Age of conan Fresh start but in local :)

Age of Conan General Discussion
1

Hello everyone!

One evening I fell into a real nostalgic rabbit hole. I remembered Age of Conan, back then it was still called Hyborian Adventures, not “Unchained”, and decided to check out what the official website looked like in 2008 through the web archive. I was genuinely surprised by what I saw: live flash banners, dark barbaric design, a huge “Buy Now” button, all soaked in the spirit of an era when MMOs were events, not services.

It was 2008. Funcom promised a revolution: the first “mature” AAA MMO with blood, dismemberment, and a real combat system instead of click-click-auto-attack. Hyborian Adventures, the world of Conan the Barbarian, dark, brutal, no elves or friendly paladins. At launch the game received decent reviews, but the technical issues and sharp drop in population after the first few months became almost a meme in gaming journalism of that era.

Browsing through the archive, I remembered that around 2010, someone had been working on a private server. I got curious about how it was going and it turned out the server had shut down before it ever went live. But the author released everything as open source, and I… decided to give it a shot.

And you know what? I actually managed to run Age of Conan locally.

I sat there alone, running through Tortage, hearing that same soundtrack and I understood why back in 2008 we were so in love with this game, despite all its bugs and rough edges. There was something genuine about this world: a grim atmosphere, mature dialogue, the feeling that this wasn’t just “another fantasy MMO.”

Only one question remains, why has no proper private server ever appeared in all these years? But since the foundation exists and the code is out in the open, maybe it’s time for someone to see it through. I’ve decided to try and pick up where the original author left off. We’ll see what comes of it. I’ll be sharing progress along the way. Cya :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

P.S. I can’t add a screenshot, but I can drop a link. Enjoy the nostalgia :wink:

2

Easy answer; because it’s illegal.

Funcom OWNS the sole rights to the game at this time.

3

Oh right, the rights… fair point. Well then, we’ll just play locally with friends if we’re lucky :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

4

Reverse engeneering is pretty hard. And aoc lost its popularity pretty fast so maybe because of that that one person dropped the project or maybe he dont have spare time anymore.

But i would like the option to log into old client of aoc that was BEFOFE dreamworld engine update and just walk in this beautiful world once again in its full glory. I mean to see how Aoc looked when it has REAL dx10 graphis not castrated one tha FC did after. With volumetric fog and clouds, caustic water with waves, dynamic shadows and SSAO (real one not fake that we have now)

5

Thanks for this post (:

Ive been datamining the game alot myself and trying to tweak everything settings within the game

aswell as your offline project - I am curious to know more
I am not really a server guy myself but I recently had similar thoughts on creating a developer server
it is often somthing I dive back and forth with just recently i did some dive into the .exe file
Normally I scan the RDB files for assets (I had a project where I wanted to “re-inject” updated textures into the game - but with no luck so far I have a difficult time finding the exact textures that I want to explore)

It was very time consuming

If however you manage & have success drop me a PM (:
I am a hard believer in this game & how easily it could re-enter the market in 2026 with minor tweaks/updates.

Here are some of my passion posts:
Upscaled textures from Datamining
Modernise Combat/UI minor Dev tweaks
A wish for Open Modding tools - To Create own Content
New Class Concepts - Made with AI
Why AoC was ahead & still could enter market in 2026
Why AoC actually still matters in 2026

if you feel like it, check it out

6

Hey! The main issue with this server is that it’s completely empty, there’s nothing but the world itself. No NPCs, no quests, nothing to interact with. We could probably set something up for PvP in the White Sands area, like in the old days, but that’s about it honestly, and I doubt anyone would even bother connecting to play. I’m not going to dive into reverse engineering just to populate the world, that’s way too much work for what it is.

Still cool to see someone else interested in this though! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

7

Yeah I did imagine the server is empty just like with wow private servers :stuck_out_tongue:

but yeah - We need the access to the /set commands the /set commands is what allow you to do GM stuff - which i assume is your key to start adding NPCs
Atleast that is how I tried to do it in World of Warcraft

but I am really not good with servers

Let me know if you discover anything futher into it i’ll see what I can contribute (:

8

Yeah totally get what you mean with the /set commands, that’s basically how GM tools work in WoW emulators like MaNGOS/TrinityCore, you spawn NPCs, set their stats, waypoints etc. all through commands. But here’s the thing with Age of Conan it’s a completely different beast. In WoW, the community spent YEARS reversing the protocol and building databases with every NPC, their positions, loot tables, AI behavior. That’s why private servers like Warmane can feel almost like retail.

With this we don’t have any of that. Even if we got GM commands working, we’d have no data to actually spawn, no NPC IDs, no coordinates, no behavior scripts. We’d basically have to rebuild all of that from scratch by sniffing packets from the live servers or digging through client files. That’s an insane amount of work for a tiny community.

So realistically the ceiling here is pretty low, maybe just running around the world or some open world PvP at best. And honestly, the scariest thought is, if Funcom ever shuts down the official servers, Age of Conan is gone forever. Unlike WoW or L2, there’s no real emulator to fall back on. The only hope would be if Funcom decided to open source the game but let’s be real, that’s probably not happening anytime soon.:melting_face::melting_face:

9

Well, I think it’s all clear to me now why there are no private servers for Age of Conan. The community is just too small, and there’s simply not enough people or resources to bring back the old days. Sadly, those times will only live on in our memories.

I think we can close this thread. Thanks everyone for the interest and the replies, it was a pleasure chatting about this! :waving_hand: