Living Hyboria

Every character in Age of Conan, and every questline, has been developed with great care. There’s also lot of inside jokes and references to different phenomenons in the mmorpg-world in large. One of the probably more hilarious ones is where you stumble upon a noveau rich man in the noble district in Old Tarantia, Aquilonias main capital and seat of Conan himself.

When you first meet him he’ll claim he needs help because one of his farmers has disappeared and his wealth and trade is dwindling because of this. It takes a long journey deep into the Fields of the Dead in Cimmeria before you find his lost farmer. But you’re surprised to find out that the farmer is not some common confused hillbilly but a bitter adventurer who was promised gold and glory if he killed animals, beasts and evil men and looted them of items and resources and sent all bargains to his boss in Old Tarantia. He’s of course burnt out on this kind of playing and leaves you with the wise advice to never get stuck in such a deal yourself.

The greedy man in Old Tarantia is of course not happy because of this, and desperately keeps trying to sell his gold to uninterested people who pass him by, “Todays special offer, buy 30 gold for only 40 gold!”.

So without further hesitation, here’s the pictures of the desperate gold seller:

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More fun in the Acheron Ruins. This one is my character Estam climbing down the cliffs, wearing his hood. A little messing around with the camera and you’ll soon find the person hiding in that dark head-cloth.

Funny.

Age of Conan can certainly be a stunningly beautiful game, but sometimes the camera and the scripting engine are out of sync. Like this poor soul, found in the Acheron Ruins with a nasty headache…

Yes, there’s a person there, and that’s grass. Couldn’t you tell?

Served best well done and together with cool beverages.

My character just killed Strom and traveled to Cimmeria. The wintery slopes are filled with wolves, yetis, and more. I’m taking my first steps with a smile on my face, happy to be away with the murky Tortage. Which I will return to in time, I’ve got quests to finish.

It feels like the game starts now, at level 20. Maybe it does, so I better get back at it.

If you don’t have quad cores and a wicked bunch of RAM like my friend Daniel in the previous post, like me, you would probably set almost everything to low just to get a fair amount of FPS in the game. Get this though! There’s a bug (as I’m writing this) making the game perform almost worse on low settings, so what you can do here is to set everything to high and remove at least shadows. Not only may it perform equally to low, you will also have a much better looking game, of course.

Personally, I’m running a Sony Vaio with Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM and a GeForce 8400GT 256MB DDR3. Not exactly a stallion, but when I switched from low to high there wasn’t a single drop in FPS. Be aware though that this for some reason doesn’t work for everyone, but you should at least try!

You can run Age of Conan on a Mac Pro (and possibly some iMacs and MacBook Pros, if you can upgrade them enough), but it takes some tampering since the game isn’t available for Mac OS X.

So what do you do if you’re sitting on a Mac Pro powerhouse, like I am, with multiple processors and a wicked bunch of RAM? The solution is called Boot Camp, which is Apple’s dual-boot solution which will let you pick between OS X and Windows at startup. You need a copy of Windows of course, I’ve got Vista 32-bit running smoothly using Boot Camp, and will get my 64-bit version in there soon enough.

However, make sure you’ve got a decent graphics card. More or less the only Apple approved card that works, available today, is the GeForce 8800GT for Mac Pro. As I said, there might be options for iMac and MacBook Pro as well, both being rumored to be upgraded soon.

If you’re a Mac user eying Age of Conan, hoping it’ll arrive in Mac version soon (it won’t, probably not ever since it’s a Games for Windows key title), and starting up World of Warcraft with a sigh, then get Boot Camp with Windows and give it a go. Works like a charm.