When you think of Conan, you think of gathering wood and building forts, right?
SURVIVE. BUILD. DOMINATE.
Play alone in single-player mode, or forge alliances and make enemies online on both public and private servers.
Will you dominate the exiled lands or will your enemies sacrifice you on the altar of their god?
You are an exile, one of thousands cast out to fend for themselves in a barbaric wasteland swept by terrible sandstorms and besieged on every side by enemies. Here you must fight to survive, build and dominate.
Hungry, thirsty and alone, your very first battle is that against the harsh environment. Grow crops or hunt animals for food. Harvest resources to build weapons and tools. Build a shelter to survive. Ride across a vast world and explore alone, or band together with other players to build entire settlements and strongholds to withstand fierce invasions.
Well maybe if you’re thinking of Howard’s later stories that are more like American West frontier survival stories than traditional Conan stories. There were a lot of wood forts and stuff.
Man. I can think of a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t play this game, but I can think of one reason as to why I’ll probably end up playing it: the vague hope that it will offer the same sense of adventure that a good Conan story offers. It probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean I won’t sink about a dozen hours into this trying to find out.
This is what Funcom seems to be trying to do after the Conan MMO more or less died - Make a game based on whats popular currently. It rarely pans out, but hey, who doesn’t love Conan.
Hunting animals, building forts, and staving off invaders isn’t exactly too far outside of the realm of Conan that I hope they can put enough character into that for it to have a Conan feel. And every aspiring fantasy warlord needs farmers to oppress and exploit, so I don’t mind if some people choose to do that so that other players can take advantage of them.
Gosh. Why am I trying to convince myself to play this. I should just go play more Mount & Blade.
Funcom has a history of producing truly great games with awful, awful launches. I’ll keep my eye on this, because it’s Funcom. But I expect it will be the usual buggy mess for at least a year into live.
Aside from The Longest Journey and The Secret World, I wouldn’t say any of their games are great, much less “truly” so. But yeah, their QA hasn’t been strong.
I enjoyed Conan for awhile. I don’t have any regrets sinking a hundred or so hours into it.
So what I wonder about this one is what is the character progression? Just building stuff and crafting stuff so better weapons and armor = a more powerful character? Is there sorcery to learn? Can I be a thief and pickpocket other players? It’s all so vague right now.
Also, I don’t like the idea of sandstorms. Anything that makes it hard to see bugs me in games. I remember being a human in EQ and dealing with nighttime in a forest.
For me personally, Anarchy Online was a truly great game, that was also literally the worst launch I’ve ever seen/been a part of. The character building, implant system, game world, music…it really did paint a convincing picture.
I can’t think of any other MMO to date that has even come within 50% of AOs character building.
Funcom tends to have amazing ideas, and amazingly developed content, and quality of content (the quests in TSW for example), but they are usually truly horrible when it comes to technical delivery. TSW wasn’t even in the same ballpark of badness that AO was technically, so maybe they are getting better.
Funcom is always worth a look, because you can always be assured there will be at least a few things that are truly great.
I hope they go beyond the basic swing stick/shoot arrow combat system that is prevalent in all these games. Some light magic could be a breath of fresh air.
