Age of Conan: Adventures in Oslo
Of the beauties in Oslo, kids shooting up, bloody decapitations, weird sculptures and total MMO nerds.
5/19/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
The only problems? What I saw was a little latency during fighting, especially when pulling off wide, slashing moves, and drops in frame rates occurred maybe three times in a one-hour period.
Tuesday May 13, 2008, Night
Up we go into the wild bluish-ebony yonder to that famous Holmenkollen ski jump high above Oslo where in 1952 two Norwegians took the gold and silver medals. It was too much for some to take. One kid, on his first press trip, became so excited, he swooned, passing out in the thin air and falling to the ground, due to awe and possibly hunger. Steps away, Funcom unveiled what was billed as the biggest entertainment launch ever to hit Norway.
They had created the kind of party videogame companies just don't do anymore, spending hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a true barbarian environment for us journos and guild invitees. In the 45-degrees-Fahrenheit night, we walked past semi-clothed and angry-looking men and women clad in animal skins and tattoos. We watched mock battles where dozens died on the dusty field, as Conan watched on a throne hundreds of yards away. We ate the charred meat from the loins of pigs on spits. Fire eaters spewed flames from their gaping maws. Near a tent, a fight broke out among barbarians over a leg of lamb. An apple-faced barbarian toddler wrapped in swaddling skin clutched a fork as if it were a dagger. On the stage, the Oslo Philharmonic played the haunting game soundtrack and many got drunk on Ringnes Beer as fireworks exploded over our 21st century heads, the warm shrapnel hitting us in the chest or eyes. And Conan looked on, stuck in the same sprawling position he held hours ago. This swarthy dude's back was going to hurt royally in the morning.
When the night wind blew too cold, we descended into a bunker tricked out to be a barbarian club over which one of Conan's enemies held court and trailers from the game looped until 2 a.m. I imbibed horrid tasting blueberry vodka drinks with Hyborian names, and when it was all over, when we stumbled down the mountain in the direction of our buses, there was only one thing we wanted to do: Play the game.
On the bus, I talked at length with the German community manager, a guy who loves his 14-hour-a-day job of answering questions from community members who complain about patch download times and the ineffable bugs that come up in all beta projects. And yet, like all of the Funcom team, I saw this excitement, an exhilarated zeal and gusto, when talking about any aspect of the game. I've never seen this kind of thing in all my years, even when I was at Sony and the company was all-consumed with the making of the first
EverQuest. This dashing, earnest individual loved the fact that, when he interviewed for the job at Funcom, Gaute Godager went out and listened to his complaints about the beta and then tipped more than a few with him and the Funcom crew as well. I don't think Smedley at Verant ever was anything like that, at least not based on what I saw when I was at Sony. And up past the ski jump on the mountain into the deep blue as the Norwegian moon shone its spotlight on Hyboria, the silent, brooding Conan saw it and thought it was good, probably because there's a little bit of the horror of Howard's pal H. P. Lovecraft in everything Funcom did with the game ... and the party.
