Craig Morrison discusses future Age of Conan updates and changes
Age of Conan's game director, Craig Morrison, has written a letter to the community about the next slew of upgrades and updates coming to the game now that Ymir's Pass -- and its new PvP system -- is on the live servers. First on the list of patches will be DirectX 10, which Morrison says is something the team wanted to be really special. We're just hoping it doesn't bring any serious new bugs with it, but from the sound of things Funcom is trying to make sure the new graphics are highly scalable for various computers.
The second big project in the works are two new dungeons. Thunder River will hold both of them and they'll be aimed at max-level players. The Slaughter House Cellar is for single players, while Xibaluku is a large team dungeon. We can expect to see these released with the next update, apparently.
The new-year will bring a new outdoor area called Tarantia Commons that's focused on late 70s players. Funcom is promising a dynamic storyline surrounding riots in the commons, so that should be something for everyone to look forward towards. The finale subjects talked about are itemization, statistics and class balance. Anyone who played Age of Conan at launch should be familiar with the strangeness with stats from just about all equipment. It seems like class balance is something being looked at in a very deliberate manner, which is to say they don't want to mess anything up than it already is at the moment.
No matter how you slice it, Craig Morrison and crew are doing a lot to earn the respect of their player base. Not only are there a ton of updates coming down the pipe, but a lot of it is being shared with us at an early stage. According to Morrison most of this stuff should be out by early next year, which is a long time in MMO-patch world. Hopefully things can pan out for this game, because the world of Conan deserves a worthwhile virtual representation -- even if it takes a little longer than everyone hoped it would.
