Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Preview

GameSpot has put together a preview of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, based on some firsthand time they spent with Funcom’s RPG/MMORPG hybrid at Microsoft’s X06 event.

Once you’ve gone through the roughly 10-12 hours of single player content, and you’ve reached level 20 in the game, you’ll venture out into the larger MMO world of Conan’s fantastic universe. As you rise through the levels, you’ll increasingly customize your character to find his or her fit in the larger world. At level 20 for instance, you choose your class from choices such as thief, warrior, and so on. At level 40, you choose a prestige class, which will define your role in the larger MMO world of Hyborian Adventures. Options here include lord, commander, crafter, and more.

Your prestige class is tied to your role within the guild system in Hyborian Adventures. Once you’ve joined a guild, you and your guild mates have a number of options. You, of course, can go on dungeon adventures and raids, or you can engage in some of Hyborian Adventures’ more interesting aspects, such as city buildling. That’s right, if you’re in a guild, you can stake your own personal stake of Cimmeria as your own, building up a city complete with it’s own working blacksmith, living quarters, meeting hall, walls, and defensive units for you to control. It’s here that your prestige class will be useful. A crafter, for example, might be useful as a blacksmith or an architect to build buildings. The lord, on the other hand, is skilled at finding resources for the city, while the commander can lead troops into battle, earn increasingly effective formations, and so forth.