Conan: The Nonsectarian

Conan solves his first side-quest.

   

In its opening city, at least, Conan offers a tantalizing taste of something amazing to come in the world of RPGs: A point at which the game world is too large and complex for a single player to reasonably expect to explore in a single game. A world in which a majority of the content is optional but rewards straying from the beaten path. Conan is not quite there: I will eventually hit every building in Shadizar. But it's close. It sets up a dynamic to which we've grown accustomed in recent years, where the character might have a main quest, but he has to pick up its thread within the context of a sprawling metropolis full of shops and fights and NPCs who want you to solve their problems. 

Ultima V and VI also came close, but the Ultima series, for all its strengths, has never really understood the concept of "side quests." So although the player was rewarded for open exploration, those rewards were more thematic and visual than tangible. I think of the completely optional side-dungeon in which it was clear that some miners had died and become undead skeletons. Conan has those types of visual rewards, too--sometimes, it's fun just to see what the interior of a building looks like--but it also has side quests with monetary rewards.
      

The interior visuals in the game are a lot of fun. Note the beckoning prostitute and the drunk passed out on the floor.

     

(The concept of thematic rewards for their own sake is something that we'll have to discuss at more length later. For all the criticism Bethesda gets for plot, dialogue, and role-playing options, I don't think they get enough credit for their attention to world detail. Every building in Fallout 4 has some story to tell through a combination of written notes and visual cues. Even the throw-away wrecks of houses usually have a little vignette or two, such as the skeleton of an owner who drank a few beers before shooting himself in the head, or a fallen tree trunk that caused consistent damage through three stories.)

As I began this last Conan session, I couldn't remember what I was doing. I resisted the temptation to restart and instead scanned through my screenshots of my last session. I was surprised to find much more plot and dialogue than I remembered; I think that during my first session, as eager as I was to figure out the controls, I just screen-shot most of the NPC dialogue and saved it for later.
     

An NPC makes a good point about Conan.

     
It turns out that I received a side-quest mere steps from entering the city: the recovery of the Eye of Sight for the Temple of Crom. The priest of the temple said that the Thieves' Guild had stolen it and sold it to a wealthy merchant in the Merchant's Quarter, in a room accessible only from the roof.
      

This was, alas, not the solution.

     
I found a likely candidate in the area and fiddled with trying to use my rope for a while before realizing that wasn't going to work. The only other option was to use a Teleportation Scroll--I had found one during my looting--which moves you to any position on a small map of the surrounding area. This is definitely something you want to attempt after saving the game, as it's possible to find yourself on a random roof with no way down, except by another scroll, which is a lousy option since they cost over 200 gold pieces each.
      

Using the teleport mini-map to move to a roof.

      
Anyway, I got into the house, defeated a guard, found the gem, and returned it to the Temple of Crom for a 1,000 gold piece reward--significantly more than the 30-50 gold pieces I'd been getting for each successful theft. I have outstanding quests for the Temples of Ishtar and Damballah that I hope pay as well.

I'm trying to avoid spending too much gold until I know what I need for plot purposes, but I did pick up a few "white lotus" potions for healing (health otherwise regenerates very slowly on its own) and a couple more teleportation scrolls. There are some promising-sounding magic items that I might want to buy later. Some merchants sell maps of various areas, but they seem like a bad investment since you can find most key locations just by exploring.
     

One of several magic shops offering useful-but-expensive items.

     
I had long forgotten what exploration pattern I had used in the first session, and I hadn't annotated key locations, so I printed a copy of the game map and started marking each building with various symbols for shops, treasure, entrances to the underground, and special encounters.
    
As I explored the city, I was attacked at irregular intervals by thugs, thieves, and even city guards, each of which requires a different combat style to be effective: thrusting for thugs, swinging for thieves, and chopping for guards.
      

It will be a long while before the word "finesse" enters Conan's vocabulary.

      
Combat in this game is otherwise boring and annoying, and I can't believe Synergistic couldn't come up with a better approach. You just stand there and hold down the "attack" key. Slain foes hardly ever have any valuables, and you don't gain any skill points for battles, so the only reason to fight is that the enemy won't leave you alone until you kill him. Why didn't they make it so Conan's associated weapon skill goes up by 1 point with every victory? Even that small addition--which existed in the two Excalibur games--would make it feel like combat wasn't just a waste of time.
     

Conan exploits a thug's poor pathfinding to avoid a battle.

     
At the beginning of the game, nameless travelers suggested that I seek out the Red Dog Tavern and the master thief, Taurus, who operates independently of the Thieves' Guild. At some point, I got word that Taurus wanted to meet me, as he also opposes Thoth Amon and the Temple of Set. At the tavern, an NPC told me that he lives in Snake Alley near the Inn of the Veils. I thought I'd need to use the underground to reach Snake Alley (an otherwise cordoned section of the northeast), but upon return to the Inn of the Veils, I realized I needed to bribe the innkeeper to give me back-door access to the alley. This was another consequence of me not paying attention to NPCs during the first session. Many of them say something like, "I think I vaguely remember something about that," indicating that they want a bribe to refresh their memory.
       

Refreshing the innkeeper's memory.

      
I found my way to Taurus. In a long speech, he related that he used to be the Thieves' Guild master before Thoth Amon's agents infiltrated the Guild and expelled Taurus. Through some means he didn't expand upon, Taurus thinks he can regain control of the Guild if I can find the Eye of Set, deep within the Temple of Set. I'll have to enter via the city underground, since the main entrance is supposed to be trapped. I'll also need to find some special magic sword to defeat a serpent who guards the gem.
     

Taurus lays it all out.

    
I actually have another reason to enter the Temple of Set, as the priest of the Temple of Ishtar wants me to recover an amulet there. It's worth noting here the eclectic origins of the game's pantheon. Ishtar was a Mesopotamian goddess of love and fertility. Set is Egyptian--god of the desert and brother and murderer of Osiris. Crom comes from Crom Cruach, an ancient Irish god whose worship was ended (in legend) when St. Patrick took a sledgehammer to his statue. Other gods mentioned on the game map are Damballah, a spirit associated with Haitian voodoo, and Mitra, from Indian mythology (and origin of the Greco-Roman Mithras). Some Googling confirms that all of them appear in the canonical stories of Conan, although I'm not sure if Howard himself used all of them.
      

An NPC explains the game's approach to religion.

        
One persistent and annoying issue in the game: although it offers redundant use of the keyboard and mouse, occasionally it just stops recognizing the keyboard as a keyboard. Instead--and I never know what brings this on--the arrow keys suddenly start moving the cursor around the screen, instead of moving Conan himself, and the letter keys stop doing anything at all. This would be livable, as the game is 99% controllable with the mouse, but that last 1% involves drawing Conan's sword in combat. The only way to do that is with a keystroke. So whenever this starts happening, maybe once per hour, I have to shut down the game and restart it to get the keyboard working again. Any ideas?

At this point, I'm still having fun systematically exploring each of the buildings on the game map, but fairly soon I'll be transitioning to the underground and the main quest. Although readers will undoubtedly point out that other games did it first in a technical sense, Conan somehow manages to feel closest so far to starting out in Candlekeep or Amn or Megaton and helping various residents with their problems while learning about the game world and getting a bead on the main quest. If only the mechanics of the game, particularly combat, were up to the quality of the game world.

Time so far: 7 hours