Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview
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Ten Ton Hammer: So now that this first update has come in do you have an idea of what the team will be focusing on next?
Craig Morrison: Well we've already got our next update going which will have the revamp of the items and statistics. Basically quite early on, immediately after launch, the players didn't feel there was any real incentive through the itemization of the game to progress. The statistics, such as strength or dexterity, didn't really mean enough to them to be worth investing the time in upgrading it. It was a conscience decision early on in Age of Conan development to not make the game item-centric and to make it more skill based but I think that it is fair to say that we've come to the conclusion internally that we probably went too far. When a player can wield a level 30 dagger at level 80 and not feel the difference we didn't get it right.
So what we are doing with the revamp is changing how the statistics affect the character and we're not going to go to the other extreme either. We are trying to find the right balance by keeping the things that made the game appealing to people in the first place, such as the very hands on combat, and the fact that it is not just down to your gear how well you perform, but we do want to make sure that items and statistics are a viable progression driver for players. They should be rewarded as they go along so that when they get that new cool armor item for completing a quest that they can put it on and see that it helps them in some way.
It'll be going to the test servers in the near future, sometime over the next month, so that players can get to see it for themselves. There will be a lot of information released as it also involves a slight re-balance for every class. When we are doing something as fundamental as adjusting the statistics, what they mean, and how much they affect the character, that also means that it is the right time to look at all the classes, feat trees, and their spells and abilities to make sure they are balanced with the new system in mind.
On top of that, the update will have a totally new gemcrafting system, which was another system of the game that had some serious issues after launch. The gems went from being useless to being overpowered and we had to take them out to prevent people from exploiting them. The guys on the team have spent a lot of time revamping that system and making sure that it will work right and provide tradeskillers with a way to have a valuable impact on the both themselves and other players through the gems. It's going to be a sizable update that is also a challenging one because we do have to be careful to not go too far in the other direction.
It is going to be an interesting series of updates and we expect it to be one of the longer periods during testing. This is the kind of update that will go through a few iterations on the test server with plenty of player feedback once we release all the information to them.
