Age of Conan Announcement

Posted by Stropp on June 4, 2008

Funcom hasn’t been taking vacation time since the recent release of Age of Conan. On logging in to Age of Conan today, an announcement of the near future of the game by Gaute Godager, the games director, is up on the game loader. I’ll present it in full below. You can read the original on the Age of Conan community site here.

Fellow Hyborians!

As you may have noticed we have had frequent patches the last two weeks. We hope this will soon start to quiet down, but as long as there are major issues – and there have been – we will dedicate the Conan team to fixing them and giving you these fixes as soon as possible! We have a plan on how to move this game forward because as you know, what you have today is but the platform – the dawn of this world. I hope you enjoy the game as is, but I can ensure you, this is but the beginning!
Our focus from now on can be summarized by these points:

1. We will add content, specifically in mid-late thirties and mid-late fifties and make the leveling speed smoother in those areas, reducing the need to grind.
2. We will have an overhaul of the PvP system – adding consequence and a host of small things.
3. We are fixing bugs you reported through all channels we can get information from.
4. We will add a new large outdoor region in the 55-60 range this summer!
5. This is only a small taster! More information about the exciting summer and fall Roadmap will come the end of the next week!
6. We are staffing up Customer Service, Quality Assurance and Community departments!

I will spend some words on a bit more details now.

1. Filling “thin areas” in our content
We have seen that there are certain level ranges of these Hyborian Adventures that do not have the amount of quality we wish them to have. Most specifically these are the end of the Thirties and the end of the Fifties level ranges. We are addressing this in several ways.

• Several mid-late thirties dungeons are getting a complete overhaul (Black Castle, Pyramid of the Ancients and Treasury of the Ancients)
• Several quests are being made fuller and more entertaining. If people wish to revisit these quests, we will add a system to let them try them out again.
• we are adding first a batch of quests in Eiglophian Mountains (lvls 55+)
• We are also adding in a bunch of quests that didn’t quite make it for launch in the 30+ areas.
• Around 60 quests through the game have been flagged as “Lore Quests”. They will now be patched out with full Voice-Over. (Roughly 1 quest per level after level 20)

All this will come in June! In July the first level 80 additional Dungeon will be patched out. More on that later…

2. Overhauling the PvP System
People like our open PvP system. There are many plans on how to give this open free PvP even more meaning and Purpose. In the meantime we will be doing some smaller tweaks, and we plan to get these out sometimes in June. I will not go into 100% detail here, but that will come next week! What I can promise is:

• An update on how sneaking and perception works in PvP (nothing major, but an adjustment).
• A change in the amount of information you get when you hover over an other player.
• An added system of consequence to “ganking”. (Killing much-much lower level players).
• A system of adding consequence to losing a PvP match, and winning a PvP match + turning on PvP Leveling.
• A change in how Crowd Control (Root, Knockback etc) works in PvP.
• PvP gear.

3. New Massive Region
We will unveil this location later, but it will feature a host of quests, new monsters and places of dreams or horror. It will be styled towards the players in the late 50s and bridge the experience on the way to Atzels Approach. We have plans for releasing several of the areas that didn’t quite make it for the release.

4. Fixing bugs and increasing Customer Service
Funcom has always prided ourselves with having great customer satisfaction. The success so far for this title has left us with the need to increase the size of CS. This will go in parallel with the constant fixing of bugs and other issues that lead people to petition. Included in this is even better testing of the game by increasing the size of Quality Assurance and informing you better about changes by staffing up the Community Department. I know a blurb like this will haunt me always, but I will still venture one: We aren’t satisfied until all our customers are! You know we had a very, very difficult launch of Anarchy-Online! That was a very painful process for all of us working on it – 4 years. You might not understand how driven we are to make sure you enjoy this game, and all the support around it!
The future is very bright for Hyboria. There will be many bright mornings following this, the very first. Together we shall surge ahead and build the world even bigger, better and more detailed!

Yours truly,
Gaute Godager
Game Director
Age of Conan, Funcom

Lack of quest content in the mid to late 30s and the 50s has been one of the biggest complaints that I’ve seen in the official forums. It’s good news that this is been looked at with some urgency. It appears that this wasn’t due to oversight on Funcoms part; the content just simply wasn’t ready for launch.

Adding full voice over for the lore quests after level twenty. Excellent. Strongly needed to give a continued impression of polish. But they shouldn’t stop there. All quest givers need to be given a voice. I don’t mean they need a full voice over. But they should do more than just grunt at me. I know the Conan universe is set in a slightly post stone age world, but a "hello there" is much better than an "ugh!"

I had hoped for some comment on the patching during the Oceanic primetime, though that does seem to have reduced a bit and they are doing the patching an hour later now — the game comes down at 9pm instead of 8pm — but with continued patches promised by Funcom (a good thing btw) the Oceanic prime downtimes seem set to continue.

All in all, a good message from Funcom. It does show that they are recognizing the major problem areas early and are working on them. This should go a long way to calming the Age of Conan community.

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