Posted on 2008 under Age of Conan Quest |
29
Jul
One of the staple parts of MMORPGs, apart from the combat, is the presence of quests. Quests are adventures that enable a player to develop a character through either role playing, gathering experience points or finding rare items/weapons to defeat a certain enemy. Most quests in MMORPGs to this day tend to have been focused on the ‘kill monster, take item to someone’ variety, but in Age of Conan/: Hyborian Adventures the developers decided to focus a little more on the quest side of the game than other games did.
There are a couple of quest that are particularly of note - one of them is given when you try to slip past a certain mountain with a dragon guarding it. You have to go find ice worms to give this dragon so it’ll be too busy eating to notice you slipping past it and on up the mountain. Another quest is given when you’re trying to go through a particular swamp. It turns out there are some sort of magical bushes blocking your way, so you have to go find a special magical torch that will hold the flame needed to burn through them in order to go into the swamp.
Quests in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures are a mixed bag of long and epic, like the old Conan stories, or short and sweet, so that casual players can just sit down to play for a short time and get a quest done without having to devote ungodly amounts of playtime to it. The larger quests are multi-layered - they’ll take some interaction with other players or NPCs to complete. Say, another character has an item you need, you can trade them for it and they can help you on your own quest in return.
There is also puzzle-solving, which makes Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures feel somewhat like a Zelda game. NPCs interact with player characters through cut scenes as well, with actual voice-acted dialog. Most MMORPGs have large boxes of spoken text, but not here. You can actually feel like you’re in the game and not just reading the game.
In Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, there isn’t a system in-game to transfer quests between players. This would just defeat the spirit of the game - would Conan just say ‘I don’t feel like doing this quest, someone else take it on?’ No, he’d carry through regardless. Of course, you can do so unofficially, but you’re the one missing out on game play experience and experience points.
The locations where you can do quests are varied; you start out getting quests in the capital city of your country of origin (Khemi, Conarch Village or Old Tartage for Stygia, Cimmeria and Aquilonia respectively) You can go to ancient ruins, old castles, newer castles, and more places. Even though it might seem that, being Conan, the game is all about violence, there’s a lot more to it than that. MMORPGs can learn a lot from Age of Conan once the developers have ironed the bugs out of the game.
One of the staple parts of MMORPGs, apart from the combat, is the presence of quests. Quests are adventures that enable a player to develop a character through either role playing, gathering experience points or finding rare items/weapons to defeat a certain enemy. Most quests in MMORPGs to this day tend to have been focused on the ‘kill monster, take item to someone’ variety, but in Age of Conan/: Hyborian Adventures the developers decided to focus a little more on the quest side of the game than other games did.
There are a couple of quest that are particularly of note - one of them is given when you try to slip past a certain mountain with a dragon guarding it. You have to go find ice worms to give this dragon so it’ll be too busy eating to notice you slipping past it and on up the mountain. Another quest is given when you’re trying to go through a particular swamp. It turns out there are some sort of magical bushes blocking your way, so you have to go find a special magical torch that will hold the flame needed to burn through them in order to go into the swamp.
Quests in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures are a mixed bag of long and epic, like the old Conan stories, or short and sweet, so that casual players can just sit down to play for a short time and get a quest done without having to devote ungodly amounts of playtime to it. The larger quests are multi-layered - they’ll take some interaction with other players or NPCs to complete. Say, another character has an item you need, you can trade them for it and they can help you on your own quest in return.
There is also puzzle-solving, which makes Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures feel somewhat like a Zelda game. NPCs interact with player characters through cut scenes as well, with actual voice-acted dialog. Most MMORPGs have large boxes of spoken text, but not here. You can actually feel like you’re in the game and not just reading the game.
In Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, there isn’t a system in-game to transfer quests between players. This would just defeat the spirit of the game - would Conan just say ‘I don’t feel like doing this quest, someone else take it on?’ No, he’d carry through regardless. Of course, you can do so unofficially, but you’re the one missing out on game play experience and experience points.
The locations where you can do quests are varied; you start out getting quests in the capital city of your country of origin (Khemi, Conarch Village or Old Tartage for Stygia, Cimmeria and Aquilonia respectively) You can go to ancient ruins, old castles, newer castles, and more places. Even though it might seem that, being Conan, the game is all about violence, there’s a lot more to it than that. MMORPGs can learn a lot from Age of Conan once the developers have ironed the bugs out of the game.
Posted on 2008 under Age of Conan Quest |
4
Jul
Your first quest is given to you by a fellow refugee, who speaks to you in an interactive cinematic sequence complete with camera close-up and branching dialogue options, reminiscent of single-player games like Knights of the Old Republic and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As we soon learned from this conversation, another urvivor from the slave galley has washed ashore–the head slaver, who has fled to the nearby town and must be slain before he can alert the authorities to your presence. Along our path, we also found a half-naked Stygian woman bound to opposing trees by her wrists–we spoke with the woman in another cinematic dialogue to find that in order to free her, we’d have to forcibly convince a scavenger to part with the key. We readied our splintered oar and went hunting.
