Age of Conan: Adventures in Oslo

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"You cannot escape me!" he roared. "Lead me into a trap and I'll pile the heads of your kinsmen at your feet! Hide from me and I'll tear apart the mountains to find you! I'll follow you to hell!" -- Robert E. Howard

Sunday, May 11, 2008

And then there was Oslo, a completely charming city of intensely exquisite parks, blooming flowers, and medieval architecture, so seemingly perfect that when you walk its cobbled streets, you feel that tulips are blooming under your very skin. Yeah, you can amble down Karl Johans Gate after the Nordic sun sets to get a GTA IV feel: Somalian prostitutes will beg for your every dollar. But mainly, it's a city of graceful beauty; of well-dressed, well-coiffed Uma Thurmans and Brad Pitts everywhere you look. You just want to consume it all, eat it up again and again like a hungry LocoRoco blob. So it may appear strange and feel unforeseen to realize that this is the nation that spawned the awfully mature brutality of the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, an MMORPG full of bloody decapitations and so rife with the suggestion of sex that you can almost smell it. And this is the edited version of the game -- the one without the suggestion of date rape and without the scene where one particularly smarmy character beats and urinates on a chained prisoner.

Yet it somehow makes sense. Looking deeper in present-day Oslo, you'll find expressions of every imaginable emotion -- of note, the 212 sculptures within the 80 acres of Frognerparken with its odd Vigeland Park: twisted bodies upon mangled bodies frozen in moments of anger, passion and violence. Then, at the very top where the ancient Akershus Fortress guarded over its citizens, I look down past a wedding party to see four scruffy young denizens shooting each other up in the webs of their fingers. Oslo surely has its darker side, and there are those who relish it. Some of these people work at Funcom, a company that has poured millions of krones and pails of perspiration into their Robert E. Howard creation over the past four years. I was invited to this Viking city because their barbarian baby was about to be delivered.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008, Afternoon

It's early in the day. We're in a random club next to a random amusement park that's pretty pitiful. In addition to journos, the invitees here included vociferous members of clans and guilds from various virtual worlds, including the Age of Conan beta. MMO lovers aren't just passionate, they're obsessed. When they like something, they're like PR people with a deeper, intimate knowledge. These guys get together as strangers and after they talk shop for hours on end they seem like lifelong friends. It's like they were born of the same mother, related from the moment their fetuses became entities.

For four hours, I watched and played. The upshot? Age of Conan's graphics are the best ever seen in an MMO, especially the Thunder River level full of waterfalls and pools, something like Victoria Falls meets Niagara. But there's more than graphics. You can have massive hundred-person raids in the game as if you were acting out a scene in "Braveheart." Want to chill after a big battle? Go to a bar and listen to the barkeeps spew one of 30 Robert E. Howard poems. Want to play single-player? You can do that for the first 20 levels. Can't get to Level 85? A more powerful friend can anoint you with strength for a while and take you along to see what being so strong will look and feel like. Want to fight like in a Street Fighter game? Pull off a few special moves and you'll see some intricate fisticuffs. Want to play as stealthily as Altaïr in Assassin's Creed? You can do that, too. I saw a player creep up into a wealthy landowner's room and stab him to death as he slept. When you're potent enough to go on a raid, you can do so with two dozen people. Heck, there's even mounted combat on a mammoth or a rhino. Tired of fighting? You and your pals can build a complete city à la SimCity. Said droll Game Director Gaute Godager, a self-described "total nerd," "It became bigger and better than we dreamed it could be when we started out."