All Posts by Stradden

Every month, the folks from Funcom provide us with a new developer profile Q&A, telling us just a little bit more about the people behind Age of Conan. This time around, it's Per Storløkkenn, a Gameplay Designer.

MMORPG.com:

Can you remember your first video game? How often did you play, what other games had an influence on you?

Per Storløkkenn:

One of the first games I remember playing repeatedly was a Space Invaders clone on the VIC-20 that I think was called Battlefield. I also remember playing the first Donkey Kong on a handheld. I never played a lot when I was young, that came later.

There isn’t one game that has influenced me a lot; there are rather many games that each has influenced me a little. However, when I started gaming “for real” two of the games that I spent the most time on were QuakeWorld: TeamFortress and Ultima Online - they both represent the type of game I prefer. They both gave me (to some degree unintentionally) a lot of freedom as a player. In QW:TF the unintentional gameplay made the game; it’s a fact of life that rocket jumps, grenade jumps, and triple pipe jumps are fun!

Read more here.

Sounds are generally used in games to set some kind of mood while the player is moving through the world. While we still don't have much information on the game, the folks from Earthrise have provided us with these two tracks from their upcoming MMORPG.

Vision of a Dream

Sal Vitas and its advanced towns are the cornerstone of human culture and art. Unlike 20th century cities built to fit the landscape, Sal Vitas has terraformed the land to fit the imagination of the glorious architects. Every element is designed and built carefully, down to the most minute detail, in an effort to complete a solid image. Sal Vitas is not only a city, but a testament to vision and determination.

You can download the song from the feature.

Check out these two tracks here.

Originally posted by Alan0n

I have a top end PC and the game runs with alot of hitching and huge spikes.

By top end Im talking about real top end - including 9800 gtx.  New install - nothing else on the Raptor and still its shit even in low settings.

Seriously - this Dev is simply lying.  Funcom can not guaranty a top end players with a game that runs.  So minority... Is that 49,9% ?   Or maybe players that are not even given the chance to test if the game runs at all on their machine will have to find out by buying something that doesn't work ?

Grats Funcom.   You will be so populare. 

This is a joke

DONT BUY THIS GAME UNLESS U ARE GUARANTIED IT WILL RUN ON YOUR PC.  IT has NOTHING to do with minimum or requmended.  Funcom have not done ANY testing on what the game is running on - and they simply dont give a dam.

Vista - 64bit

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66Ghz

4 Mb RAM

Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT

I suspect that it'll be stable on more systems come launch. From all accounts they have indeed done testing on what the game is running on. Any MMO company would be moronic not to look into it and Funcom isn't out to NOT make money and they have a lot riding on AoC, given that they also have another MMO project that will follow behind it.

Just my 2 cents though.

MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh speaks with the folks from Flying Lab Software in this progress update that brings us information not only on the recent server merge but on the game's past issues and its future.

“What server merge?”  Russell Williams, CEO of Flying Lab Software deadpanned, comfortably seated in his office on top of Queen Anne hill in Seattle, WA.  “Didn’t you read the follow up announcement?  Our web servers were hacked.  Ha!  Gotcha!” 

Russell really wasn’t trying to pull one over me, but was simply joking, this sunny morning in the Pacific Northwest that I was visiting to talk to the team.  Take a temperature reading, find out the whys and wherefores of the server merge in Pirates of the Burning Sea and what they had planned for the future.  One thing I know about Russell, having interviewed him several times previously, is that he is candidly honest and would provide a wealth of information.  I lusted surreptitiously at the model of the Yamato (among other toys) he has in his office, pondering once again how I could tuck that under my coat when I left, then urged him to “tell all.” He did.  Starting with what went wrong.

Read more here.

Last week, we spoke to Funcom’s Age of Conan Product Director Jorgen Tharaldsen about the company’s decision to hold an Open Beta through the subscription-based website Fileplanet. Now that the Fileplanet Beta is underway, a number of player concerns have arisen about the game’s performance and potential launch problems. This week, Tharaldsen speaks once more with MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood, Speaking to some of the concerns that have been raised by our readers.

MMORPG.com:

We have heard many complaints about the presence of loading screens in Age of Conan. Can you tell us why they are there? could the game have been made without them?

Funcom:

When we started to develop Age of Conan we really wanted to bring a new level of immersion to MMOs (and judging from the feedback we have done exactly that!), and we wanted the most lush and detailed areas we could possibly deliver (while hand-picking the best from the Conan lore, across Hyboria). It was therefore a trade-off that we divided Conan into zones, and by doing so we also, naturally, had to have load times between the zones. I think this price is worth paying, for sure, but for Open Beta we reintroduced an old bug which expanded the loading times way beyond the acceptable (the bug makes the game write and store tons of code while loading, which increase the loading times too much).

It is noteworthy to mention that if you want a seamless world, you need to stream a lot of the content to make it load right. We tried this, but it meant degrading the quality of the graphics, and even getting a lot fewer interest points in the game, so the end result was an easy choice. Quality won!

Read the whole thing here.

Nick LaMertina, a Sound Designer for Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment's Stargate Worlds has written a fantastic blog post over at the game's official site. We have asked for permission to re-publish it here at MMORPG.com as it serves as a grreat example of a developer struggling to do the best job possible on a project and also of an artist struggling to ply his trade in the games industry.

There are some days things just plain refuse to work, and fault never lies with just one person or circumstance. The software is crashing, the MIDI routing hiccups, the instrument doesn’t perform as expected, or there’s an unannounced support task that inhibits or destroys my momentum. Or sometimes it’s even an outside issue (or frequently, issues) that affects my composure at work.

It’s often frustrating when I’m trying to accomplish something, and I know, I just know, that I’m fully capable of delivering the goal I have in mind, but one roadblock after another comes up and inhibits my progress. Sometimes it’s my own fear of failure (or success!) that holds me back. It’s very easy to get discouraged and feel like the end goal is an impossible task and not worth pushing to, especially when dealing with an art as emotional as music. It’s frequently a lonely experience, speaking, reading, and writing in a language that most can only topically understand, and no matter how much I try to disconnect myself from the work, I’ve never been able to reduce that emotional bond to my work. It is singularly my greatest strength and my most significant weakness.

Read it all here.

The fine folks over at Cabal Online have provided us with part two of this new and original comic.

Check it all out here.

This Wednesday at 7pm EST, MMORPG.com will be holding a public test of a new feature. Dynno will be providing the technology that will allow players to stream their gaming live for others to watch.

With a single click, Dyyno lets you broadcast your gameplay (or any other window) live to a potentially unlimited audience without slowing down your PC. Dyyno streams are very high-quality and can be viewed in a web browser.

More on Dyyno here.

Our Warhammer Class Overview series continues this week as MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood speaks with WAR Combat and Careers Strike Team Lead about the High Elf Swordmaster class.

Have you ever wished that you could play a character who was so good with the sword that you could walk toward a curtain of arrows with nothing but the cold steel in his hands to deflect the incoming onslaught? Well, now you can with the High Elf Swordmaster of Hoeth in Warhammer Online.

Late last week, I had a quick opportunity to sit down to talk with Adam Gershowitz, the Combat and Careers Strike Team Load over at EA Mythic about this class in our continuing Class Overview series.

The Swordmaster of Hoeth (name generally shortened just to Swordmaster) is a formidable opponent. Master of the blade, she has the ability to cut her foes down not only with the cold steel in her hands, but also through the mysteries of magic.

Read the whole article here.

The folks from Codemasters have sent us these new screenshots featuring areas from the recently released Book 13: Doom of the Last-King that recently made its way to live servers near you.

Check out all four here.

Originally posted by JK-Kanosi

I don't know, maybe professionals and educated people give a damn. You've gotta admit, even a spell checker would have fixed most of those. Journalists typically submit their work to an editor before it is published. This shows that this website hires writers without college degrees or at the very least, writers who has taken college writing. Or, it shows that the journalist's work isn't submitted to an editor first, which only shows that this isn't a professional website, which to educated people, means that their opinion's hold less weight to websites that do employ professional writers.

You need to learn to think more critically and to start giving a damn about education. The future of mankind depends on education and people who give a damn.

EDIT: No, I'm not oblivious to the fact that most of you probably don't give a damn about education, pride in worksmanship, or the future of mankind after you are dead and barried. After all, this website does have a heavy population of people who don't mind mediocrity. However, some of us do care and it does irk me that people have an "I don't care" attitude about how they write. Sure, there are intelligent people that are bad spellers, and I am terrible about grammar, but they pick a different profession than journalism. For some people, bad spelling and grammar stick out like a soar thump and actually takes away the focus from the topic of the article. It's not really about if you can spell or have good grammar to me, it is more the attitude people have about this topic.

First. Have you never had a bad day?

Second, have you never rushed something to publication that resulted in a number of errors? Even us "educated" people make mistakes now and again.

Third, I take my profession very seriously and I take pride in my work. I was embarassed by the quality of the editing in this piece and I was very clear about owning my mistakes and correcting them. If you knew me, I think that you'd find that that's a life philosophy of mine.

I have been writing professionaly for three years now and I can tell you when you act as both writer and editor, and you're trying to hammer out a decent article on the morning of publication because you wanted to be able to include as much info as you could about the game you are playing, sometimes things slip through. Still though, I must be unprofessional and "uneducated". Like I said before, mistakes do happen. For example, did you know that you wrote this:

"bad spelling and grammar stick out like a soar thump and actually takes away the focus from the topic of the article."

Maybe before spouting off about how uneducated I am, you should read the About Us section. I currently hold two bachelor's degrees one in English and Theatre and the other in Education. I took several writing courses and even have a year of journalism school under my belt.

Just needed to get that off my chest.

 On Wednesday evening, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood attended a press conference for Ea Mythic's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Today, he recaps the information for us in this article.

On Wednesday, a number of press outlets were invited to take part in a telephone press conference with the guys from EA Mythic who were there to talk about their progress to this point in development.

While a lot of what was said was information that we have reported on in the past (there were a number of outlets there that have not had the same opportunities to cover the game as we have had), but there were some gems in there on subjects like the lorebook, sieges, updates and more!

Within minutes of joining the call, I could tell that this was going to be another typical Warhammer event, making best use of the controlled madness that is the Warhammer promotional team of Paul Barnett, Jeff Hickman, and Josh Drescher. This time, they were joined by Adam Gershowitz and Destin Bales.

Read more here.

The folks at Disney Online have provided us with this new, internal Q&A with Pirates of the Caribbean Online Game Developer Jason Yeung on the game and what's coming. They have also provided us with six new screenshots!

Q: So what’s the deal with Davy Jones and the Kraken? Do you have plans to add them to the game? Any hints on when that might happen?

A: Yes, we are definitely planning on adding Davy Jones and the Kraken to the game, and along with them will be all new Quests. Stay tuned for more details!

Q: Is it possible to solo your way through the game, or do you need to join a Crew and/or Guild? Which would you recommend?

A: It is possible to solo, but a core part of our game is the ability for players to assemble a crew of friends. Crews and Guilds are both useful in different ways. Joining a Crew is like playing a pickup basketball game, where you play with different people every time. Crews work together and treasure is split according to the Pirate Code. Joining a Guild is more like playing in a league – you play with the same people every time.

Read it all here.

okie dokie, all fixed up.

In all honesty I wrote this up this morning quickly so that I could get it out there as soon as possible. I appreciate the feedback. Generally speaking, if you find issues, it's best to contact me at stradden@mmorpg.com. I check that account like an addict.

Thanks agian!