Age of Conan’s Update 5 goes live, game director hints at future improvements
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Classes, Game mechanics, Guilds, MMO industry, Patches, Crafting
The fifth major update to Age of Conan,”Gangs of Tarantia“, has gone live. The update adds the Tarantia Commons District, a high level area with both single player and group dungeons, as well as a revamped RPG system. There are substantial system changes that have gone into effect in Update 5, which impact every class in Age of Conan, covering everything from itemization changes to feat trees, as well as abilities, spells, and combos. Plus Funcom has rolled out a complete overhaul of the gem crafting system and introduced new rewards tied in with guild cities. Any in-depth look at the sweeping changes made to Age of Conan with Update 5 is beyond the scope of this post, but are summarized in the patch notes.
In the June letter from the game director, Craig Morrison explains how Gangs of Tarantia is the most significant update made to the game thus far. Morrison also drops some hints about the directions Funcom plans to take Age of Conan with future game updates. He writes that the next update to Age of Conan will focus on three main areas: improving guild gameplay; new high level content in the House of Crom; and more goals and objectives with Border Kingdom PvP.
Beyond the letter from the game director, Funcom has grouped together a ton of information related to Gangs of Tarantia and AoC in general, which can be found in Issue #23 of the Age of Conan newsletter.
Age of Conan’s Update 5 goes live, game director hints at future improvements originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Read up on Age of Conan’s culture armors
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Crafting, News items
Culture Armor, just what is it exactly? Better yet: How is it going to work? Well, Funcom has some answers to your questions. First of all, culture armor (and weapons) are designed to be end-game crafting creations, thus giving more weight to the crafting aspect within Age of Conan. Eleven cultures are being represented in the armor sets and yes, certain classes won’t be able to wear culture armors that don’t fit their origins. For instance, Priests of Mitra probably aren’t going to be running around in Kushite gear.
Our impressions are that these culture pieces will be a great boon to the visual flavor in the game as well as make crafting much more worthwhile. They’ll of course serve a utility role as well, but the inclusion of more variety is something any MMO should be looking to add.
Read up on Age of Conan’s culture armors originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Age of Conan cultural armor and weapons on the workbench
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Culture, Crafting
We’ve blogged at length before about the crafting changes coming to Age of Conan, and every new piece of information we find out makes them look even more intriguing. Take the Culture armor and weapons: new pieces that crafters can make that don’t require a guild city, with recipes that drop from bosses as blue loot. Now designer Dave Williams has put up a thorough Q&A about these pieces.
As well as adding visual diversity to AoC, with many more cultures represented than we expected to see, they’ll be worth wearing for mechanics reasons: stat-wise, the pieces will be somewhere between dungeon-dropped blues and epics. Dave explains that the first batch of recipes to be patched in is only the initial iteration of something that will be much larger.
From the look of it, there will be plenty to be going on with: ‘There are 24 culture armor recipes. Each recipe makes three pieces of set. Thus for patch 3 we are releasing twelve 6 piece armor sets — one set per class. There are four culture weapon recipes grouped by geography, and each weapon recipe can make 3 weapons related to that theme. There are a couple of details that I’m going to leave to discovery, that I think players will find interesting.‘
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A look at Cultural Armor in Age of Conan
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Culture, Crafting, Races
Age of Conan has been (in our view, fairly) criticized for lacking costume diversity. It’s not quite Age of Strikingly Similar If Slightly Recolored Leather, but it’s close. The huge revamp to the crafting system that was recently announced will do a lot to fix this, adding new crafting recipes for armor sets including the Cultural Armor sets.
We had initially thought that the ‘cultures’ mentioned would be the three in the game currently - Aquilonian, Cimmerian and Stygian - but a recent feature on the new sets has added Acheronian to the list. It’s accompanied by a lengthy piece of background text concerning niello, a substance that does exist in the real world, and will presumably appear in Age of Conan as a crafting material.
The whole piece, however, is clearly a FunCom addition to the work of Robert E Howard, and while it’s inevitable that the canon would have to be expanded upon in order to flesh out the game, we can’t help but raise an eyebrow at a chronicle by ‘Lascivicus’ that mentions ‘Deathcoils’ and ‘the Dark Lord’. A bit too black metal, perhaps. And Lascivicus? Come on, Funcom. The Bearded Clam was bad enough, but let’s steer cleer of the silly NPC names, eh?
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Major revisions in Age of Conan crafting revealed
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Patches, Crafting
Okay, Funcom, we get it. You’re deadly serious about fixing Age of Conan. First the beginnings of the PvP patch went live, ‘Patch 2′, giving players PvP XP and gear. Then we got to see the reworked notoriety system on Testlive, along with shady camps and six pages of patchnotes. And now we get a lengthy document about coming changes to the crafting system on the Testlive server. Good heavens, anyone would think that Craig Morrison bloke actually knew what he was doing.
Age of Conan crafting had been lacklustre. The new changes, which are scheduled to go live as part of Update 3 - the very same update that will polish off the PvP changes - add much more depth and complexity to the tradeskills. Weapons and armor will now have recipes that drop for city, base and culture versions, depending on whether they require a guild city or not. The ‘base’ pieces can be worn, and also used up in crafting to produce new pieces.
Continue reading Major revisions in Age of Conan crafting revealed
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