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Age of Conan: Update 3.0 Interview
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, Ellingson 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! |
| MMORPG.com: | So let's touch a little bit on each of these individually. Can you give us an overview of the new PvP system now that it is completely rolled out? What does it add to the game? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | The PvP consequence system will punish players who kill other weak and innocent players. If you kill a so-called innocent player you will get a criminal status, and you will accumulate murder points. If you accumulate enough murder points you will be flagged as a murderer, basically making you an outcast of society. Murderers will be attacked by city guards and will be unable to trade with normal vendors. Instead, murderers will have to seek out renegade vendors on the fringes of society! You can absolve yourself of murder points in a number of ways: just waiting it out as it fades over time, earning regular experience, and performing redemption quests. Other players will want to hunt murderers down as killing a murderer increases PvP experience gained by one hundred percent! PvP experience is now very valuable, as we introduced PvP levels and PvP specific gear in the last update. There is a lot more detail to this system, of course, and we will be putting up an article on the official community site explaining everything in detail. |
| MMORPG.com: | Ok, let's talk a little bit about tradeskills and crafting. In a recent review here at MMORPG.com, the AoC crafting system was criticized for being rather weak. How does this update address that? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | This update brings several changes to tradeskills, but this is only the beginning. We will be looking even more into tradeskills going forward, and we are very keen on improving it further. What this update does is make crafting more enjoyable by introducing several different changes and additions. First off, we are bringing in new types of armor and weapons, called "Base", "Culture" and "City". This gives smiths a lot more to craft and the recipes for these items also include new resources that alchemists, skinners, weavers and woodcutters will have to provide, so working together with other player crafters and gatherers will become both encouraged and necessary. We are also making numerous changes to resource drop-rates (making it easier to gather resources), and the alchemy profession is getting a significant overhaul by having their number of recipes reduced and also making less resources necessary. This will generally make alchemy much more enjoyable. This is by no means the "miracle update" for tradeskills - we will of course continue to improve this feature in the time ahead. |
| MMORPG.com: | We've been hearing about culture armor for a while now. What is that exactly? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | Culture armor is a new type of armor we are introducing into the game, in an effort to both make tradeskills more interesting -and- to get more content in there. We are releasing 24 recipes in this update, each recipe making three pieces of armor in a set. Each class will get one culture armor set they can use, and everything is based on various Hyborian cultures. They look stunning, and are designed clearly with that culture's unique fashion in mind. All culture armor is intended for high-level players, and in terms of stats they fall somewhere between dungeon-dropped blues and same-level epics. Culture armor will have to be crafted by players, and the recipes are dropped by boss mobs. We plan to add even more culture armors in future updates. Also note that we are introducing culture weapons in this update as well. |
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| MMORPG.com: | Your team is making a number of changes to the game's innovative combat system. Can you tell us how combat will be different? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | First of all we have done major changes to crowd control and immunities, allowing players to break stuns, fears, roots, snares and charms when they have lost a certain amount of health. We did this in order to give players a fair chance to whithstand these effects and fight back. Secondly, we have done some changes to some of the combos. What we have done is make some of them have fewer steps, for instance making them more viable for use in PvP. So while there are now many combos that are shorter, they also deal less damage of course. We have also introduced a penalty for when you miss with your directional combo strikes, and the penalty will increase with the number of missed strikes. This is definitely something we will keep our eyes on closely, and we will certainly track how these changes are received in the community. |
| MMORPG.com: | How different is the game today from the game a month after launch? If I left the game after my initial month, why is it worth my time and money to come back? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | This is certainly a biased answer, but I will give it to you anyway: it is definitely worth it to come back if you haven't been playing for a while! We have made a huge number of improvements to the game in the past few months, from major gameplay additions to countless little tweaks and fixes. There has also been radical improvements to technical stability (such as memory leaks). While we certainly have many things left to do before we are satisfied, we are still really happy about the progress we have made. I have spoken to many players about what they feel about the progression, and most of them tells me that the game has improved radically since one month after launch. But this is only the beginning, we are working relentlessly on future updates and we are putting a strong emphasis on player feedback when doing so. Of course you should rather ask a player this question. Better yet, I encourage people to pick their character back up and give it a try. I think they will be pleasantly surprised, even though there is still a lot of improvements left to be done. |
| MMORPG.com: | Okay, last question. What is on the immediate horizon for Age of Conan? |
| Erling Ellingsen: | Right now we are looking very much forward to the upcoming content update. This will include Ymir's Pass - a gigantic new outdoor adventure region intended for level 55 characters and above - as well as the legendary Amphitheater dungeon. We really believe this will introduce countless more hours of content for players, and the feedback we have been getting from players on the testlive server is very promising. We are also working on tier 2 and 3 PvP armor - armor that looks beyond stunning and will be sure to appropriately show of your status as a PvP god. We are also working on new high-level dungeons and a new adventure area for Tarantia City. Our techies continues they work on DirectX 10, as well as working on even further improvements to stability. Generally I would say the future of Conan is very promising. The game has matured a lot in the past few months, and we strongly believe it will only get better. We have had a few rocky months and we know that there are issues we need to iron out, content that needs to be added and player concerns that must be addressed. We very much appreciate everyone's patience, and we're very happy to have our players with us as we keep making Age of Conan a better and better game with each update we put out. We look forward to seeing how this latest update is received in the community, and we look even more forward to push out future updates! |
;)
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!
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.
I agree, finally getting somewhere.
Do you still play Valentina? You were pretty active on Dagoth weren't you?
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
I'll come back when there is more content for roleplayers, like housing and real furniture where you can sit down on a chair
I’ll check it out when there is a free week. But as of right now I like Warhammer better, when Warhammer gets boring, then I will check on EQ2.
Funcom really burned me with AoC release. I am a big fan of Conan and robert e. howards books and looked forward to AoC with great interest. I preordered a CE and was their at headstart. From day one i realised I had been bamboozled by Funcom into buying an overhyped game based on a francise i loved. I felt lied to, cheated, and plain bitter about what I bought. I gave funcom one paid month after free month to fix my gripes, and they failed to address any of them. Even more so, i rolled a Dark Templar, one of the most laughed at an undesirable classes in the game at launch... what a mistake, but i felt certain Funcom would answer are pleas..........
Now I am playing Warhammer online and its such a breath of fresh air to come to a game where the developers roll out patches consitently that do not break the game further, provide clear feedback and listen to the player base, and were up front with what would be shipped with their game. I can not say the same with Funcom.
IF they want me to come back to AoC for another try, they will offer me a free 1 week return... or hell, how about let me use one of my 5x buddy keys I never got to use because they wern't at release and blank slips of paper in my $89.99 CE box?!?!
I'm not now nor ever again to believe a thing that F**ckdUpCom says. They totally lied during the beginnig of launch and haven't stopped since. The *patches* they delivery are full of crap and do nothing to help, only hinder the game. I will never go back to this maggot infested piece of crap again and I hope no one else does.
I would seriously be careful about listening to what anyone at Failcom has to say. Let the people decide. Read what the
suckerssupporters are saying on the forums. So far I have not heard them singing it's praise. Aside from the fanbois. Don't be swindled by failcom.I would return to AOC if it was not a piece of sh!t game.
I admit, when the game first launched, it stumbled a bit, but after all the updates, it's much smoother. I would definatly give the game another chance if your still sceptical : )
It is nice, they almost have the game out of beta stage now, oh yeah but they have been charging people to beta test this game and even with all the patches, there is still little to do at end game.
So yeah, some of you are having fun leveling up and that is good, games are supposed to be fun, but don't be disappointed when you get your character to 80 and find nothing to do.
Yes, at the beggining a failure, now, well, you can't look at the official forums because there are ONLY AoC fans telling you to wait for next patch, again and again.
LvL 80 on 2 months with casual play and at 80.... nothing to do, no quest, no motivations for PvP,
lot of zones,
preloads,
instances,
dungeons empties and with bugs,
everybody looks the same, no itemization,
no gameplay rules to make your own RPG game, like in UO or EVE.
Thats not a virtual world, it is just a joke.
I'm not going to give it another go. Funcom does not deserve any kind of support after the pathetic piece of crap they released and called a game, and then mocked us with the worst content since Jesus was a kid, and a support SO BAD it makes various dictators seem human and cuddly.