origin neverwinter nights 2 digital download

#Origin neverwinter nights 2 digital download series

The result was a scenic and highly detailed series of peaks and valleys that were composed of actual geometry. Although the combat engine wasn't anywhere close to being complete (the game as we saw it was in a pre-alpha state), we were able to get a sense of the real-time sword combat, which will let you combine six basic directional sword strokes into a wide variety of combination attacks (depending on how good your timing is).įinally, we adjourned to a mountain range in the Cimmerian wilderness, which Godager explained was created with a combination of the game's powerful terrain engine and lots of tender loving care from Funcom's art team.

By drawing our sword in their vicinity, we roused the ire of these seemingly insecure fellows, who attacked us immediately. We walked past a pair of half-naked, fat-bellied thugs who were armed with bladed staves. This dimly lit temple was adorned with complex stonework that cast eerie shadows in the flickering torchlight. We then skipped ahead to an indoor area within a temple devoted to the ancient goddess of pleasure and pain. Godager hastily explained that Age of Conan won't have any kind of explicit sexual content, but this sort of thing was common in Howard's Hyboria, and Funcom aims to do justice to that legacy. Silhouetted by yellow light, the merchant began peddling a very different sort of ware. We also passed a female merchant hawking what appeared to be various types of pottery, but after Godager accelerated time to show off the game's impressive real-time lighting and shadow system, we saw the same female merchant as she emerged from the top window of her house. Game director Gaute Godager explained that characters will be powered by a 'needs-based AI.' That is, all characters you meet in the game will have specific needs for food and sleep, and in the case of the village's children, socialization (which explained why they quit their idle play and chased after us throughout the town for some minutes before becoming bored again). We passed a blacksmith who had just finished creating an iron broadsword, after which the man approached us and began making an aggressive sales pitch. Unlike in other role-playing games (massively multiplayer and otherwise), the characters you meet in the game won't simply stand in one place and wait for you to click on them if they have business with you, they'll actually approach you and begin speaking to you. While Age of Conan won't have a hard-coded 'faction' system that will let you become friendlier with certain groups by repeatedly killing certain monsters or finishing certain quests, you will be able to get better reactions from characters of your own race or from characters that belong to whatever sect wears the same clothing your character currently has equipped (for instance, our Cimmerian character, dressed in leather armor and a horsehair helmet, elicited a favorable reaction from the similarly dressed guards of Tortage). We watched as a Cimmerian character (decked out in high-level armor) wandered through the tiny berg, past townsfolk who approached him in various ways. The town was built right out of the earth, consisting of buildings hammered into soil and bedrock and flanked with the curling fronds of wild grasses and ferns. We began our demonstration in the freebooter town of Tortage, which will act as a hub area for the single-player portion of the game. This online portion of the game will let players advance all the way to an experience level of 80, which will involve at least one additional specialization into an elite character class. The game actually takes place just after Howard's Hour of the Dragon novel, in which the mighty barbarian has ascended to the throne of the kingdom of Cimmeria and his neighbors of the rival nations of Aquilonia and Stygia have begun to consider an uneasy truce in the face of an all-new threat.

Funcom is designing this part of the game to be self-contained, and it suggests that some role-playing fans may be satisfied in simply playing through the single-player game and leaving it at that.įor the rest of us, Age of Conan will let players take their level 20 characters into an online version of the savage world of Hyboria, made famous in Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Unlike other massively multiplayer games, Age of Conan will start out with a 20-hour single-player role-playing game that will actually let you create a specialized character after changing professions twice (once at a character level of five and again at the end of the adventure, when your character level advances to 20). We had the opportunity to take an up-close look at Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, the online role-playing game from Funcom.

Origin neverwinter nights 2 digital download