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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.”

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.

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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