Conan chats up the ladies
Age of Conan spent today's Friday update dealing with the women of Hyboria. Honestly, the first time I saw the proposed cover art for the game, I was a little surprised it didn't include, well Conan. Placing a female on their game is just one step toward proving that there is a place for women in this society (and not just a lusty tramps either, although they are in there as well.)
Female characters will have the same amount of strength as male ones. Although this deviates from the original concept of women in the works of Robert E. Howard, but I think you'll agree that the portrayal of women as weak, fainting pansies wouldn't nearly be as fun to play as say, my hero Red Sonja. But the developers have gone to great lengths to make sure that women have their own identity in AoC, and to that end have created over 2500 unique female animations. Each piece of armor is specifically designed for the female form rather than being a copy of the male armor, as you can see in the screenshot above.
It looks to be that the trend these days is to create women with equal strengths and abilities to men. While I am all for that, I also would like to point out the obvious: that a woman is not a man. In the original D&D female characters had a modifier -1 strength +1 charisma. Yes, I agree that women are as strong as men, but their strengths lie in different areas. Of course, the strengths of a woman are definitely harder to quantify, so I can see leveling the playing field for simplicity's sake. I suppose I am simply left with the question does a woman fight and/or deal with conflict differently than a man? Will there ever be a game that can capture this?
Whatever the answer may be to those questions, I am suddenly very jazzed to play this game.
