Examining the Populace of
Hyboria

NPCs, AI, and Dungeons in
Age of Conan

Intent on making a living breathing world rather than a
stagnant
sandbox, Funcom has developed NPCs that act at least as complex as
those that existed in Oblivion, if not more so. Wandering around on of
the Stygian areas, Jorgen picked up a quest to go to a bandit camp and
destroy the bandits inside. While that would be a pretty typical
kill-and-return quest in most MMOs, in Age of Conan things get a little
more interesting.

“You can’t just charge into the camp,”
Jorgen said as he walked his character around. “If you do,
the guards at the front of the camp will alert those in the back,
spawning more guards and bringing them all down upon you at once. You
can achieve your goal this way, but there are other ways to achieve
this goal: You can poison the food source, you can use the day night
cycle to your advantage, you can even set their tents on fire. We made
the camps unpredictable, so players won’t be able to simply
saunter in and do the same thing their friend just did.”

When asked whether this area would be instanced, Jorgen mentioned that
certain parts or quests might be instanced, depending on the situation.
“We want to keep the MMO feeling of the game, so we are doing
instances in certain areas. Being the first company to instance (with
Anarcy Online), I think we have a good feel on what should or
shouldn’t be instanced.”

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You can often sneak up behind your
enemies to ambush them.

For instance, Jorgen mentioned that you could poison the water of the
guards, sneak around behind their camp, or simply use stealth to kill
the guards before they can alert the others. When Jorgen entered the
camp, his higher level character decimated the guards quickly, but they
still were able to alert other members of the team.

Being a Conan fan, I also realized that a lot of the stories that are
told about the Cimmerian revolve around open air environments, so I
wanted to determine whether AoC would have some
“dungeons” or whether the entire game would be
played in these open air type scenarios.

“Yes,” Thor said. “We’ve been
working on some really great dungeons. It’s nothing we can
really talk about at this point, but they’re coming together
and it will be fun when we can show them off.”

Jorgen was quick to point out that the dungeons would also be dynamic
and would have boss mobs that players could battle. With Anarchy
Online, they developed tools that could generate dungeons quickly, so
they’re using these tools to make the dungeons but filling
them with created content.

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Here are a few mobs that Jorgen
was showing off.

Between our adventuring, Jorgen took a moment to spawn a few mobs, just
to show off the character models. One of them is displayed in our
screenshots, but my camera couldn’t take a decent picture of
the others. Let’s just say that all of the mobs were
frightening enough to make me wonder just how many group members it
would take to get one of these things to fall. The winged demon (which
is in the background of a picture) was especially frightening.

As Jorgen continued the demo, he went and nabbed a caravan quest that
required him to take a group of merchants from one city to another a
few miles away. Being a non-instanced quest, he had to wait for the
caravan to arrive in his town before heading out. It arrived shortly
thereafter, and Jorgen followed the group for awhile.

He smiled mischievously and then began to move his character away.
“Watch this,” he said and moved away from the
caravan and up a path that they were headed towards. On that path was a
group of bandits, with several camel carcasses beside them. Jorgen
engaged the group and began to fight them off. “They wait for
you…the AI is smart like that. They’ll take
advantage of any terrain that they have to get the jump on
you.”

Later on down the path, the caravan encountered a group of lions. While
a guard stayed with the camels, two of them went off in search of other
lions…attacking them before they could get to the camels. It
was intriguing to watch the interactions. Between the NPCs and the
mobs.

It was clear that the world wasn’t stagnant, but that this
sandbox was full of living, breathing creatures.

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