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.
More news about the 1.05 update, this time in an interview over at IncGamers, who incidentally sparks a malware warning in some browsers. I dared it, and got this on rooftop gameplay, courtesy of Per Storløkken:
Rooftop gameplay. With an urban area there is room for only so much gameplay in narrow city streets, so rather than miss out on that extra ‘footprint’ we moved a large part of it to the roofs. Fighting on the roofs adds new elements, both on PvE and PvP servers. For PvE it means that in many cases you will have nowhere to run except down – and down easily means death by fall damage unless you’re near water. This makes fighting much more tight than it is on the ground, and you have to be a lot more careful. For PvP it means that this area is going to be filled with people wanting to kill you
Sounds cool. Other news includes conflicting quest storylines, where you’ll join a gang and, if you’re a devious bastard, double crosses them. Also, there are riots which could be fun.
Finally, a tiny little tidbit about things to come:
The next thing to come out is going to be The Iron Tower, a group instance set in Tarantia Common District (in which we will conclude the storyline started in the outdoor playfield).
