If you're unfamiliar with how combat works in the game, set to release next month, we already went over the basics in yesterday's article. Before we get into the remaining six classes, though, we'll give a little more detail on character creation. In Age of Conan, you can pick a racial type of character before selecting a class, though doing so doesn't actually affect your statistics. Instead, it limits your class selection. Picking a Cimmerian restricts you to picking between guardians, dark templar, conquerors, bear shaman, barbarians, and rangers. An Aquilonian get access to guardians, dark templar, conquerors, priests of Mitra, barbarians, assassins, and rangers. To get access to the Mage-types you'll have to be Stygian, whose available classes include tempests of Set, assassins, rangers, demonologists, heralds of Xotli, and necromancers.

Continuing the trend of hybrid classes in Age of Conan, none of the following are strictly limited to their primary role. The Rogue-types are basically meant to be lightly-armored damage dealers, but all have ways of strengthening themselves in other areas. Same goes for the Mage-types, whose classes' strengths range from straightforward ranged damage spells to demon forms to commanding hordes of pets on the battlefield.

Your first quest is given to you by a fellow refugee, who speaks to you in an interactive cinematic sequence complete with camera close-up and branching dialogue options, reminiscent of single-player games like Knights of the Old Republic and The Elder Scrolls IV： Oblivion． As we soon learned from this conversation, another survivor from the slave galley has washed ashore--the head slaver, who has fled to the nearby town and must be slain before he can alert the authorities to your presence． Along our path, we also found a half-naked Stygian woman bound to opposing trees by her wrists--we spoke with the woman in another cinematic dialogue to find that in order to free her, we'd have to forcibly convince a scavenger to part with the key． We readied our splintered oar and went hunting．

The early version of the game we played already has a working interface that nests most major menus (such as your character's inventory and skills) along the top of the screen, while including a mini-map in the bottom-right corner of the screen and your combat menu at the bottom center of the screen． In the PC version of the game, by default, you use your W, A, S, and D keys to move as you would in a first-person shooter, and you also use your Q, E, and your number keys 1 to 3 to perform melee weapon attacks, which include a forward thrust (the 2 key), overhand diagonal slashes (1 and 3 keys), and horizontal slashes (Q and E); all five buttons are also represented onscreen as labeled icons． When you begin your career, you'll have no real skill in combat, though your enemies will also be weaklings．

Thought of a new name for the title! I am still finding out new features in this game. A lot of the features are kind of "stealthed" into the game. So I'm going to just put the spotlight on some features out there, make them known, and also try to to just make this a help guide with common questions! You don't have to like it, if it helps you, then I'm glad.

Just thought I'd throw this out there, since I hadn't seen anything letting the incoming new folks in on what there is. Nothing spectacular, but deserves to be put out there. If I miss something, Post it, and I'll add to this OP.

Most of us on the dev team have been playing the game, and its been nice to see the different things people talk about on the OOC channel and hear peoples feedback.

If I could ever find a game that didn't feature Gank Squads, Random Acts of A**Hole-ery, etc and that didn't require full-sized teams just to travel safely between towns, then maybe I might eventually some-day change my mind. But it hasn't happened yet

The graphics look pretty good in this one, you can safely say it's the best looking MMO to date and may even remain that till ~2010, especially if they add higher resolution textures and DX10 features like promised. (supposedly coming in Fall)

Introduction Well the time is finally here. On May 20 Age of Conan, one of the most highly anticipated MMOs to be released in years will finally be ready for the masses. Most likely you have heard or even read the AoC FAQs and boards during its development. However, if you want to know more about AoC (and its prime competition, Warhammer Online) Take a look at the game summary I wrote HERE.