Kotaku

I remember Erling Ellingson from a totally forgotten mmo he created called Era Online. Id be surprised if anyone remembers that little number.

He used the term "gooey" =\.

Not as bad as saying "El oh El" or "Oh Em Gee" out loud, though.

Wario wants you to play this game, he will PvP you! Waaaaaaaa!

Looks forgettable :/

I hear that pvp blows chunks in this game.

I might be totally off on this, but those animations look...middling at best. It's a beautiful looking game and I haven't played it so the gameplay might be the best ever, but it looks a little clunky to me. Just my opnion.

Ugh... could they have chosen a duller universe?

Besides, what's the appeal of it if you can't actually be the main character? One of the things that makes WoW work is that the rank and file troops are actually kinda cool. In settings like this, that are so firmly rooted in the specific personalities of certain heroes, who wants to be a nameless redshirt?

Can't friggin wait. Something finally on the scale of Daoc. Looks good too like the art style.

@Bluecell: Yes but it's forgivable since it's in reference to a technical term (Graphical User Interface) rather than some asshat saying such as ROFL.

@Moonshadow101: It's not High Fantasy (which is a good thing in itself IMHO), but it's far from dull. There's a lot of depth to the setting, and it's really been fleshed out even since Robert E. Howard's time. Check out the paper and pencil RPG stuff to learn more, it's all really well done.

Lol, I like how you can see the random people hopping around. I know when I was waiting for a game to start in Wow, I would hop around on top of the tents in Orginnmar.
He sounds unfamiliar with the term PvP, from the way he says it.

Holy cow. This looks awesome. But I just can't get myself to pay for online gaming like that, no matter how good the game.

Too bad AoC, I had really considered you - this footage looks amazing.

I have no problem saying Erling Ellingsen... but then, I am also Norwegian, so... :P

@Moonshadow101: As great as the game looks and appears to be. A great combat system and a strong hype going into release, I agree.

I'm sick of the middle earth mythical fantasy RPG/MMORPG. We've seen these "Adventure" titles for decades and little has changed. Same swords and shields environment that looks like the next RPG.

Plus all those mini games are pretty much the WoW battlegrounds I got sick of last year. How about some innovation.

Zzz...I lost focus 2 minutes into the video. I know that they have good intentions but I wasn't impressed.

Why did the sound suddenly switch entirely to my right speaker when the dude switched to the left side of the screen?

All I can really say about the pvp is that it looks somewhere between WoW and GW except that you have to aim your bow.

WAR did the greenscreen thing first

@Moonshadow101:

Until he becomes king of Aquilonia, Conan himself is pretty much exactly what the player characters in an MMO are.

@sohpi: LOL! I thought that was just an issue with my own hardware. I checked my cables and everything. Good to hear it's the video and not me, though!

In the context of MMOs this game looks beautiful, nice animations, and actually seems well made. Though it's not enough to crush WoW, I think this may actually be what is considered to be "genuinely fun"

*Crosses fingers and contemplates trying it out*

Graphics look great, gameplay... seems like little innovation. The PVP does look way better than WOW's, but DOAC had better gameplay in my opinion.

@sohpi:

Yeah, you have to aim your bow. And you can double-tap dodge left/right/back, and double-tap lunge forward to have a %chance at a stun attack. You also have to direct your swings in accordance with the other person's defence if you don't want to hit for 4, and time your combos.

The PvP beta was a blast.

@Moonshadow101: I'm guessing you're not familiar with the works of R.E.H as saying that is dull compared to Warcraft baffles me. Don't get me wrong I love the Warcraft universe, but the Hyborian World is so much richer in almost all respects.

lol and i quote "Its braveheart meets troy, meets Kingdom Of Heaven its nothing you have ever seen before" well since I have seen all those movies I would say I have seen it before. Not to mention I would never compare a game I made to Kingdom of Heaven or Troy unless I was showing how much better it was.

But all in all it does look good I just wish the races where more diverse I mean human vs human vs human doesn't tickle my pickle

It does look fun but wait till Guild Wars 2 comes out.... O_O

@Bluecell: Seriously? Everybody uses GUI. If you take the time to say either "Graphical User Interface" or "G-U-I", then you are in the absolute minority.

wasnt interested at all in this game till just now. Definitely gonna pick it up now.

Looks good and I hope it teaches WoW a lesson on how to do PVP.

for those in the know the open beta will launch on the 1st. I am already installed and waiting. Can't wait for this game to come out for the 360 later this year. I am getting the PC version for now and will get the 360 version to have voice chat with at least one of my friends if in game voice is not supported. This is a MMO that (for me) I have been waiting for. Both the massive world to explore and rpg-it then the pvp to kill like any stadard console death matches...oh yeah...!

Only sad thing is that most people that first-glance this are going to see a WoW type game without any of the racial diversity in the characters.

Seems like all the cool stuff is in the nuances, rather than in your face. That may hurt it a lot.

@zombieistired:

Agreed, but the subscription fee is mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

@JorgieX: Not set to come out for the 360 for well over a year.

@huginn: Well sure, except when someone innovates, the inevitable question becomes 'why don't you have the classic gametypes like CTF and team death match'.

Innovation is not the province of MMOs. At this point, I would settle for a radical deevolution of the form to a pre-RPG state, when an actual game was the underlying mechanism for playing--like Subspace's asteroids-like gameplay.

AoC's innovation is to make it less of a pointless wank by involving you a little more in the decisions of combat. If it doesn't do that, then it will certainly be the same old shit, but I hold out hope that it will be interesting enough to keep playing for a while.

What I know *won't* ever be interesting for me ever again is a setup for combat and magic so simple that it could (and should) be automated, yet the council of satanic underlings responsible for the 'game design' (in quotes to indicate that it is a farce to use the term this way) focus on ways to keep the system clunky and obtuse, so that people cannot subvert their idiocy with interface improvements (like click healing)

Battlegrounds aren't what make this old and tired. If CS players can still be playing de-dust until the wee hours, then no amount of repetition of simple, abstract goals will *ever* matter one way or another for innovation. CTF, team-based conflict, and hopping around impatiently while you wait for match-making to complete are staples of gaming in general--they're the game design equivalent of a survival instinct, or flippers. The equipment it takes to get conflict started and structured is a technique--like using 3d models or FX. It's not an area for significant innovation. Any innovation is simply a variation on the theme. Is the flag a briefcase instead of a flag? Does only one team have a flag? Does one team have capture points and the other team have flags? Is one team on offense and the other on defense? These are largely meaningless in comparison to the actual game you're playing.

When I was playing capture the flag with light vs dark jedi in Jedi Outcast, I wasn't angry that there wasn't an innovation of some kind to set up the basic conflict--because that game, with its acrobatics and various powers, was as fun as playing santa claus at a stip club.

AoC, even if it turns out to be the ideal implementation of the combos and aiming for ranged shots--will still be lightyears away from the various great arcade beat em ups that we've seen on consoles recently.

The innovation I crave, and that I think *you* crave, is something along the lines of a Call of Duty 4--where our beloved games, with tight presentation and a sense of being 'complete' and triple-A--with replay value that resides solely in the greatness of their core experience, make the next step and build worlds somewhere in between what we consider an MMO, and what we consider a normal online multiplayer game.

This is really, in the end, a matter of resources. No triple-A team yet devised can produce the volume and quality of game assets demanded by a typical MMO *and* spend the time checking those assets for design and their behavior in the world. In a way, the MMO came too early for the tools of the industry.

What's really holding gaming back right now is tools for artists. If Pipelines can be developed that bring together FX, animations, and the configuration elements that objects and characters in a game require *with* the 3d tools, and unwrapping/texturing can be done directly on a 3d object, without need to switch between disparate and mutually hostile programs (in terms of memory usage), then the ability to tweak assets will become more viable, and ultimately, teams will be able to make these kinds of experiences--with the appropriate amount of iterated crap and *still* produce a good game to play underneath it all--without providing a publisher with prohibitive risk.

In any case, this game has nipples.

This game sucks the mutated tit.

The beta feels so much like Guild Wars it's not even funny.

Funny video. But this still isn't selling me on the MMORPG thing... Just I'm waiting for a game that I truly enjoy in that genre I thought Tabula Rasa was gonna do it but nope.

I think my next hope is this APB by the Crackdown devs...

@Reverend_MoJo: I can say "goey" without feeling embarrassed. Its like referring to someone getting a DUI as a "duey". I'll stick with G-U-I thanks.

^can't*

wtb edit button. =(

Oh my god, I think I just cried.

This game is beautiful.

:'((

WOW! This just sold me on the game. Can't wait for it!

As a former fanboy who's been beta testing since November, I can't stress enough that people need to stay away from this game. The hype and especially the PR is very far off from the actual gameplay. Even the demos at events are very different. If you must try age of conan, don't get it at release. Wait for reviews and a couple of months for them to fix the mountain of horrendous bugs.

@Reverend_MoJo: I always say "G.U.I." I realized after I commented that it's fairly acceptable, but I still say things like "M.M.O." instead of "mumorpegger".

I digress.

For me, AoC has been a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to hype. There are times when I'm really not interested in it because as ambitious as it is, it still won't topple WoW. Then they release some new information that gets me interested again. Take this video for instance, I can see myself getting invested in all those game modes. And the amount of guild involvement in the world has always intrigued me. Building homes and towns/cities sounds like a lot of fun.
In the end, I'm not sure what to think of this game. It looks and sounds like a lot of fun, but so did Hellgate: London, and that game is horrible. I think I'll have to see what kind of following this garners before getting into it.

I hope the guild/siege pvp they showed at the end is what will be the dominant form of PvP in this game. I'm not paying 15 bucks a month to play CS/UT in an instanced BG. In fact, the whole idea of instanced PvP is kinda lame imo. It sucks in WoW and my guess is it will suck in Conan. Back to waiting on Warhammer.

Honestly did anyone actually enjoy the PvP weekend?; personally, it was just mediocre.

@PokeSmot:

Siege pvp is supposed to be the only PvP with any significant reward (battlekeeps, which grant resources which are needed for certain crafting). The minigames are supposed to be there for when you're bored, much like the drunken brawling.

@deathbunny: to me, nipples are an innovation in gaming.

I was in the PVP Beta and it was alot of fun and lived up to the hype.

Yeah there are some bugs but overall it was pretty polished and definitely not as bad as the people who say it is horrendous.

Some of the people having problems were the ones trying to run it on a PC that didn't meet the minimum system requirements and were trying to force it to work.

I like this guy, he seems nice!

I'll prolly preorder AoC just because my WoW guild is so obsessed with it, whether we stick with it or return to WoTLK remains to be seen.

Bleh, that video actually made me think twice about getting the game. Can't wait till the open beta to try it, but... battlegrounds. I thought I bloody left CTF behind in WoW... I just hope the pvp servers actually have world pvp.

R.I.P. World of Warcraft PVP: November 23rd 2004 - June 7th 2005

@Bluecell: Oi... yeah... MMO I can understand. I hate when people try to say "mummorpuhga" or whatever that nonsense is. But, in the games industry (and most of programming, in general, since even boring apps have GUIs), GUI is almost exclusively spoken as a word (like LASER or SCUBA), and not an acronym.

But yeah... say "mummorpuhga" around me and you'll get smacked... :)

Looks neat! Hopefully this will give Blizzard some decent competition, and force them to overhaul their own very samey PvP environment. There are only so many times you can replay the same 4 instances you know!

If they don't... meh. I'm not about to swap MMOs now, and abandon hundreds of days /played, i'll just cancel my account.

@Athest:

CTF is just one of the minor mini battlegrounds available. The thing you do on the side. The main PvP is in city building and siege battles around battlekeeps.

I preordered this game 10 months ago.

Is it bad that I can't look at any third-person MMO with the hot-key bar and not think "WoW Clone"?

@psychobaka: You do know that WoW was not exactly innovative, don't you? In fact it's probably the most derivative of all the popular MMO's that were released over the past 10+ years. There were quite a few 3rd person MMO's with hotkey bars before WoW came along.

Don't get me wrong, I like WoW but give credit where credit is due and don't use the phrase 'wow-clone' because WoW is a clone itself.

LOL even he was thrown off by his own name:)

hmm now i think i might just get this game.....

I think this game is a wait-and-see'er. The PVP weekend beta did not leave a good impression.

did he say indiana jones?

i was looking forward to this game as i love MMO's and have for many years now, however i am worried about several posts on this thread like desterions ;/

Bah game looks great. Sure as hell beats the PvP disaster known as World Of Arena: ESport edition.

I'll give it a shot.

Lord Orion's jacket is hypnotizing me into it as well.

@Moonshadow101:

i do thank you

and the world of conan is far from dull and boring. but im just assuming you would have to be a fan of the conan/conan universe to be anywhere near excited for this game

I think what people are failing to realise when saying th