Why did it take six months to make such simple, yet fundam🍃ental changes to the way the game plays? “It’s because you have 14 classes,” answers Go🎐dager, “times 80 levels, times hundreds of abilities. Going through all of them is just a massive logistics job. But the beta was always running. We were always getting feedback from the players. For us, delaying the release was not such a big deal. Quality comes first.”

We spent time traipsing about Age of Conan’s creche area -that is, the island on which you’re hand-reared through the game’s first 20 levels. The city൩ of Tortage offers a line of quests based around teaching you exactly how to use your particular class. It’s no longer a single-player game in these early stages either.

Interestingly, by day Tortage is a multiplayer arena, but find a bed to sleep in and you’ll wake up at night, whe💞re Age of Conan becomes an entirely single-player experience. You can flip between single and multiplayer just by hopping into bed.

In single-player mode you further your ‘destꦍiny quest’ by completing a series of quests based around your class. As a barbarian (AoC’s rogue class), we found ourselves creeping along rooftops to eavesdrop on the local misfits, and stalking certain targets to subtly ensure their safety. Whether or ♔not this kind of quest can work outside of Tortage’s single-player mode (and therefore anywhere past level 20), is unclear, but while it lasts it’s an impressive and interesting change of pace from the typical ‘kill X of Y’ missions we’re used to.