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Age of Conan on Facebook

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:00:44 +0000

There’s an official page on Facebook for Age of Conan. If you’re into that sort of thing you might want to fan it or something.

Age of Conan on Facebook hails from Living Hyboria!

Age of Conan Expansion Announced: This is Rise of the Godslayer

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:36:10 +0000

The first expansion to Age of Conan was announced on Gamescom, and it brings us to the lands of Kithai. This is Robert E. Howards very own adaptation of China, and it shows, both on the screenshots and in the trailer.

With the expansion we not only get a new landmass in Kithai, we also get the Kithan playable race, new armor, combos, and other things that a new area generally brings in any MMO. No new classes though, the current ones will have to suffice and I think that sounds like a good idea. Kithai characters will start in Tortage, as usual, but will travel to Kithai when the night questline is finished, much like Cimmerians travels to Cimmeria and so on. Tortage is said to be slightly updated to fit the Kithans entering the scene, that’ll be interesting to see.

The expansion takes a step from the Robert E. Howard short story Tower of the Elephant in some fashion, and it is set years after this occurs. How Conan slaying the imprisoned elephant-like good in that tower has anything to do with Rise of the Godslayer isn’t known at this time.

That brings us to the story, and this is how it is described on the campaign site:

Far to the east, beyond the devil-haunted towers of Zamora and the wind-tossed waves of the Vilayet Sea, the Empire of Khitai spirals slowly into chaos. The tendrils of darkness spread through the lands, tainting them. The Hyrkanians, kept at bay for thousands of years by the Great Wall, now spill across the Northern Grasslands in a wave of savage slaughter. The once beautiful lands of Chosain Province burn as power-hungry warlords fight to control every inch of the land.

And behind the scenes, sorcerers play games of power for stakes that would shrivel the soul. The desert of black sand known as Kara Korum seethes with alien creatures, bizarre and twisted forms of life that cry out human voices yet attack with demonic fury. And deep in the vine-choked jungles of Paikang, the heart of the corruption beats to the rhythm of another world.

Now, the slave who became a liberator must walk the dark roads of the empire and rise against the darkness that dwells there.

Let the rise of the Godslayer begin!

Uh-huh. Right.

Kithai is in turmoil and there will be focus on factions and the conflicts in Rise of the Godslayer, we’re told. You can join any faction, and that will open up different questlines, which sounds cool.

Other news include new mounts: Tigers and Wolves.

In the case of the Tiger mount, for example, it is a religious ritual for the cult that you must join. In order to capture their tiger, the player must travel into the woods unarmed and unarmored and kill the Tigress barehanded. Then they can pluck the mewling and defenseless newborn from the den and bring it back to raise it as their own. It first becomes a pet and the player must teach the tiger all of the necessary skills for survival such as hunting, stalking and battle. Once the tiger has grown large enough and if the bond is strong enough, the player must create a saddle out of various ingredients scattered across the land. Only then will the Tiger become a mount.

One might expect a raised level cap, but that’s not the case. Instead, we get an alternate advancement system:

The alternate advancement system will basically allow players to use their experience towards special alternate advancement feats and combos. This will open up a lot of new potential abilities for players. In addition the players will also be able to ‘train’ these feats to a second level over time to perfect them. This will allow players to choose which of their new feats or abilities to focus on and decide which order they build them up in. This training will continue whether you are online or offline, and will take a certain amount of time to complete (depending on the power of the feat), so it is a tactical choice for the player as to which order they do this training.

So when will we play Rise of the Godslayer? No release date has been set, and it is probably a bit optimistic to hope for a Holiday season release, but it isn’t impossible. We’ll see what the reports from the Gamescom show floor tells us, the expansion is supposed to be playable there. My guess is March 2010 for this one though, but hopefully I’m wrong.

Be sure to check out the screenshots, artwork, trailer, and the official expansion website.

Age of Conan Expansion Announced: This is Rise of the Godslayer hails from Living Hyboria!

Trailer Time! Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:32:00 +0000

The trailer for upcoming Age of Conan expansion, Rise of the Godslayer, is here!

Trailer Time! Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer hails from Living Hyboria!

Conan Radio Launches (Yes That’s Right: Radio!!!)

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:54:26 +0000

Conan Radio is a pretty funny little project getting ready to roll out, broadcasting “live from Old Tarantia”. They are looking for people:

Conan Radio is looking for interested individuals for Live DJ’ing, Voice Overs and Program Hosting. If you are interested in any of the positions please contact Brad at brad@zero-nation.com for more information.

Links to tune-in is available from the site of course, and if you’re playing on the Cimmeria RP-PvE server you can hear from the good folks behind the project there as well.

I wonder if they’ll try to stay in character? Might be a bit hard, given that there were no radios in Robert E. Howards universe… Still, gotta love the dedication here, so here’s hoping it’ll take off! Tests are being done this week, so maybe we’ll here more later.

More information on the official Age of Conan site.

Conan Radio Launches (Yes That’s Right: Radio!!!) hails from Living Hyboria!

Veterans Rewards Program Somewhat Detailed

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:17:18 +0000

The new Veterans Rewards program is due in the near future, as we’ve mentioned before. In the July 2009 Letter from the Game Director, Craig Morrison tells a little bit more about what we can expect:

As part of the next major update cycle, a new veteran reward system will be introduced that gives veteran players access to special vendors who will offer them a host of veteran benefits ranging from social status items to special items that will provide extra convenience items to veteran players. As an example of the latter, exp potions and similar bonuses, while not increasing the power of your characters, will provide veteran players with great time-saving rewards and options not available to new players.

So in-game perks when we keep playing, that might actually be a good idea, especially if it is combined with extra character slots (which they gave previously) and things like that. Just don’t send me gold bonuses or nonsense like that, make it cool, maybe Veterans Only quests?

Veterans Rewards Program Somewhat Detailed hails from Living Hyboria!

IGN’s Age of Conan Vault Gets Some Love

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:25:08 +0000

This is almost ridiculous. The official site is giving IGN’s Age of Conan Vault quite a push in its latest news update. It almost sounds like a promotion, doesn’t it?

That being said, I’m sure the guides are great, even if the graphics promoting them isn’t. I’m mean seriously, look at this crap:

One would think that IGN should be able to afford a decent Photoshop ninja, eh? Ah well, it is the content that matters, so do check it out if you’re into researching everything. Me, I’m more of a hack n’ slash kind of guy… That always work.

IGN’s Age of Conan Vault Gets Some Love hails from Living Hyboria!

Guild Leveling is the New Black

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:29:07 +0000

Or at least that is what Craig Morrison and fellow Funcom peeps are hoping, because that is the next main feature being rolled out in Age of Conan. Basically, the idea is that everything you do as a player will be counted against your guild, hence you’re leveling the guild when playing the game. The system is called Guild Renown and it focuses on getting Renown points in three different areas:

Valor, which is PvE stuff.
Glory, which is PvP mini-games and similar.
Artisan, which is garnered from crafting.

I wonder if this means we’ll have artisan focused guilds? That would be cool, make armor not war…

Anyway, the Renown level is calculated from these three, and there will be rankings so that guilds can compare and boast amongst each other. Naturally, there will be rankings in all these three niches, so that you can be that artisan super guild if you want to.

Rankings will be reset regularly, weekly is the idea right now, and there are status items to be won for the guild and participating members.

My initial reaction to this was “cool, but that’s more pressure from serious guild players”. Not so, at least not if you want to believe Morrison:

One area we have considered here is that we don’t want to have players feel ‘forced’ into merging guilds to compete for ranking placement. Thus, we will be making the ranking calculations only count the top X contributions from members in the ranking period (the value of X to be determined during testing). So let’s say we decide the contributing cap will be 50, then the top 50 contributors within the guild will be the ones whose efforts are counted for ranking purposes, even if you have 100 members. Please note that we plan for all members to be able to contribute to the Renown level, so larger guilds may level up quicker, but they won’t necessarily do better in the rankings – they might – but it is important that success in the rankings is down to effort, not just due to overwhelming numbers. With this, we hope that even small and medium-sized guilds will be able to make appearances in the rankings.

Sounds good.

Read the full Letter from the Game Director July 2009 here.

Guild Leveling is the New Black hails from Living Hyboria!

Veterans Reward Program Coming to Age of Conan

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:52:19 +0000

When Age of Conan launched there was talk about the PowerPoints program, which would reward veteran (ie long term) players of the game. This has not been rolled out yet, but it seems as if it is still on the table. Game director Craig Morrison commented on the matter in the official forums, telling us that there will be a “veterans reward system” in the near future. Now, that could mean anything of course, but it is promising.

Morrison also said:

The veterans rewards when they arrive will be based on the number of months you have subscribed for in total. It will be retroactive as well so it will already know about those months you have already earned.

It is very much going to be about rewarding those who have been loyal to the game.

Veterans Reward Program Coming to Age of Conan hails from Living Hyboria!

Play Age of Conan for Free? Nothing is Ruled Out, says Funcom

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:36:50 +0000

The IncGamers interview with Erling Ellingsen is an interesting read, but this question in particular sparked my interest:

There are many other MMOs of the same genre, and players can only afford so many subscriptions. Blizzard said earlier this week that it’s possible WoW will be free to play with microtransactions one day, would you ever consider changing AoC to a free to play model?

We’re certainly not ruling anything out, but we don’t have any current plans for that. However, we’ve had huge success going free-to-play with our other MMO Anarchy Online, and we strongly believe its a viable business strategy for these kinds of games.

Anarchy Online is still alive and kicking. It recently celebrated its eight year anniversary, so Funcom certainly knows a thing or two about free to play games.

Play Age of Conan for Free? Nothing is Ruled Out, says Funcom hails from Living Hyboria!

GameSpot Revisits Age of Conan

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 08:23:08 +0000

GameSpot’s Online Games Blog regularly revisits online games, especially MMOs, since they are prone to change all the time. The latest post is all about Age of Conan and the changes since launch. It is a pretty good walkthrough on the various major updates that have been addressing the issues.

We ran through the early game experience again on a midrange PC and noticed considerably fewer performance problems than at launch–aside from a few bouts of network lag, the game seemed to run quite smoothly with few to no hitches beyond some extremely minor clipping issues with characters that have long, flowing hair that clips through their clothes.

The wrapup is a bit dull, but overall I’d say that the blog thinks you should revisit Age of Conan, especially since you can do it for two weeks for free.

While Age of Conan had a rocky start, it seems like the game has made several turns for the better and continues to have a devoted team of about 100 people hammering away at both improving and expanding the game. This new team really seems to have tried to address the major concerns of its fans, as well as the concerns of the people who tried the game at launch, and left.

GameSpot Revisits Age of Conan hails from Living Hyboria!