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).

Rooftop Gameplay Sounds Cool hails from Living Hyboria!

Gang warfare is prevalent in Tarantia Commons. You will see gangs fighting in the streets and you will be able to join the battles. Riots are also frequent in Tarantia Commons, and as a player you will be able to affect the outcome of these riots and even recruit more men to join through quests. Tarantia Commons is about quality storyline, and players have an opportunity to directly affect the conflict going on in the area.

Other news include more living guild cities and teleporting to your guild city. There will also be vendors selling pets:

We have also added new social pets to the game. Players can purchase these social pets from vendors in the guild cities, and currently the selection is cats, dogs and snakes. Social pets can not fight for you – but hey, they look pretty cool following you!

Check out the Tarantia screenshots here, while you wait for Age of Conan to download the 1.05 update.

Tarantia Commons on 1.05 Update hails from Living Hyboria!

[...] it allows us to enhance our items, abilities, and even our buffs better than before. This is important because it means that items and even abilities become more meaningful and rewarding to the character when receiving them. On top of that, it also allows more dynamic character and item builds in the long run.

Interesting, but it could make the game really unbalanced right?

Luckily, it seems as if this has been taken into consideration, at least if we should believe Jarle Snertingdalen in this Q&A:

The biggest challenge by far has been to do all these fundamental changes to a game that is already a live product. As players already have characters they have invested time and resources into, there is a limit to what you can do. There are for example a lot of class changes in update 5, but we have had to tread carefully as players are used to play their class and too many and deep changes at once will disrupt how players are playing the game. You don’t want to feel like a novice after a patch, you want to experience to new content and have a good time.

He also comments on the difficulty level, which some players found increased a lot for PvE’ers.

The last of the big challenges we have faced that I want to bring up is balancing the game again. Fundamental changes to statistics, RPG systems and formulas affect everything, be it PvP, solo gameplay, dungeons or raids. Getting the difficulty-level back to what it is on live for all these aspects with a revamped RPG system is not trivial.

Read the whole thing for more. No date on when 1.05 will roll out yet.

RPG System Revamp in the Upcoming 1.05 Update hails from Living Hyboria!

Full update notes here.

The role-playing servers are finally getting some rules as well. Looks OK to me, might actually create a character on a RP server to try it out. I played a lot of pen-and-paper role-playing games when I grew up, so this actually appeals to me.

PvP Update, Role-playing Rules, and More hails from Living Hyboria!