Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Previews

GameSpy and MMORPG.com have both posted updated previews of Funcom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, based on the build on display at this year’s E3. A snip from GameSpy’s article:

There are plenty of features listed for the Dreamworld engine, running beautifully in DX9 for our demonstration. The team has caught a lot of negative attention for fears that Conan might lurch outside of DX10, so it was great to see the engine looking great in DX9. In a fly-through of the valley where our host’s barbarian stood, draw distance was great, and the rushing water cascaded along the riverbank beautifully.

We noticed a few issues, which we’re hoping to see thoroughly exorcised by launch. Some pop-in would occur with objects around the edges of the screen, and there were definitely some draw-in problems with objects far in the distance, particularly mountains. Those bugs aside, the engine is one of the prettiest we’ve seen for an MMO, and with a reasonable rig (namely two gigs of RAM and a high-end graphics card) we saw frame rates dip no lower than the mid-thirties.

And a snip from MMORPG.com’s article:

We “flew” through Conalls Valley – an area just outside Conan’s birth place, where many available quests will take us into the valley and beyond. Frames Per Second (FPS) ranged from over 20 in areas crowded with NPCs and environmental features to over 50. Then we ran through it with a character, whacking a few NPCs along the way. Jason spun around and panned the camera across the landscape to show how the FPS never fell under 20. Indeed, it remained above 30 most of the time. If readers will recall, back at E3, I reported that Funcom artists had very creatively used colors and color shading to create the illusion of a texture rich 3-D world in order to keep FPS high to allow for real time combat. With this new engine, it looks even better. Jorgen confirmed that they felt that color was very important to convey the feel of a region; such as Conalls Valley being in Autumnal colors conveying the dying of the year. As it stands currently, the 24 hour day and night cycles are compressed into eight; four real-time hours of light and four hours of darkness. I commented that it seemed a little long to me and both Jorgen and Jason simultaneously mentioned that they are looking at shortening that further.