General Discussion

The Anarchy Online official site has been updated with a letter from the Game director.  The letter details what's on the horizon for Anarchy Online, including new items and nanos, a new team instance, a re-write of the PvP title system, and more.

As 17.7 gets closer to being ready for the live dimensions I thought it was a good time to give you all another little insight into where we are at with Anarchy Online.

The coming game update includes quite a lot of stuff that we are all quite excited to see released to the live dimensions. Having spent quite some time now (well over a year in fact when I think about!) working on content with a focus on the Shadowlands it has been great to be able to look at Rubi-Ka again as we work through the new quest lines.

Getting to add some reasons to get people out an exploring the original game world is a fantastic feeling, and not just because it’s a great nostalgia trip for me! It was great seeing the designers and artists adding a little more life to some of the areas I remembered frequenting in the days around launch and sending people to some of the ‘old haunts’.

The Dust Brigade story elements are also shaping up very nicely. I think you’ll find some intriguing developments there and the team is translating the direction we have set out for the coming months into some very interesting content. It’s always quite satisfying to see the plans go from concept to testing to the game itself.

Then there are the new items and nanos, and people, as always, have already had quite a bit to say on the new items so I wanted to add a little here. When it comes to designing items we generally have to face the fact that at least as far as the feedback is required we are often in a ‘no win’ situation! The new nanos that are being introduced in 17.7 are a great example. When items are within the current budgets players have for skills on their characters then the items are seen as ‘too easy’ to equip and the game is being ‘dumbed down’, then when we make items that are intentionally at the high end of what’s possible they are ‘too hard’. In this case that difficulty is very much the intention!

Read more here.

Sounds good... But have they updated the graphics engine yet? I played AO for a couple of years and enjoyed the game a lot... But i'm an admitted graphics junkie and left for 'greener pastures'. I checked in again about 6 months ago when they offered some free time to returning players, but the graphics had not been updated, just tweaked.

Originally posted by Kidjel

Sounds good... But have they updated the graphics engine yet? I played AO for a couple of years and enjoyed the game a lot... But i'm an admitted graphics junkie and left for 'greener pastures'. I checked in again about 6 months ago when they offered some free time to returning players, but the graphics had not been updated, just tweaked.

New graphic engine ( actually the modified version of the AO engine used for AoC, then retrofitted for AO; bringing DirectX 9, shaders, etc.) will hopefully be on Test beginning of 2008, and implemented live mid-2008. This is Silirrions' tentative projection as of the last Director Letter and forum response. The graphics themselves ( artwork and such ) will be done afterwards,  probably 2009.

No mention of whether they will continue the froob access or not.

Originally posted by grunty

No mention of whether they will continue the froob access or not.

That's actually a good question, and it's been coming up alot. While I think they probably will continue with it, they've usually made the continuation known well before the end of the year in the past.

It is good to hear that this game is getting udpated graphics.  I think all games that are serious about their product should do this.  The updated graphics for EVE Online are going live 12/05/07.  More games should follow these leads.