[H]ard|OCP

Navigation

• [H] Forums
• Archives
• Search
• [H] Folding

Age of Conan Gameplay Performance and IQ

Age of Conan, the most graphically advanced MMORPG we've ever seen, boasts over 400,000 copies sold in the first two weeks! We've played the game on six of today's most popular video cards and share our experiences.

Introduction

Conan, and the land of Hyboria, were created by the American author Robert E. Howard and first published in 1932. Originally published as a series of 17 stories in the fantasy and horror pulp magazine Weird Tales, Howard's creation has certainly endured, becoming one of the most famous fictional barbarians and one of the most recognizable icons of American fantasy literature. Since its original publication, Conan has appeared in numerous other books, comics, films, television shows, as well as a number video games. The most recent of these games is the subject of this article: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

The Game

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in Robert Howard's fictional land of Hyboria. In this game, Conan is already king, and he has called upon "every strong arm and sharp sword" to take up the fight and defend his kingdom from the invading hordes, which will be a pretty familiar theme for most MMORPG veterans.

Less familiar, though, are some of the game's key features. The combat system is relatively unique. First, it is real-time combat. There is no waiting for a weapon to "recharge" or become usable again. The character slashes or hacks when you tell him or her to slash or hack. Then, instead of the character pressing a single key to set off some combat or tactical skill, the player must press a series of keys to execute combination attacks. Combo attacks deal increasing amounts of damage, and increase the player's chance of getting a "fatality", which allows the player to kill the enemy in a particularly dramatic fashion, such as a slit throat or a beheading. Combos also deal tactical damage, such as decreasing the enemy's ability to evade attacks, or poisoning the enemy.

Another key feature is the Guild Village. Guilds may purchase land upon which to build a village, and then upgrade the village to a city, and eventually to a castle. Other games have implemented player and guild housing before, but Funcom's implementation takes it a step further by integrating core game mechanics into the process. The cities are home to guild banks, crafting facilities, and other resources.

Perhaps the most important part of Age of Conan is the player versus player (PVP) system. There are PVP servers with open, free for all PVP. This means that level 20 players are mixing it up with level 80 players and all that that entails. There is currently nothing stopping those level 80 players from slaughtering every lower level player they come across, but Funcom has stated that they plan to address that situation.

Does Age of Conan Support DirectX 10?

Age of Conan was supposed to support DX10, however currently DX10 is not enabled. One of the key advertising points for Age of Conan was its "Groundbreaking graphics and advanced DirectX 10 features." However, if you go to enable DirectX 10, you will find only this.

It seems that Age of Conan was shipped without DirectX 10 support after all. At least, there seems to be no way to enable it from this end. Hopefully Funcom will add DirectX 10 (a feature which, according to its own AoC's marketing material, should have been there already) to Age of Conan in a future patch. As it stands right now the game runs in DX9 under Vista.

The Video Cards

We are testing Age of Conan with six different current video cards. In the high end, we will be looking at an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, a GeForce 9800 GTX, and AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. In the more mainstream performance market, we'll be examining performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, the GeForce 9600 GT, and the ATI Radeon HD 3870. These six video cards provide us with a good cross-section of the video cards our readers have expressed that they are most interested in. These video cards also allow us to expose Age of Conan to single and multi-GPU products from both GPU manufacturers.