Gamespot.com hosted an Age of Conan : Hyborian Adventures PvP weekend, where 20,000 lucky Gamespot.com members were given a weekend key to access the PvP beta of the long awaited and highly anticipated MMO from the folks at Funcom (Anarchy Online). The event featured small PvE part (5 levels) to familiarize yourself with the game and its interface and then an instant boost to level 20, where PvP mini-games were available for all to enjoy and test. As you can all attest, I am not breaking any NDA here.

Well folks, heads did roll. Especially mine, quite a few times. I have to say Funcom had a wonderfully fun PvP weekend set up. At times, it was a bit disconcerting, seeing how some people just blatantly take advantage of an exploit and repeatedly do it to piss people off. But human nature dictates that the anonymity of the internet will make people do worse things than they would if face to face. But I digress…

To start off, you’re given access to all 12 classes that are making the final cut into the game. You get to create your toon and access the optional beginner area “Tortage” to get your bearings on the interface and the combat system. You quickly find yourself in a MMO world where auto-attack does not exist. You must actually tell your avatar which way to swing your sword. Needless to say, this removes one of my major gripes about MMOs; the dumbed downed combat system. Not to say I hate auto-attack, it just gets….boring.

To continue, a whole 5 levels into the game, the intro area is finished off and your automatically boosted to level 20 and thrown into a PvP lobby where you can group up or go solo and look for PvP matches. There were two types of matches available : the Team Annihilation and Capture the Skull (which is another fancy term for Capture the Flag). The first was my favorite as it requires you to defeat the opposing team by destroying their resurrection statue (so that they can not resurrect anymore) all the while defending yours. Capture the Skull was your regular, run of the mill CTF game which has its own merits, but is nothing new.

All in all, the experience was great and leaves you wanting more. Some people were upset that the devs did nothing to address the assassin’s overpowering bug, but many fail to realize that finding a problem, patching it, taking down servers, deploying patches…all that takes a lot of time. When you have a three day window to have as many people try to test your product, you can’t afford a lot of down time. I am confident that Funcom will in fact take care of what they need to take care of come launch time. In the mean time, the only other thing to look forward to until release is the Fileplanet Open Beta, which begins May 1st.

Kudos to Funcom and Gamespot for hosting a fun event. Here’s to seeing you all online. And I will lop your head off!