The Technologically Advanced Age of Conan
I'd drawn up a battle plan -- a sturdy one. One that involved the upcoming MMO stunner, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and a marathon reading of Robert E. Howard's original and unedited Conan tellings, starting with The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Then, come the game's official release date, I'd bring (hopefully) literary-minded observations about the game world, thining the lines just that much more between the established entertainment arts -- movies, music, literature -- and the current pinnacle of interactive entertainment: video games. This would serve as an intensive compare-and-contrast from the page to the monitor. From 10-point Times New Roman to 1920 x 1200 resolution. From intellectual property to internet real estate.
But my plan was hardly foolproof ... [Read the rest of "The Technologically Advanced Age of Conan."]
My dad didn't introduce me to the Conan stories as a youngster (he was more of a Tom Clancy/Clive Cussler fan, which loses a little in translation during story time) -- nor have I entertained the Conan movies and/or comic books that have endlessly spun off over the second half of the 20th century. Many times, if I'm that late to the party, I'd rather just not show up.
But Conan, I realized, would be different. Conan would be a resurgence, a rise from the ashes of obscurity and irrelevancy. Not like that other Fellowship that's never actually left the forefront of the world's consciousness. Conan, I'd heard, and certainly found certain truths in, was a gratuitously violent, mysoginistic world populated with beheaded warriors and naked, fawning women. Don't worry: Funcom, developers of Age of Conan, know when it comes to blatant chauvanism and racial stereotypes (oh yes, plenty of those in Howard's stories, too) that we're nearly a decade into the new millenium now -- it ain't the 1930s anymore. And there are plenty of old school domineering and damaging social structures that just don't fly nowadays. In Age of Conan, female player characters won't be running around in a chiffon tabard, clinging desperately to sweaty alpha males for sex and security. A woman swinging a battleaxe can cleave your head from your shoulders just as efficiently as a man-wielded one.
But this plan was to conduct a purist's study of the source texts (themes, motifs, symbols!), bounced off the most realized and interactive construction of Hyborea ever beheld (instances, grinding, pixel shaders!). But my plan was far from foolproof. What I didn't anticipate was a hyper-dedicated, overzealous group of game developers that would create one of the most beautifully-rendered MMO worlds that I will never be able to run at a decent framerate on my current gaming rig. In fact, I pass more hardware benchmarks for Crysis than I do with Age of Conan. So, as the Search For America's Next Top MMO continues, expect Age of Conan to always be struggling to keep a decent subscriber population around. At least for the first year or two, which is a timeframe that, with incredibly few exceptions, makes or breaks an online world. And not because it won't do anything better or worse than MMO's Current Top Dog. But because so few people in the gaming world will actually be able to access it. And of the people that can access it at a playable framerate (remember, Age of Conan is unapologetically PvP/RvR-centric; a bad time to see stutter-stop frames-per-second) even fewer of those people will be interested in such a niche universe as well. And if the Mature rating is such a gigantic draw, remember: videogame nipples and blood splatters across the user interface will operate by the same Law of Diminishing Returns as everything else. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
So, with the sad news that my duo-core Dell Inspiron E1705 isn't up to the task of rendering a competent online version of Hyborea, I'll have to curb my enthusiasm until it's released on Xbox 360 this holiday season. But I'm a tad flaky when it comes to MMOs ... and there's always, always, always The Next Thing. Am I right? This holiday season I might be entirely too enamored with Spore, Fable 2, and Warhammer Online by then. And Age of Conan might become an already fading memory, before it's even had a chance for people to catch up to its future-proofed graphics-hog dimensions.
