Hamburg - The world of online role playing games does not start and end with the World of Warcraft, although competitors of that popular title have been relegated to small niches of the market. Now, for the first time in years, there may be some changes afoot on the scene. Game maker Eidos is going after precisely those players who have had enough of cartoonish elves or dwarves with its New Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventure. The game is set in a scene far away from the cute and cuddly. Conan is already considered the first online role playing game for adults.
Conan the Barbarian? Yes: this is indeed the same basic material turned into a 1982 Hollywood film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The basis for the fantasy world is much older, though. The underlying foundation was created as short stories written in the 1930s by author Robert E. Howard. He envisioned a raw and brutal world, a place where relaxation and peace are the exception.
Unlike most fantasy authors, Howard filled his realm with outlandish elements from real history: a mixture of the Far East, a dash of Rome and a heavy dose of barbaric wildness. The relationship to reality in the continent called Hyboria is toyed with through countries with names like Iranistan or Afghulistan.
Oslo-based Funcom, Age of Conan's developer, has built on Howard's dark atmosphere. Put bluntly, the game is intended to be wild, barbaric, brutal and bloody. This has led to sales of the game being restricted to adults in places like Germany.
"At first glance it seems to be a classic online role-playing game," says Daniel Matschijewski from Munich-based Gamestar magazine: The action revolves around creating a character, sending him out into the world over weeks and months, completing quests, and above all else collecting experience to make him stronger. There are none of the typical fantasy races like elves, gnomes, or dwarves in Age of Conan - only men of various nations.
The concept behind the battle system has been completely redone from those used in other games. This means players will have to learn a new way of defending their characters against wild beasts or human opponents. Eidos has described the changes as providing a real fighting system. Instead of simply pressing a few buttons to launch massive magic firepower on an opponent, personal dexterity is required.
"This is a dynamic fighting system in which the player has to pay attention to the side from which he attacks," Matschijewski says. And as it is intended for adults, there is no mercy when it comes to the spilling of virtual blood. Different versions are being prepared for different countries, however. The German version, for example, is slightly toned down, meaning that no severed body parts fly around the scene.
If internet forums and fan sites are any indication, many gamers see the Age of Conan as a serious alternative to the existing online worlds, no matter what the level of brutality and age restriction. Conan's world is also enjoying a great deal of anticipatory press reports. The game will not be released until May 23, meaning most of the information available about the game at this point in fact comes from the game maker's own press releases.
A beta test has been running since early May, allowing selected gamers to test that everything in the game is working properly. This itself provides one benchmark indicator of the current popularity of Age of Conan: "During March we had 500,000 registrations for participation in the beta," says Eidos spokesman Sven Liebold.
Testers from the industry magazines are included in that crowd - and are among the voices counselling caution. "I remain somewhat skeptical that everything will really be finished by that published deadline," says Daniel Matschijewski. "It is quite impressive taken on the whole, but some areas are still unfinished," he says. The weak spots are performance blips or crashes in the game, he indicated.
Problems of this kind are to some extent standard for new online games, which are always a work in progress even when stamped as finished. Anyone who doubts whether Hyboria is truly a good excuse to migrate away from the more familiar RPG worlds should wait for the test reports, which should appear en masse online and in print as soon as the game is released.
INFO BOX: Robert E. Howard - the man behind Conan The author and Conan inventor was born in 1906 in Texas - and killed himself at only 30 years of age. Before making a living as an author, Robert E. Howard worked as a cotton picker, a surveyor and cowboy. The figure of Conan the Barbarian was a composite of numerous persons whom the author encountered over his life.
