Funcom to merge Age of Conan servers

By Oli Welsh Published 30 September, 2008

More PVP and loot changes detailed.

In a lengthy post (two, actually) on the Age of Conan forums, the MMO's new director Craig Morrison has detailed a raft of upcoming changes to the MMO - including a server merge.

In what amounts to the first admission from Funcom of the game's declining popularity, Morrison said that servers will be merged in both Europe and North America.

"It's important for us to ensure the best gameplay experience for you all, and more healthy populations on each and every server will make sure we maintain healthy communities for the game in the future," Morrison said.

Morrison - who recently replaced original director Gaute Godager - also went into greater detail on the forthcoming updates to the game that the company outlined at Leipzig.

He confirmed that new zone Ymir's Pass will soon be on the test server, and that it may stay there for some time; other new content additions will follow.

Morrison shed a little more light on the second stage of the much-delayed new player-versus-player system, which will introduce consequences for attacking other players. He pointed out that "ganking" other players will mean you are unwelcome in many parts of the world, but said hardened PVP fans will be able to frequent a new network of camps "that function with a little more moral ambiguity".

He explained that the item system would be adjusted, so that equipment would modify a character's statistics by about 50 per cent, as opposed to 25 per cent currently.

"It was always the intention that Age of Conan would not be a game where items would be the deciding factor in encounters," Morrison said - but Funcom found that this devalued loot, and diminished players' sense of progression through the game, so "we came to the hard choice that something had to change".

The Powerpoints and Kingship systems first announced back in June are still planned, but will "go back to the drawing board" under Morrison's hand.

Powerpoints, an Achievement-style system, will be integrated with "some for of loyalty program", Morrison said.

The guild-versus-guild Kingship system will be completely redesigned, integrated with better guild support and "lateral progression" for max-level characters, and not released until next year. The overhaul perhaps comes in response the highly successful organised conflict in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning,

Finally, Morrisson said that the game's delayed DirectX 10 version has "come very far", and elements of it would start to appear on the test server after the next update.

We hope to offer our first re-review of Age of Conan soon, so stay tuned.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • SaitanMar #1 3 years ago

    The First early signs of a MMO struggling. Age of Conan is a solid game but I personally think folks are fed up of MMO styled games now.

  • paulf #2 3 years ago

    waiting for gaol with his 'i told you so post' ...

  • SleepyMagpie #3 3 years ago

    "The First early signs of a MMO struggling. Age of Conan is a solid game but I personally think folks are fed up of MMO styled games now."

    Eh?! Excuse me, what planet are you on, where have you been? AoC has been struggling since it's near stillbirth, and is so NOT a solid game. People are also NOT fed up of MMO's, just bad ones.

    3 strikes, you're out.

  • FortysixterUK #4 3 years ago

    What with a a friend of mine who works at Eidos stating Eidos forced AOCs releases massively prematurely ( possibly helping to facilitate the head exec leaving), the games woefully unreliable game engine, causing very regular crashes ( memory leaks ), and now a server merge, this game must be going to way of the Dodo. A shame as the game has lots of personality and potential, but here I am a few months after release, back in WOW.( A game that DOES NOT crash my very expensive PC every 30 minutes or so ! )

  • TitusCrow #5 3 years ago

    this might have been a game with a year's more dev time - but you only get 1 shot in mmo launch if its a turkey the bad press etc will sink it for good - conan's dead! shame cause being a r e howard fan the world and lore etc are great.

    so onwards and upwards.. what large company has the balls to do a mmo on the hp lovecraft horror universe? call of the cuthulhu mmo anyone?

  • MaxiSleep #6 3 years ago

    Real shame this. I really want some competition to WoW but I think this one is a gonner for at least a year and will need major financial support and a proper relaunch.

  • nervouspete #7 3 years ago

    @ TitusCrow re Lovecraft MMO...

    "Quest Description:

    You are hereby charged to go to Innsmouth, and there you shall see something terrible and do mad things. Of the things you see I cannot speak. Terrible things! Terrible, squamous, oppressive, maddening things! When you see these strange apparitions, you must perform an action too terrible for me to speak of. You know of what I do not speak of! Is this clear? Very well, be gone! And good and holy luck accompany you in your horrifying descent into non-specific madness.

    Reward upon Completion:

    1,900 Insanity Points

    Selectable Reward:

    Edvard Munch Painting
    Ham sandwich"

  • paulf #8 3 years ago

    conan is a pretty decent game for the first 20 levels - not a massively multiplayer game however more of a single player game - after that it just declines into a boring grind - war is a much better game and will fare better I think

  • 4thVariety #9 3 years ago

    All you need to know about MMOs in one quest description:

    Hello Stranger,
    your sword tells me you are just the kind of misanthropic homicidal maniac I need right now. You see, I have this problem with a certain village nearby. They all promised me their hearts for 10 pieces of gold. Now that I need their hearts for a ritual sacrifice summoning forces of evil to lay waste on these lands, they refuse to hand them over. Could you be so kind enough as to bring me 20 hearts of these villagers. You can of course keep their gold and I also throw in this Lanyard of Oozing Coolness +1 to make it worth your while. Your friends will envy you wearing this. Now do we have a deal?

    [Answer1: Awsome, I'll rip their hearts out]
    [Answer2: How dare you disturb me playing Peggle while running bots?]

  • anomagnus #10 3 years ago

    sad to see, i hate to see any mmo crash, as they represent the one true gaming genre that can respond to customers needs

    i have faith that they can sort their problems out. if vanguard can do it, this can do it

    its unfortunate now though, thats its competition is the sublime WAR and the ubiquitous WoW. Time lost will be hard to make up.

  • Darkjinxter #11 3 years ago

    Seems all the action is on, and will be on, the TEST servers.

  • M83J01P97 #12 3 years ago

    The fact that WAR has turned out to be such a good game won't have helped AoC, because it just proves how weak an MMO it actually was.

    Don't make an MMO if it can't be run on a large number of systems... that should be rule number 1 of making an MMO.

  • Chufty #13 3 years ago

    LOL SaitanMar said AoC is a 'solid game'

    /points and laughs

  • Bleh #14 3 years ago

    It's sad to see that it's slowly going down hill. It should have had a lot of potential but they couldn't make them.

  • Slabbathepave #15 3 years ago

    I'll keep my copy of AoC and keep an eye on how Funcom deal with this. Just a shame, i quit playing months ago due to how awful AoC was but even now problems that existed then still havent been fixed... doesnt bode well for the future. It is a shame that Eidos forced thier hand a little on the release date. A real shame.... but who knows? they may fix it yet.

  • Pirotic #16 3 years ago

    To say an mmo is unfinished is naive, but to launch an mmo with major, critical features missing and hundreds of crash to desktop bugs occurring is simply insulting to the customer. Conan wasn't ready for launch, even in it's current state it doesn't sound like it would of been ready for launch.

    The customer service and tech support was also terrible at the start, so it's little wonder users got frustrated and quit. The sooner it goes tits up, the better. They have some talented staff who deserve to be working in a project which has a budget and development timeframe which gives them half a chance to show it.

  • Turrican #17 3 years ago

    Perhaps the US Congress can vote AoC a bail out package?

    I didn't get past the trial, the game ran fine but it still felt like Dark Age of Camelot - progress this is not.

  • Rirekon #18 3 years ago

    Sort out the rubbish GUI and I'll give it another go, until then forget it.

  • hula hoops #19 3 years ago

    Well it is, always be in near future, hard to compete with WoW for newly released MMO games.

    First, the current state of WoW is the result of many years development, fine tuning and incremental improvement not only done by the developer but by the players themselves. You can see this by the so many third party add-ons out there which improve the gameplay experience. So it is always hard to be competitive when other MMO is just released, but that doesn't mean they won't be competitive in future.

    Thirdly, the reason why so many players like me stick with WoW is because they have spent so much time with the game. This makes the game UI very familiar to them and they will not like it if they have to do a steep learning curve again to adjust to the new game UI. Our spent time in the game also mean we have spent so much time and effort on developing our characters. And I believe quite a few people will have the heart to just say goodbye to all their chars and friends because of a new game. Most people will play both game alternatively. And if, and I emphasise IF, they feel more attached to their new characters and get accustomed to the new UI then they will leave WoW and stick with the new one.

    This will take time, so I guess we will just have to wait and see the fate of any of these games one year down the line.

  • iokthemonkey #20 3 years ago

    Well it is, always be in near future, hard to compete with WoW for newly released MMO games.

    ----

    Even more so if they're shit, like AoC...

    The simple fact is, people need to accept that WoW is there and will probably never be topped. There's no shame in accepting second place, as second place could still see millions of subscribers and a suitably large income. The fact is though that AoC was truly shit. A big steaming pile of rancid arse-vomit that promised so much yet delivered nothing. And yeah, it's sad that it's dying now, but the fault lies with Eidos and Funcom for releasing a badly realised, dull, shallow and massively flawed "game" that needs a good year of bug fixing and another year of content before it'll even be close to interesting...