800s and make MMOGs that regular people can run.

That said, Funcom seems to be cognizant of what their game is and what it is not, and I believe their expectations are in line with the limitations their system requirements place upon the game's ultimate subscriber numbers.

Age of Conan is the refreshing anti-WoW in an age of clones. It clearly took some lessons from the King, but it does not appear that they made decisions based on whether or not WoW did them. In some ways, it is very familiar; in others, completely innovative; and in yet more ways, harkens back to MMOGs that preceded WoW in a very good way. It's clear that this game is the result of years of experience from MMOG veterans and while its not perfect and most definitely not for everyone, it has the potential to carve out a niche and succeed where so many other games have failed. Age of Conan is slated to hit stores on March 25, 2008 with a string of beta tests in the interim.

Source Warcry
Citation :
Publié par Fz POGO
yep l'ami


mais le soucis c'est qu'a 3 mois de la soit disante release on a vu hummmm comment dire ...

Quedalle de tout ça !!!!

je parle aussi du :
-craft ?
-des villes de guildes ?
-d'un système de construction de bâtiments ?
bref j'en passe ...

bref on en est toujours au même point et ça devient super saoulant .
Et le tissage de sort

Merci Nard pour ce topic ,).
Citation :
Publié par NardPoleon
Jørgen Tharaldsen a dit que les mini-jeux auront deux types: classement et escarmouche , le classement debloquera de benefices uniques au jeu JcJ. Les matches classés vous donneront un classement si vous gagnez -- vous permettant d'affronter des equipes du même niveau de classement.
WTF ?

Need la source pour voir si j'ai bien compris

edit: me suis débrouillé: http://aoc.curse.com/articles/details/4344/


C'est chaud cette news :/
Superbe interview, avec les vraies bonnes questions qui dérangent ! Genre : comment se fait-il que la FAQ du site officiel n'ait pas bougé depuis septembre 2006 ? Et qu'est-ce qui va faire que vous allez réussir votre lancement et ne pas faire comme Vanguard ou Gods & Heros ? Et est-ce que vous en prenez pas un risque avec un jeu classé "Mature" ?

Bon, les réponses sont évidemment prévisibles, mais ça change des "alors, racontez-moi à quel point votre système de combat est chouette".
Citation :
Publié par Fz POGO
Je kiffe toutes ces références à WoW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
faut se faire une raison, WOW est (et seras) une référence au MMO. Comme l'es UO.

Donc faire des comparaisons à WOW est rassurant pour certains joueurs (et investisseur).

il ne faut pour oublier, que pour qu'un Mmo vive, il faut des joueurs.
Beaucoup de joueurs, même, dés le début. Pour une installation confortable dans le monde des Mmo.

Aprés Aoc reste Aoc, et Wow reste Wow
@Bohn O'Gure vbmenu_register("postmenu_15351976", true); tu vas passer une bonne journée je pense ainsi que nos amis d'hyboriancodex...Je ne sais pas si vous comptez vous partager le travail de traduction... Merci à vous en tout cas !
Tiens y'aura du E-sport, ah des raids 24 HL aussi et des talents qui ressemble furieusement à un jeu dont le nom commence et finit par un W ... Je sais pas vous mais quelques choses me dit qu'AoC va finalement peut être être celui qui ressemblera le plus à WoW.
lol dans ce cas là y'a un paquet de jeux qui se ressemblent ... tu n'aimes pas que l'on rapproche war de wow, ne viens pas faire la même chose ici.

De l'E-sport ça ne change rien ... les classement existent dans un paquet de jeu, et pour un jeu avec un système de combat se rapprochant pas mal du fps ça ne me gêne pas du tout.
Need de l'e-sport pour ceux qui veulent le faire dans AOC

je suis a font pour si y'a une arène en ultimate fighting 5 vs 5 sous forme de tournoi avec classement serveur / fr / euro et world ...
Un mmo sans challenge est un mmo mort pour le long terme
Des (arbres de) talents sont aussi présents depuis peu dans War (après le retour des BT sur le manque de personnalisation des personnages), en plus de ce que propose bien entendu ce mmo.

C'est pas dérangeant tant que ça nous oblige pas à nous cantonner à du PvP ou du PvE à cause d'une spécialisation trop poussée.
Citation :
Publié par Fz POGO
J'attend toujours! fais vite ou j'appel ta femme !

ps : need de l'e-sport
Bon un petit post pour ne rien dire :

/HS : Fz POGO a dépassé son quota de messages privés et ne peut donc plus accepter de nouveaux messages tant qu'il n'aura pas libéré un peu d'espace.

ca sent le noob ! http://37.img.v4.skyrock.com/379/kanabeach01/pics/421659972.jpg
Citation :
Publié par NardPoleon
@Bohn O'Gure vbmenu_register("postmenu_15351976", true); tu vas passer une bonne journée je pense ainsi que nos amis d'hyboriancodex...Je ne sais pas si vous comptez vous partager le travail de traduction... Merci à vous en tout cas !
Je fais confiance à Scoliaste pour fournir une bonne traduction du jeu.

D'ailleurs elle devrait intervenir en fin de bêta même si rien de précis n'a encore été décidé, d'après ses aveux (certains aspects du jeu doivent sûrement être en attente de finalisation afin d'éviter qu'un passage soit retraduit 5 fois pour rien).

Façon, je suis sur le qui-vive pour la localisation du jeu.
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