Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Preview
The Age of Conan will soon be upon us!
by Rook
previewed on PC
Something new! (cntd)
Magical combat will be just as fast and demanding. Spell casters will use a system called Spellweaving. Magic use in the Howard’s world of Hyboria was generally dangerous business. It wasn’t a skill that was accepted by most fellow citizens, nor was it something to be taken lightly by its users. Misuse of the mystical energies could mean an untimely death for a careless caster. In Age of Conan spellweaving will require strategic planning to execute well and there will be catastrophic consequences for mistakes. Powerful spells can easily backfire in a spectacular and even fatal fashion, which makes magic more dangerous and intimidating art than it is in most fantasy games.
Now that the offensive side of combat is taken care of, let’s look at the finer points of defense. The real time combat system takes into account two forms of defense: passive and active. Passive defense is the standard result of combined scores of the traditional defense ratings similar to other games. Active defense is the ability for a defender to shift his defensive stance to better defend from attack coming from a certain direction. If your attacker is favoring an attack coming from the left side, the player can manipulate their defensive position to shift his defense to the side being attacked to help deflect the damage. For those instances where you really need to block damage, the player always has the option to actively raise their shield to deflect most incoming attacks at the cost of their endurance - you can only hold the shield up for so long.
Something old
Another aspect that has become a standard throughout MMOs is Character Development. First off, there are three possible races to play. The Aquilonians are best described as Imperial in nature. Aquilonian cities are rich and prosperous and culturally enlightened. Having both a strong sword arm and the ability to become great scholars, the Aquilonians offer versatility in play options. The Stygians are a people who worship the serpent god Set. They are masters of the occult and demonology and are so dedicated to scholarly advancement. In Age of Conan they are not able to choose soldier archetypes as a profession. Finally, the Cimmerians are the barbarians of the northern mountains who follow the mighty god Crom and this is also the race of King Conan. Their barbarian nature makes the perfect soldiers of any flavor with no interest for the arcane.
Each race has a class restriction imposed upon them. Stygians, as mentioned above, cannot become any soldier type due to their academic nature whereas Cimmerians avoid the arcane out of superstition. There are four class archetypes: soldier, rogue, mage and priest. These four archetypes are the basis of twelve very unique classes that reflect the deep lore and history of Hyboria. Each class advances and develops using the same attributes, which are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom and Intelligence. These ttributes affect the attack, defense and so on of the character and will increase as the character advances or equips attribute modifying equipment. All in all, pretty standard fare.
Each class comes with a list of skills. These skills represent abilities such as perception, concentration and climbing. Some of these skills are activated when the player needs them, others are passive and are always in effect. These general skills help the characters along wherever their adventures may take them. The meat of the character development is a “Feat” system. Similar to the skill trees of other games, the feat system is a point based system where -upon leveling- you are awarded a point to be placed into available feats to further advance your combat or magical abilities. Each class has three trees available to them. The first tree is a common tree for each archetype. If the player chooses a mage type character, one skill tree will be the mage archetype feat tree and the remaining two will be specific to your actual class each reflecting an aspect of play style.
