MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood had the opportunity to sit down with Funcom's Erling Ellingsen to talk about the most recent major update to Age of Conan that hit the live servers today. In the interview, Ellingsen tells us a little bit about combat changes, improvements to tradeskills, PvP changes and more!

MMORPG.com:

What was the team hoping to accomplish with this new update?

Erling Ellingsen:

We started introducing the new PvP system in the last update, and we wanted to finalize it in this one. So that was certainly a big focus for us. The notoriety system is a major addition the gameplay in Age of Conan, and I think this will open a whole new world of opportunities for those inclined to get involved in PvP. We also wanted to improve on tradeskills, introduce culture armor and start making some changes to the combat system. The update is simply huge, but the highlight is undoubtedly the PvP additions!

Check out the Age of Conan Update 3 Interview.

ok wow? not bad ...good turnaround indeed.

you have my attenion again funcom...open up cancelled accounts around patch 5.0 (2 major patches away) and you might have a nice surge in numbers.

Interesting. I'm still a little skeptical, but it does look promising - I may have to try it out again soon.

 i try it when ymirs pass is live, i alreaddy had alts around 55 when i quit

whats especially of interest to me is the question if they can keep up with other companies like turbine, nc soft or even blizzard to produce something significant in a period of lets say 6month time.

with signifcant i dont mean playing around with some stats or ironing out old bugs but bringing fresh content.

6month of subscription to me is (even after substracting server/support costs) almost the price of a full game so id expect at least a +20-30% of its original game content.

any company that cant manage that is either greedy, dont know their code, bad organised has a to limited player base imho

I'm going to have to give it another try. Looks like they are doing some real work on it.

Nice job Funcom, now just keep it up and you will catch up.

I'm still undecided i'd prefer to wait a while for other players to give some feedback befroe consedering comeing back.

When you think you're ready Funcom, reactivate my account for a week and I'll check it out.

I jumped in today for a usual 1-2 hour session.  The immediate change I saw was some armour looked different and the combat skills needed less key strokes.  The biggest improvements for me are:

PvP mini games.  I actually enjoy these and it now gives a player who is not in a big guild a chance to PvP all night long and have some kills

Stability - Its amazing how stable the game is now.  Ok I get lag spikes once in a while but it lasts 5-10 seconds and since everything else freezes you dont die stupidly.  Havent had CTD for ages.

There are also a ton of changes within dungeons and all for the better. 

Overall I was losing interest around 6 weeks ago but held out for a the last big patch.  Now AoC is the main MMO I play and I am looking forward to leveling an Assassin and trying out the more evil side of the game :)   

Population is increasing and its nice to see a number of people around in all the zones and todays patch they have sorted the issue with ganking at rez points by increasing the invunerability time.

Yep I'll try it again, but only on thier dime. I already paid 4 months worth of subscription price for an unfinished game.

I would love to try it, but I would never buy the hole game after the first failure. Shame they are not smart enough to give people 5 days free or something like that. Perhaps it will come.

Nice job Funcom. Keep it going!

Originally posted by remyburke

When you think you're ready Funcom, reactivate my account for a week and I'll check it out.

Yea ill check it out also when you reactivate my account for a few days, other wise im just going to wait 6 more months till i try it out.

Originally posted by Valentina

Nice job Funcom. Keep it going!

I agree, finally getting somewhere.

Do you still play Valentina? You were pretty active on Dagoth weren't you?

Originally posted by remyburke

When you think you're ready Funcom, reactivate my account for a week and I'll check it out.

When they do this you will know they feel the game is ready.
Most likely they will do this somewhere in January 2009, when they aim to release for Russian and Polish market.

Somehow I doubt they will give some free time before DX10 and all that new content is released.

To bad there's a serious flaw that came along with this update. Apprenticed lowbies don't get the debuff if they are part of a group of aggressors, meaning if you kill them they will give you murder points.

Edit- issue was less severe than I first thought.

These sound like some nice additions and changes.  I will definitely give this game another chance if I get a free week trial.  If my performance issues are resolved (ati user) then I would resub atleast for a month to check things out.

ha since its been confirmed that the games gonna be on the 360 ill get in then.

i hopethe game wont die because it gonna be the best mmo when its finished

I recently restarted my account about 1 week ago and was also an initial beta tester as well as with everyone in the first wave of its release. I'll admit it had serious problems and was perhaps one of the biggest hyped MMO's yet released.

Being a veteran WoW, WAR, Lineage 2, and EvE Online Player, I must say that with this patch this game has come a long way since its initial release. No more memory leaks, lag spikes, or serious performance issues and the game world itself has become much more user friendly. The gameplay and combat is still the same but flows extremmely nicely...if you have the hardware. PvP is very fun and FUNCOM added a hefty spoonful of balance into it. Crafting is actually worth pursuing now with tons of more recipes and simpler schematics.

I foresee a possible free trial in the future (within the next 6 months?) in attempts to bring some players in but it already has a solid population so I wouldn't expect one very soon. Its at a fine stage right now where it should have been at launch so if you're still sitting on the fence, I say its worth the $15 to fire it back up and give it another try. This game is only going to get better!

My score at launch: 5/10

My score via Patch 3.0: 8/10

A few things that could really aid Conan:

-Word from FUNCOM that an Expansion is being planned

-New Servers (only if the population increases) or an actual RP-PvE server (there are currently none)

-Advanced character leveling spawns (if you reach a certain level with a character, you recieve another on the same server starting at level 20 so you don't have to repeat Tortage if you choose not to)

i will certainly try it when ymirs is out. Im glad that serious ppl took over th situation there, this is a game with potential