So what have Funcom been doing with Age of Conan since PC ZONE unceremoniously infuriated barbarian fans across the globe by calling Conan "an awful stereotype of a fantasy RPG class most people don't choose any more"?
Our last hands-on with Funcom's online action-RPG threw up various concerns about the game's combat system, which we criticised as being "a little clunky", "a little fiddly", "cumbersome" and "ideally suited to players with three hands".
Not long after heaping our worries on the plucky developer (whose previous successes include Anarchy Online and Dreamfall), Funcom delayed releasing Age of Conan until our concerns, and feedback from the ongoing beta testing, had been thoroughly addressed.
Once they'd done all this, they whistled at us, invited us to Oslo, cocked their little Norwegian hats in our direction and said, "Hey, what do you think of Age of Conan now?"
TUNE CHANGING Well it's looking great, actually. The combat system has been changed in a number of very definite, deliberate ways, and it improves the feel of the game immensely.
The number of directions in which you can attack has been reduced, combos must now be activated instead of memorised and hopelessly recited, and enemies now display shield icons on either their front, left or right sides - a seemingly trivial inclusion but one that gives purpose and meaning to the ability to attack from one direction rather than another.
It gives us hope that a live-combat MMO can actually, seriously work, and that Age of Conan could be the biggest trend-bucker the genre's seen.
AOC's game designer, Gaute Godager, explains what's been happening these past six months. "Previously, we had a system of combat inputs much like an action game or a fighting game," he begins, "where you do a sequence of moves like up-down-right to activate a combo. We found that when players had 15 combos that they knew, it was really hard for them to remember how to trigger a specific one."
This means there'll be far fewer players mucking up when attempting the frantic keyboard gymnastics required to do their area-effect taunts and instead alt-tabbing to iTunes and falling off their chairs.
"That's why we took a step back and realised we had to do it differently," continues Godager, "and that's why we implemented the combo starters and the follow-up system."
These combo starters sit on your action bar at the bottom of the screen, and are activated by clicking on them - this highlights directions in which you must attack in order to carry out the selected combo move.
Kill an enemy with a combo move and you'll carry out a fatality - anything from lopping off a head to butting your opponent to the floor and slowly, torturously piercing him with your sword. No other MMO comes close to this level of combat interaction - it really does feel like a single player adventure game.
And why did it take six months to make such simple, yet fundamental changes to the way the game plays? "It's because you have 14 classes," answers Godager, "times 80 levels, times hundreds of abilities.
"Going through all of them is just a massive logistics job. But the beta was always running. We were always getting feedback from the players. For us, delaying the release was not such a big deal. Quality comes first."
QUALITY ASSURED The visit to snowy Oslo saw me swanning about Age of Conan's crčche area, that is, the island on which you're hand-reared through the game's first 20 levels. The city of Tortage offers a line of quests based around teaching you exactly how to use your particular class. It's no longer a single-player game in these early stages either.
Interestingly, by day Tortage is a multiplayer arena, but find a bed to sleep in and you'll wake up at night, where Age of Conan becomes an entirely single-player experience. You can flip between single and multiplayer just by hopping into bed.
In the single-player mode you further your 'destiny quest' by completing a series of quests based around your class. As a barbarian (AOC's rogue class), I found myself creeping along rooftops to eavesdrop on the local misfits, and stalking certain targets to subtly ensure their safety.
Whether or not this kind of quest can work outside of Tortage's single-player mode (and therefore anywhere past level 20), is unclear, but while it lasts it's an impressive and interesting change of pace from the typical 'kill X of Y' missions we're used to.
That said, a foray into some of the later level gameplay revealed it was more in tune with World of Warcraft's particular flavour of questing - collecting eight silk webs by killing spiders and waiting for the loot drop.
Godager was keen to talk about various features I wouldn't have a chance to play, such as sieges. "The reason you can't see that is because it's played with two 60-man guilds, at level 80."
So does it work similarly to World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds? "No, it doesn't," Godager explains, "it's different - we have the battlegrounds as well, that's a Capture the Flag game you'll be playing later. The sieges take place in three large areas, static areas of the world where guilds can build their own battlekeep. The battlekeep works like a Warcraft RTS, you build walls around your stuff, you put up defensive towers and build barracks. Then the other guilds siege you by building catapults, siege towers, and ladders to climb over your walls."
"It's something that guilds will do because it gives them such a huge reward in terms of buffing," continues Godager.
"Also well, destroying other people's buildings gives them the opportunity to build their own there. You get ownership of resource nodes when you build in these PvP areas, and there's a mechanism we call the 'opportunity window' where you define when you can be attacked - so you don't get woken up in the middle of the night being told your guild is being attacked. It's epic, it's grand, it's over 100 players battling it out using mounts and siege weapons."
Oh yes, mounts. Age of Conan's planning on utilising mounts in far more interesting ways than the go-faster-look-nicer steeds of WOW, not just horses either, but camels and woolly mammoths too.
"Mounted combat changes some of the core rules of what you can and can't do," claims Godager, "it adds new elements about movement and damage. Being on horseback strips you of combos and most spells, but as a melee character you use the speed of your horse to add damage to your weapon. So the faster you ride, the more damage you do - but you can't turn very well, that's how it balances. It's less DPS, but a shock-and-awe approach."
So we're sacrificing practicality in the name of looking awesome? Fine by us. "We have a specific role for horseback combat in the game," continues Godager, "it's for camp-breaking. We're making camps which are like walls - you need to have players ramming it with their horses and lances in order to smash it down."
RIGHT DIRECTION Even if this game fails, even if all of the trucks and planes carrying copies of AOC to high street stores across the world crash and explode, and all of the developers succumb to a deadly curse, it will still have achieved something incredible.
It's kicking away at the fundamentals of the MMO genre by allowing players to interact with the world in a new and far more tactile way - something some people think impossible, but more people think exciting.
Still, having only spent a day in Hyboria, it's not possible to gauge exactly how well all of these highly ambitious features will hang together. Every time we wonder whether massive sieges will create crippling server-loads, we counter it by wondering how cool it would be to ride a woolly mammoth and attack people with its tusks.
Age of Conan is a determined step forward for the genre, and one we're hoping doesn't falter.
Kudos to you guys for being virtually... no, the only publication to have predicted, correctly, that this game would not be ready by the official launch date.
Makes me more confident that your journalism is not just puffery for the games companies.
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