Part three of the
Developer Panel Q & A video showcases our wacky
devs telling us about even more Age of Conan goodness. In this
transcript of the video we
learn about class merges and balancing; Tortage and low level content;
the Collector's Edition; rough system specs; engine tweaking; combos;
art choice and character customization and clothing.

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The Age of Conan
Development Team


From left to right:
Didrik Tollefsen, Terje Lundberg, Evan Michaels, Gaute Godager,
Pål Hansen, Erling Ellingsen




Q: Can you
offer some
clarification as to the classes that have recently been merged?

style="">Evan Michaels: I’m
sure you’ve probably heard some of it, but I don’t
really view it as “removing”
classes, because we have more or less condensed them. What
we’ve found is that
one of the toolsets was a bit too narrow. You know, it was pigeonholing
people
and they weren’t finding that fun. And like I said earlier, a
lot of our
classes are very hybrid; our roles are very broad. We want people to
experience
variety in their game-play. So what we did is we took those two classes
and we
took basically all their cool abilities and all the stuff people
enjoyed and
wrapped them into something that’s more coherent.

The
Tempest of Set, which used to be the Stormcaller, and
Scion, has basically the abilities of both of them, and it’s
been re-themed,
basically around the whole Set priest-type thing. The response to that
internally has been very favorable and I think the external stuff that
people
know has also been really favorable so we’ve been really
happy.

We
were not very content with the two classes as they were and
when we combined them and started meshing out the new theme it really
meshed
well together and I think the resulting class is really, really fun.

style="">Gaute Godager: One
thing is that the class now called “Tempest of
Set,” formerly called “Scion of
Set,” formerly called “Stormcaller,”
formerly called “Druid of the Storm…” We
wanted to make sure we got a couple more name changes in before launch [ style="">laughs].

style="">Evan: That
explains the priest one.

class="MsoNormal">In regard to the lich; the lich we found
was a little too
similar to the Heralds. They had a very similar vision. That was kind
of our
fault initially for making two classes that were a bit too much the
same. The lich,
what people really enjoyed was the theme. You know, the undead, evil
overlord
type stuff. We thought that really fit well with the necromancer class
which we’ve
been trying to evolve over the last bit to set it apart from the
Demonologist.
So the necro does get an ability now, or an optional ability to
transform into
a lich into some of his other cooler abilities. It already went along
with this
whole undead, evil theme so they fit well together and I think the
resulting
class is more interesting and a more versatile class.

style="">Erling Ellingsen: Can
you tell us a bit about what has been preserved from the two classes?

style="">Evan: Almost
everything, actually; most of the abilities. The only thing that has
been
removed from the lich… The necromancer is still a caster
class, the lich was
more melee oriented. The necro is still a caster class but he has all
the kind
of spells and trigger abilities that the lich had.

The
Druid of the Scion of Tempest of Set of whatever [laughs].
The Tempest of Set basically
has both toolsets completely, only re-themed to the Set Priest theme.

style="">Gaute: The only
thing I want to add: the interesting thing is that people view class
reviewals
and class balance marketing material that we do as a contract. It makes
it very
hard for me to do my job properly, which is to make the game fun
because we basically
have to make a decision. “How much is this going to shake the
boat versus how
much worse is the boat going to float when it’s
launched?” I wish I could just
reveal the finished game and at day’s end and say:
“here you go. Have fun.” That’s
part of it. And, yes, we expect that there will be some upset people
from this.
For them, we are truly sorry, and we try to preserve what we can in
these
classes when we merge them up.

style="">Cody Bye (Ten Ton
Hammer): I think as long as you keep everything from the
other two classes,
I don’t think there should be too many people…

class="MsoNormal">Evan: We’re
not
heartless. All of us on the character development team are gamers. I
mean, I’m
an MMO player. I’ve been an MMO player for years, so I know
how it feels when
classes are changed. But in the end, we want to make a fun game, and
that’s our
end goal. So we’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the
classes in at launch
are as fun as we can make them.

Q:
Previously you
mentioned that you will allow us to skip levels 1-20. It’s
not in beta. Will
you allow this in release?

style="">Gaute: We will
have the opportunity to skip 1-5 most likely; not 1-20. What
we’ve done is we’ve
opened the world up and let you leave Tortage instead, as
I’ve told you earlier
today.

Q: So skip
1-5 and
leave Tortage after that?

style="">Gaute: Yeah, you
can leave Tortage, but there won’t be any low-level content
outside of the hub
in Tortage. You do not have to do the Destiny Quest over again. You
don’t have
to do the Destiny Quest, following the path during night. There is
low-level
non-quest content.

style="">Evan: I can also
add something really quick. The reason that we originally allowed the
skipping
of 1-20 was that long, long ago you didn’t pick your class,
you didn’t pick
your specialized class until you became level 20. So you were just a
mage, and
when you got to level 20 you picked “I’m going to
be a Demonologist,” but that’s
been changed. So we’re choosing our class earlier in the
game. That has allowed
us to introduce new class abilities starting at level 5 instead of
level 20.

style="">Gaute: Even at
level 1.

style="">Evan: Yeah, even
at level 1 you get a few startup things. Because we’re
introducing that right away
now, there’s really not the need to skip. The main reason we
wanted to allow
people to skip is to get into their class after they’ve
played it once.

Q: Tortage
is really
boring the third time.

style="">Gaute: That’s
very true, which is why we’re also arguing the things that we
are talking about
letting you leave the area. We are also going to make more starting
areas with
time, but not at launch.

style="">Erling: But the
stories in Tortage are very different, right?

style="">Gaute: What we
did when we made Tortage is that we said: “We have two
choices. We can do what
every MMO did, and what we did in AO, was sort of take a spread and
make
cookie-cutter content.” If you play most other MMOs, and if
you play in one
area and move to another area, it’s the same type of quests.
Maybe themed
differently, but content-wise it’s more or less the same. And
we said: “Let’s,
instead of that, try to use that effort into making one storage of an
area with
really high quality stuff.” And, you know, people who are
forced through
Tortage time and time again in beta are basically going to look a bit
singed
when they enter the game at launch, and kudos to you if you press
through and
do it over and over again, so thank you very much for that. But, of
course,
most players won’t have that type of repetitive experience.

Q: With the
Collector’s
Edition, will you be doing a 64 bit client version?

style="">Pål Hansen: It’s
a standard 32.

Q: Is the
game
optimized for quad core or is it just dual core?

style="">Pål: The more
cores you have, the better it will run.

Q: Is it
still viable
to use the measuring stick of “If the PC will run Oblivion,
it will run Age of
Conan?”

style="">Pål: Minimum
requirements. They’re 5800. The important thing is to have
Shade Modeler 2 and
at least 128 MB of RAM on it. The performance now, I understand your
concerns,
but it is in the plans that we do almost all of the optimization now in
the
remaining time.

style="">Erling: What you
got to see today was a taste of what’s to come on the new
rendering code.

style="">Pål: We have a
lot of stuff, a lot of optimizations coming out and it’s
probably coming out,
the first stages of this improved “Cheetah”,
it’s probably coming out next week
probably on the General Beta. We have a lot of stuff in there.
There’s also a
lot of new stuff coming. Right now, it’s been quite a big
change so it’s coming
out with new features, with debugging information and so on, so
it’s not like a
total new engine coming out of the box next week but it’s
improved. What we’re
looking at, it’s a bit combined, but it’s the
memory, how much memory you use
for textures. It is, of course, all the different shaders and the CPU
usage.
The GPU usage, and the CPU usage.

One
of the things that we have done lately is that we have
improved how we load all the textures. You used to load almost
everything. Now
we are doing that much more intelligently, so that you are supposed to
only use
the amount of memory that your graphics card can handle. It adjusts
dynamically.

We
are looking into the frame rate itself. That is going to
be improved. And we are looking into making the game load more of the
stuff
asynchronously, instead of synchronously, because that will make it
stall, and
you have stuttering and so on. So we are taking every stuttering piece
out of
the game one by one, and you are loading that in the background with a
different thread, as is where the multi-cores are coming in. Or even
without a
multi-core, a single core can handle it as well, but it’s
just better on a
multi-core. This will produce a much better gaming experience for you.

I
think the coolest feature, to use a popular phrase,
“we’re
raising the sausage,” is something called “deferred
shading.” That is something
that, regardless of what kind of hardware you have, we will aim that
you will
have a good frame rate, so it adjusts and we will get that in. We have
it up
and running now.

I’m
kind of pumped up these days because we have a lot of
cool stuff going on in the rendering team, but it will come out on the
beta
step by step.

Q: With
combos, will
you hit things around you, or only your active target?

style="">Evan: There was a
bug for some time about the combos where they weren’t
properly affecting the
cone, as a normal weapon. That’s changed. It will be on beta
soon. It’s
currently changed in-house. We’ve been using it for quite
some time actually.
So basically, unless the combo specifies that it only hits a single
target, you
will always hit what appears to be what you’re swinging at.
It will default to
what your weapon normally would hit. So if you’re using a
dagger, it’s quite a
narrow cone. If you’re using a pole-arm it’s quite
wide. But the combos will be
hitting multiple targets.

Q: What
about
cinematics like there used to be in Anarchy Online? Will they be all
the way
through the game?

style="">Gaute: I’m so
sorry to disappoint you, my friend. There was a reason why we stopped.
So the
answer to that would be “I don’t think
so.”

style="">Didrik Tollefsen: It
was killing the graphic artist.

[ style="">Laughs.]

style="">Gaute (to Didrik): You
worked on them right?

style="">Didrik: It was a
nightmare. We’ll see how many customers we get. Maybe we can
give them a go
again.

style="">Gaute: Not enough
monetary bang for the buck.

Q: What made
you
decide to go with the art direction that you did? Obviously you could
have done
it a bit differently, with big hulking characters, like in the comic
books.

style="">Didrik: I liked
the comic books as well. I like the comic look a lot. That’s
more my personal
style, but to be a part of Hyboria and to feel realism and grittiness,
we could
have made it even darker, even grittier. We went for a good compromise,
and
dynamics was really an important issue. You would not be wading around
in
darkness, you would actually get your moment of sunlight coming
through. As
much variation as possible.

And
the realism? To be a bit closer to the movie maybe. That
was one issue.

Q: Was the
movie a
big influence on the way things panned out?

style="">Didrik: There’s
another movie coming up, so that’s more important. We went
for a magic realism
here. That’s a good way to describe it.

style="">Erling: I think
if there’s anything we learned from the movies, it was
probably somewhat that.

style="">Gaute: It’s very
distinct in style – that post 70’s, kind of
“big boots with fur hanging down”
and weird braless women. It’s a trip when you look at it and
I think it’s a
good inspiration actually.

Q: What
about character
customization throughout the game, after you’ve created your
character already,
to make characters distinct from one another?

style="">Didrik: There’s a
heap of sliders, but you mean after the actual creation? This is a
question for
Gaute.

style="">Gaute: First of all,
I just need to repeat that I don’t think any other MMO has
such a wide variety
and detail in terms of facial and bodily expression that we do, coupled
with
the realistic look.

What
we do have support for is a lot of changes on your body
by itself. You could wear different sets of tattoos and different
things like
that. There’s no particular method today to retexture your
items and store that
on your character so that you take like a bleached thing and you put
some other
color on it. But definitely, that is something we are always interested
in and
have discussed many, many times.

What
we do have is a method to layer clothing so that you
can have up to four layers of clothing on the character. So even though
you
equip the same things; the combination can make it look differently.

So
that we do have. But the actually physical changing of
the special clothing like painting a guild symbol on your cloak or
something
like that, we do not have support for that at the moment. But
that’s something people
do request all the time, and are very interested in, so again,
something that
we are always considering inserting into the game, to let people
differentiate
what they do.

The
core of the game, although it’s an MMO, it’s much
more
like a meaty, violent game, so it’s always a struggle for
those features which
are social, to compete with social features that come in, compared to
the more
violent ones and how much effort we put into those. So that’s
why we’re saying “let’s
have a look and see what we want to do post-launch.”

style="">Erling: I heard
today that there are 1,500 armor/clothing sets in the game. So you have
a great
deal of customization just with what you can dress yourself with.

style="">Gaute: And that’s
sets, which means that there are four to six pieces of each of them. So
you can
multiply that up and then make your own combinations.




Are the classes going to
feel complete, or crammed? How often will you
be able to enjoy Tortage before it gets old? Will your system handle
the game? Let us know your thoughts on our href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=206686">Ten
Ton Forums



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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