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Age of Conan's Combat Structure | | by Charles Onyett
April 24, 2008 - Over the past two days we've gone over Age of Conan's classes and the things to consider while deciding on and setting up a character. Today, we're going to focus more on how the game works. Specifically, how the raiding and player-versus-player (PvP) mechanics are set up. As with many massively multiplayer games, some players come into the world looking for the best loot and enjoy the cooperative nature of joining up with large groups of other players to take down challenging AI-controlled targets. Others are more competitive, placing a higher value on the opportunity to battle other players in PvP contests.
Age of Conan offers pretty much everything, from open-world PvP and arena PvP contests to large-scale player-versus-environment (PvE) dungeon and raiding encounters. It also offers an even more complicated form of PvP with its town creation and siege gameplay, but we'll get into that tomorrow as it's a much more involved process. While it's something we've talked about in previews past, we got a chance to talk with the siege designers at Funcom. Tomorrow, we'll be able to provide you with an exact step-by-step process for setting up your city, explain the differences between cities existing in instanced zones and in the open world, how you queue and schedule assaults on cities with your guild, and what happens if you successfully take one over.
But before all that, it's basic PvP and PvE raiding. Depending on your play style preference, you'll need to choose between a PvE or PvP style server when starting a character. In PvE servers the open-world PvP is turned off, so you won't need to worry about the constant threat of somebody slashing you to pieces while you're trying to complete quests. There are many players, however, who thrive on that sort of uncertainty, and the PvP servers will be more to their liking.
Open-world PvP will likely prove to be fairly chaotic in Age of Conan, as there aren't any factions. It's not like Cimmerians, Aquilonians, and Stygians will be aligned with others of their race; instead, it's basically a free-for-all. Out in the field of battle, anyone can attack anyone, something Funcom felt fit within Robert E. Howard's fiction. Essentially, if you choose to generate a character on a PvP server, it seems you'd better be ready for a world of hurt.
That being said, Funcom is going to give players specific PvP rewards. If you're a hardcore player (which you probably are if you're entering a PvP server), there are 10 PvP-specific levels to advance through. Experience for these is gained only by killing other players on your level or slightly above or below. To prevent players from hammering on each other endlessly, Funcom has added a mechanic that stops awarding experience for killing the same target in quick succession. Instead, there's a timer, so you'll have to spread out and find other victims instead of needling the same one.
It's also possible to lose experience when killed. According to game director Gaute Godager, this won't drop you from one level to another, but it is possible for your progress to be brought all the way down to zero for your level if you're constantly getting killed. To further add to this mechanic's hardcore nature, you only gain a fraction (somewhere between one half and one third) of the experience for a kill compared to the amount lost for a death. Yikes.
The whole point of the system is for only the most skilled players to rise to the top, instead of having everyone who put in enough time eventually get to the highest PvP level. Once you do get high enough, special equipment unlocks and becomes available for purchase, and the gear is supposed to be extremely powerful. It'll be comparable to raid gear, though its statistical bonuses will benefit PvP play more than PvE. According to Gaute, raid gear will be more accessible than the high-level PvP gear. The idea is, every month, to update things so new items are available for the dedicated player. Though there'll only be 10 levels to start out with, the periodic updates should eventually add more levels along with items, reigniting the contest for king of PvP over and over again.
Earning experience for these kinds of levels is accomplished in any PvP mode: open-world PvP, arena PvP, and siege PvP. In case you're unfamiliar with what exactly the arena PvP is, you can watch the video we've embedded in this article page. Or, if you hate watching videos, you should know that it's basically just capture-the-flag kinds of game types with limited numbers of players in instanced areas. These arenas are broken into tiers to help ensure level 10 characters won't be fighting level 80s. Interestingly, the game auto-levels you to the max level of the area to try and even out the playing field. The auto-level effect lasts only while you're in the arena and won't actually give you additional skills, but it will, in theory, make for more even matches, buffing things like hit points and damage per second (DPS). You can queue up from anywhere and once your number's called, you can enter into the conflict with the click of a button. It's a system that allows you to continue questing or grinding while you wait.
There's also an interesting mechanic that ties the PvP rankings of guild members with the siege gameplay, but we'll get into that tomorrow.
If you want to get the best armor and weapons in Age of Conan, you're going to have to raid, something you can't actually engage in until you hit level 80. There'll still be dungeons that players can band together and delve into before the cap, but for large-scale, 24-player encounters against enormous bosses that require highly coordinated attack patterns to defeat, you'll have to wait until the end game.
The game's eight raid encounters are split into three tiers. The first three instanced raid areas contain essentially one key raid target along with a few groups of more generic enemies. Initial run-throughs could take somewhere between an hour or two, but Funcom's raid designers said a good guild could power through in a half hour or 45 minutes. To get to the second tier of raid targets, you need to tackle one specific raid boss in the first tier. But it's not that easy to move on to tier two, as Funcom is expecting most raiding guilds to try and snag all the loot from the first tier bosses to power up their characters enough so they can be more viable once they start doing second tier raids. You don't necessarily need to repeat the tier one encounters over and over, however, as Funcom said the skilled guilds would move onto tier two fairly quickly.
When you're into tier two, there are another three dungeons each with multiple major boss encounters. They're not all open initially, though. Your raid group will need to progress through two dungeons to get to the third. Once the boss in the third tier two dungeon is defeated, you can finally move on to the third and final raid tier.
When it comes to looting all these targets, that's up to the raid leader who'll be able to set a number of different looting conditions, which hopefully works to ensure everything's distributed properly.
We got a chance to check out one second tier dungeon located in the Black Ring Citadel. Starting out in a gigantic underground cave filled with enemies, with an elaborately detailed room containing the first raid boss not far away. If players die in the cave, there's a respawn pad located within the cave, which certainly helps out if any players fall while clearing the cave. During boss encounters, though, the entrances shut down so any downed players can't respawn and run immediately back to the fight.
Raiding in Age of Conan doesn't only revolve around getting all 24 raiders to smash on the same target. During boss encounters, environmental objects might need to be triggered at specific times to open up potential damage opportunities. Part of the challenge of raiding is simply figuring out how best to tackle the bosses by studying their behaviors and attack patterns. For instance, one raid target we saw involved two massive demons, a succubus and an incubus. The trick to the fight is trying to keep the two away from each other, as their attack power grows as they move closer together. From what we were shown, it seemed the best way to go about doing this was to split the raid in half, with some drawing the succubus to one end of the room and the other raiders pulling the incubus.
In another encounter, the boss was entombed within an energy field in the room's center. From the four corners of the room demons of increasing number and power spawned in waves, resulting in a chaotic scene. Of course, since so many classes in Age of Conan have area-of-effect attacks this might have been a little easy, but it certainly seemed to be challenging, as it's meant to be. After the waves were dispatched, the boss awakened from stasis and started her attack.
One of the things that struck us about the raid dungeons was the sheer size. These places were absolutely enormous, which, as the raid designers explained to us, is a result of necessity. Since every player character in Age of Conan has collision built in, the 24 members of a raid will definitely need to spread out.
As of right now, Funcom is hoping it'll take around six months for the first guild in Age of Conan to move all the way through the raid content and defeat the final boss, the evil wizard Thoth-Amon. We'll have to wait and see if anyone can prove them wrong. |
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