Age of Conan News - DirectX 10 Release

Extracted from "New Letter from the Game Director"
Posted: - 11.07.2008

Age of Conan Game Director Gaute Godager is back to tell us about the plans for the near future.

Greetings fellow players.

While it has been some time since I last gave you an update, I wanted to touch base and let you know what we are working on at the moment and where we are going in the times to come. I want this update to focus on what is actually happening to the game now, what we have done, and also some of the reasoning behind our choices going forward.

As you all know we have been live for some seven weeks by now, and what a period it has been! While Conan has sold more and performed better than even we could have hoped for, we also know that there have been things we had to work on. I will not try to hide from this fact, but I hope you have seen our steady stream of improvements and additions, in fact, even more than I would have thought possible! I am definitively proud of the team and what they have done after launch, and I think everyone agrees that we are making Conan better, all the time. We are also keeping almost the entire development team ON the Age of Conan live team for the foreseeable future, meaning we can make exciting new content updates on an ongoing basis. Still, let me underline that our main – main – focus at the moment are bugs, stability and performance! I might not talk very much about the details here, but the frequency of the patches and their contents speak for itself.

[...]

When it comes to the overall performance of the game I also have some good news. While most players have a great time with the game, we also know that we have ways to go for those with the oldest machines. We have therefore continued to look at our memory handling and how to increase general performance, and updates on this are continously in the works. These will be brought to the live servers as we finish them, and while I won't go into specifics I know that those of you with older machines will notice improved performance in the weeks and months to come. On the other side of this spectrum you have the Direct X 10 part of the engine, which is now being worked on. What features it will have and how it will look will be unveiled at Leipzig in August, and I think those with machines who can run DX10 will be stunned by what we have achieved. We will put this into the live game as soon as the quality is good enough (during the fall).

While all the things we have done, and will do to the game, are essential, we have also gone through how we are organized. Our great success and many players has meant that we have worked around the clock to deliver the best service we can, but even this hasn’t been enough in some cases. Over the last few weeks we have therefore worked incredibly hard on hiring more GMs, customer service reps and people who serve our community, all to deliver a better service. We acknowledge we still have some ways to go before we can say we are truly happy, but we are moving towards a full coverage of our services. In the US we have added one more office building to facilitate more customer service and community people, while in Europe we are establishing a larger office in Zurich, Switzerland. This office will host customer service reps in Spanish, German and French, together with localization staff and our Euro community team. We have started the hiring process for the Zurich office, and in early fall we will have our European-only customer service center established, in addition to our already existing one in the US. We are certain this will further improve your gaming experience.

As a part of the process of adding lots of exciting new content we have also learned some important lessons when it comes to communicating dates, and we will be even more vigilant to keep to the timelines we communicate. While this is a constant nightmare when it comes to games as complex as MMO’s (as things often takes longer than anticipated to get right), it is a tradeoff in many ways. You always want to know what we are making, we want to tell it to you, but this also means that things won’t always end up on live as soon as we want it, because quality must win. As a part of this we have also worked hard on our routines for creating better update notes, so you get to learn about all the changes we implement from Funcom.

I know many of you have also asked about your buddy keys, and we have now come to a level where we are able to activate them. During the next week you will therefore be able to use your buddy keys, inviting friends to the game with you. You should also check out the massive new update we are putting to live, and not the least drop by our test live server to test the new PvP features.

That’s it for this time! I hope you all get a healthy dose of vacation this summer, and that you are enjoying Age of Conan.


Summer greetings

Gaute Godager
Game Director, Age of Conan – Hyborian Adventures