HANDS ON GUIDE

5 – Early points of interest

The Rough Guide to the Hyborian World

*** SPOILER ALERT***

There's plenty to do in Age of Conan's starting city of Tortage. Outside the main gates you'll find some Picts and Crocodiles to fight to gain easy experience points - successfully killing them all should take you up to about level ten. Advance a little higher and instanced areas such as The White Sands Isle and Acheronian Ruins will become your playground. These areas get more difficult as you progress further into them, with missions and combat to take you all the way up to level 20. Complete as many quests as possible, because you'll want an empty journal when you finally set sail for your homeland and a new hub city, where more quests, higher levels mobs, crafting and siege warfare await.

Age of Conan gives you the option of taking on instanced zones in either Normal or Epic mode. Normal mode allows you to run around and complete every task essentially on your own, and as long as your level matches the mobs you'll face, this pattern will be repeated for a lot of the early parts of the game. Switch to Epic mode, and Age of Conan becomes a different kettle of haddock. Combat is much tougher, for instance - it takes more than a mere three swipes of your blade to kill an NPC. You'll definitely need a group, and even then, running in and blindly attacking everything will quickly result in you staring at the resurrect screen. The benefit of Epic mode is a bigger XP gain from each kill, slightly better loot drops, and more coin. A group looking to power grind their way through Age of Conan will probably choose Epic adventuring. In addition, fighting tougher mobs in a group is more fun than playing on your own.

You should consider the tavern the closest approximation to your home in Tortage, for it is ther where you pick up your most important quests. The tavern also allows you to switch between day-time and night-time questing. Night-time play is a fully instanced copy of Tortage, without any other players in the way. You cannot attempt missions here with any aid whatsoever. It’s your personal destiny after all.

At night you'll meet much tougher NPC thugs on the streets and outside the city than are present during daylight. There are no merchants, and the only NPCs looking for a chat are the ones that are relevant to your Destiny Quest. Killing NPCs at night can be a good way to get extra XP early on. The Destiny Quest is a series of six missions, all of which have to be played in single player mode. Each will yield a fairly decent amount of XP and items. The mobs you encounter are equivalent to your level, so venture in at level 18 and you'll fight level 18 creatures. The quests are worth doing at least once, since a lot of time has gone into their design, but strictly speaking, they're not absolutely necessary and completing them can be very time consuming. The final quest can be completed much quicker than the rest and offers the best rewards, so if you are skipping ahead, we still recommend completing the final one. Once these are complete, you get the option to travel to your homeland and escape Tortage – at last.

Latest Hands on guides

These are the most popular features articles over the past three months.

Mobile Broadband

Compare prices

Fastest, cheapest 3G mobile broadband dongles from 3, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange
from just £10/month