Game Director Craig Morrison addresses the Conan community in this latest issue of the "Letter From the Game Director".

This month's topics include the recently announced expansion, "Rise of the Godslayer", the 1.06 update schedule, the House of Crom, Veteran Rewards, Tier three raiding, and more.

On the subject of the new expansion, Mr. Morrison discusses the expansion's setting, and how it allows the designers certain levels of freedom that they didn't necessarily have before with the existing zones. This is due to the fact that Robert E. Howard had the lands of Stygia, Cimmeria and Aquilonia mapped out pretty well, but the lands of Khitai were covered a bit less, allowing for more creative freedom. These new lands will also have roughly 30% more explorable terrain when compared to the existing zones.

When discussing more imminent changes, Mr. Morrison states that there will be a Conqueror update, and a new level 80 instanced called "Iron Tower" preceding the 1.06 patch. The 1.06 update will follow, but may be split into smaller parts to get chunks of the features out to players sooner, rather than releasing the patch in it's entirety at a later date.

The House of Crom might be finally seeing the light of day sometime soon as well, and there are some new details on the dungeon:

House of Crom is a level 80 instance that will have social elements. So what does that mean exactly? That means that we are aiming to have two parts to House of Crom, one which is more open and supports several teams in a social dungeon setting (and will have co-operative goals) and a part that will be a regular single team instance. I think the mechanics the team is cooking up for this will make for a very interesting experience!

Find out more, including what's coming for veteran players by reading the original update here.

Originally posted by MikeB

On the subject of the new expansion, Mr. Morrison discusses the expansion's setting, and how it allows the designers certain levels of freedom that they didn't necessarily have before with the existing zones. This is due to the fact that Robert E. Howard had the lands of Stygia, Cimmeria and Aquilonia mapped out pretty well, but the lands of Khitai were covered a bit less, allowing for more creative freedom. These new lands will also have roughly 30% more explorable terrain when compared to the existing zones.

I rather think that the change in the zone design is a result of the massive critique which started way back in the beta when the testers figured it out first. "Age of Guild Wars" etc.

The second reason may be that all plans for a Xbox360-conversion are off table and the zones can finally be designed for pc-hardware instead of tiny boxes+constant reloading to fit consoles.

I'm also VERY cautious when Funcom talks about "exploration". I remember back then when a dev said that the areas are so big that one time he got literally lost in the woods following a deer. In fact, AoC might be the very last game to try for players who like exploring in first place.

Alot of MMO's that where supposed to be porting to the Xbox 360 are on hold due to issues with the "LIVE" service, it's not just AoC that is suffering it's all MMO's that announced they where going to port, seems Microsoft are dragging their feet in sorting out the issues.

It's cool they are thinking about armor diversity in Khati. But what about diversity in the base game? I ask this question alot and no one has really said if it has changed yet. Has it? As far as I have seen everyone still looks the same. They stated and showed before launch all the sets, well parts of, armor that could be found but I certainly have not seen them. To look different now it seems you have to be level 75+. That's kinda pointless.

no wonder aoc feels like guild wars

shitbox 360 strikes again

massive does not equal small zones.