Friday Updates - Page 3

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 01:50 PM

Gameplay Preview #9 - Siege PVP and Massive PVP

- Jul 28, 2006
This week take a look into the bloody conflicts that players will be able to engage in within the Border Kingdom PVP zones in Age of Conan

Destruction and betrayal brought about by the thirst for power is the nectar of Hyboria - the one constant in the world of King Conan. Death reaps a rich harvest in the battles for power between rival warlords, tribal chiefs and would be pretenders to the throne of Aquillonia.

As king, Conan has opened up the Border Kingdoms for conquest. The constant strife from other nations in the area has let him grant prerogatives to whoever holds the area! The border kingdom will once and forever be part of the great Aquillonian Empire! As befits the legend of the king himself only those with the strength of will and sheer ferocity for hard fought combat will emerge victorious in these most challenging of environments!

Bloody and hard fought, these battles will be just as integral to the life of guilds that enjoy PVP in Age of Conan. Entire guilds will lay their reputations and honor (or dishonor in some cases!) on the line to hold the coveted battlekeeps!

The Aim of the Game!

We aim to provide players with truly meaningful goals and ambitions in PVP. The joy of battle and glee of destruction will shape the blood soaked landscape of the border kingdoms. This conflict will provide those with ambitions for power the means by which they can forever carve their place in Hyborian history.

We have separated these border kingdoms from the rest of the gameworld for two reasons. Firstly we know that PVP isn’t for everyone, secondly we wanted to be able to craft an area for PVP without compromises to PVE. This system should provide a real sense of purpose to PVP combat (other then casting aside the broken limbs of your enemies of course!)

Battlekeeps versus player towns

One important clarification before we get into the details on the Battlekeep system is that the keeps are a separate system from the normal player built towns, although they use the same building system, so in learning one you will know the other (we will cover the PVE player towns in more detail in a future article), so player controlled land comes in two distinct types.

The resource building playfields that will house normal player towns will not be PVP areas, and will be fully instanced, meaning if your guild has the power and resources to maintain a town, it will always be able to do so. These are the areas where the RTS style NPC AI will build opposing camps and towns and threaten player towns. So whilst the normal player towns will still need defending and not be totally safe, they wont be prey to the most dangerous of opponents – other players! That is where the Battlekeeps come in!

We felt this was important so that players who wished to own towns and engage in battles with the NPC towns can do so without having to get involved in PVP if they don’t want to. However Battlekeeps will provide the worthy guilds with the skill and tenacity to survive the harsh world of PVP combat with another totally separate avenue for gathering even greater resource rewards!

Battlekeep Zones

These border Kingdoms are a dangerous and usually lethal environment. The rivers that coarse through their valleys, or the rolling grass plains that stretch between the mountains are more likely to be stained with the blood of fallen warriors, as they are anything else.

Each zone will be home to a number of pre-defined locations where a Keep may be built, but unlike the PVE player towns there will be a limited number of zones on each server, blood will have to be spilt to hold these most coveted of locations.

These zones will also be fully PVP enabled, you had best have your weapon at the ready if you dare to venture there as the Battlekeeps will not be the only reason to seek out bloody conflict in the border kingdoms. Each of the Border Kingdoms will be home to a series of other objectives as well, all offering the chance for the skilled to demonstrate their death dealing talents.

The Battlekeeps

Each keep will function as a hardened bastion for their owners. Hard won iron, stone and wood erected to stand as a mark of their standing in the Border Kingdoms, and a reminder to their enemies of the bloody conflict taken to earn and maintain it.

Like their PVE counterparts guilds will be able to populate the insides of their keep with a number of buildings and other amenities.

Players will be able to build structures like stables to provide cavalry, forges for constructing siege weapons, sentry towers that provide essential respawn points, as well as farms and other resource buildings. These will in turn provide other useful benefits, like perhaps a vendor that will sell items to those who visit the keeps, or some NPC guards.

The difference with a battlekeep is that guilds will have to remember that there will be others out to destroy their hard work, so the investment in the keep will not come without risk!

Laying Siege to a Keep

Battlekeeps will have periods when they are open to challenges. A period of time when another guild can declare their intent to try and take the keep! We realise its not fun or practical to force players to be on alert twenty four hours a day so this system ensures that you will be given the chance to prove your are worthy of holding the keep by smiting those who would have the audacity to challenge your right to own the keep!

Would be attackers can declare their intention to issue just such a challenge by building a war tent outside the keep in question. This is performed by those with the Lord prestige class and will require resources to complete. It is important that it isn’t something a single player can do on a whim!

The defenders then have a period to arrange their defence and the attackers to muster their forces! Then the bloody zeal of combat commences and you are thrust into an epic battle for control of the keep, stone and fire will rain down from above as walls are torn down and buildings razed to the ground around the frenzied combat between your troops as the attackers try and bring the keep to its proverbial knees!

As already mentioned though, the keeps are not the only reason to venture into the border kingdoms!

The Resource Areas

These areas that are also rich in resources scattered around the zone will provide collectable resources for those who control them. Mines for iron, lumber mills for wood, prospecting stations along the river where gold can be dredged up and quarries for stone.

At any given time one or more of these locations will be active for players who control them to collect resources from. Whoever controls the flag for the resource point will earn resources for as long as they manage to hold the flag.

Towers

Looking out across the battle scarred environs of the border kingdoms stand several large stone built towers. These are almost like mini-keeps, holding them will provide some bonuses to your guild, but nothing like those of a full keep. You also can’t build anything around a tower.

These locations do though provide something that smaller guilds can still take and hold even if they perhaps don’t have the manpower or resource to hold a Battlekeep! Like the keeps, these towers will have periods when they are open for attack. This means those precious bonuses they provide will have to be defended through force of arms!

In Closing...

Crushing the skulls of your foes is fun, but in the border kingdoms the blood spilled, and enemies cast aside will truly have a purpose. A purpose that we hope will provide PVP players with a dangerous and challenging environment. Striving for the rewards and honor that can only be won in bloody conflict upon these fields of death will be the most rewarding of ways to prove your worth against the most skilled of opponents – your fellow players!

These border kingdoms will also be the only place where players can train PVP feats and spend the earnings they have gained from the corpses of their fellow players through our PVP Blood money system…oh wait…we haven’t mentioned Blood money before now have we! That’s definitely a subject for another update though.

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 01:50 PM

Behind the Scenes #1 - What is a Game Designer?

- Aug 04, 2006
Ever wondered what exactly it means to be a game designer? This week join Lead Designer Ole Herbjørnsen as he explains a little more about what goes into designing a game like Age of Conan!

A game designer is actually a very generic term, especially so in MMO-terms owing to the fact that the teams are usually quite large. For any one person it is a difficult task to know everything about every single system and technology we are using. There are so many very different skill set involved that we actually have several very different types of game designer - our own form of classes if you will!

It's quite cool to get the opportunity to tell you a bit about their feats, pets, skills and special combos, so I hope you enjoy this little insight into what goes on here behind the scenes.

I thought it would be fun to start out with a theme of sorts, and explain the various types of designers that work together to bring a monster from concept to final implementation in the game.This is the realm of the npc designer, bcc designer and script designer...

NPC designer

The NPC designer is responsible for more or less everything alive in the game, from your friendly neighbourhood tailor to the gruesome cave-dwelling monstrosities. But they are all monsters in our eyes.

The most fundamental part of the NPC designer's job is to plan which monsters are going to be used in each playfield and the levels they're going to be.

This is information that other people like the quest designers depend on to get their jobs done, so it must be thoroughly and clearly documented. For this I use a combination of spreadsheets with various information and graphical maps with overlays depicting areas with information about specific monsters and levels as well as markings for camps, villages, bosses and such.

When the planning is done we use a special tool called the monstertool, which is written and maintained by our tool coders. Using this tool we can set and change many aspects of each specific monster, such as name, level, general looks (is it a human or a bull?), specific visual tweaks and combat settings. Every time any changes are done, we of course test them in the game itself to make sure it is working correctly.

The equipment and loot on each monster is also something that is handled in the monstertool, and here we work closely with our item designers. We have previewer tools that make it easier to see for example how a villager will look with different clothes, and even if it will have to be tested ingame in the end this makes it a lot faster to dress up our persons in a fashionable way.

BCC Designer

The guys working with the Behavioral Control Center don't really have a title in the design team, and are usually referred to as the BCC guys. Their job is to make sure the logics behind every character, animal, monster or animated item are correct. E.g. an animal can't hit someone when it's dead, or a character can't swim while he's climbing. The BCC designers are also responsible for "sewing" cool looking animations together, making the combat flow majestically.

The BCC designers work closely with the animators with directing what kind of animations they would like to see motion captured. They also work closely with the scripters, since scripters put NPCs in and out of different states, and need access to all the animations.

The designers working in the BCC tool are a part of the animations from beginning to end. Animations can either be motion captured or hand animated. All the character's and the human NPC's animations are motion captured, and there is usually a BCC guy preset giving directions. For all the hand animated animals and monsters, the BCC guy reads design documents from the NPC designers about the animal/monster, and then writes down which animations to capture and how they should look.

When the animations are done, it's time to add them into the game using the BCC tool. Here a skeleton, a mesh ("skin") and several animations are merged together into a monster. All NPCs have different states like 1H edge combat, swimming, sneaking and drunk. The BCC guy sets up which states the NPC needs access to and sets up the logics between them. After this is done, the NPC is ready to be spawned in game and can show off his new cool combos of death.

Script Designer

The scripters work is closely related to the work of the programmer. Perhaps more so than it is related to traditional design work. As games have grown ever more complex they have grown even more complicated to develop, it is no longer practical or desirable to program game logic directly into the code. This is where the scripter fits into the picture - part programmer, part designer - it is his job to implement game logic, such as character AI, quest mechanics, object interaction, cinematic cutscenes, etc. using a high level scripting language.

Often the script language is developed specifically for the game or the technology used. The scripter bases his work on the written designs developed by the character designer, quest designer, item designer and cinematic designer. Based on these designs it is the scripters job to get what exists only on paper into the game, functioning as a part of the overall game.

Often there can be many rounds (or iterations) of design and scripting of a game element before it is working within the game, both technically and creatively. Thus it is important that the scripter is both technically skilled as well as having a keen understating of gameplay mechanics.

Wrapping up...

So as you can see even just for creating NPCs there is a lot of very skilled people involved doing varied and challenging work, and thats just for the NPCs! There are still a whole other set of different designers I havent mentioned yet, like those responsible for creating items and creating quests, but that will have to wait for my next update!

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:00 PM

Concept art : Conan's world

- August 11th, 2006

This week we take a look at some of the great concept art from some of the locations found in Conan's world

You can find the new images here in the concept art gallery.

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:02 PM

Gameplay Preview #10 - Blood Money and PVP

- Aug 18, 2006
This week we take a look at the Player versus Player Blood Money system in Age of Conan. Blood Coins will be the currency of combat, find out how you will earn them!

The dark and dangerous lands of Hyboria that have seen Conan rise to the throne of Aquillonia make up a treacherous and deceitful world where even the most petty or trivial of disagreements will invariably be settled by the blade (not uncommonly from behind whilst the victim is unawares!) Something is always at stake when reputations are forged by force of steel or the ingenuity of will. In Age of Conan the player versus player combat will always have equally vicious consequences and a bloody purpose that will always ensure you have something worth fighting for.

When we came to think about PVP in Age of Conan we wanted to ensure that it reflected that dark and hostile environment. We want to make sure that there will always be something at stake when a player decides to make a name for themselves in the Border Kingdoms. Likewise though, PVP still has to be fun, and no one really likes losing their hard earned possessions, so we have a very special system of Blood Money that operates in the PVP areas.

Blood Coins are effectively the currency of combat in the Border Kingdoms, tokens taken from the dying corpses of your foes. These Blood Coins are a mark of victory amongst combatants that will serve as bragging rights, status symbols and also a very useful currency in itself.

When you travel to the dangerous and blood soaked Border Kingdoms your passage there must be paid for. When you first enter the Border Kingdoms the coin that would be used to pay for that passage is not taken away, but is converted into Blood Coin. Blood Coins is effectively a separate currency to your normal coin.

Defeating other players in PVP combat will result in you being able to loot some or all of the Blood Money that they earned from their previous fights. Everyone in the Border Kingdoms will have some Blood Money value.

In addition all PVP combat earns your character separate PVP exp that goes towards earning your twenty PVP levels and gaining access to special feats and abilities that are exclusive to PVP.

This means that everyone who enters the Border Kingdom has something to lose should they find themselves on the wrong end of an opponents assault. Blood Coin will also supply another way for players to know where they rank against their fellow players above and beyond a simple count of kills. The treasured Blood Coin torn from the body of a defeated renowned player killer will garner them more fame (or notoriety!) then just picking on easy targets.

Also your Blood Coins are even more then just a token of your stature with the bow, blade or mystical arts. Blood Coins will be used to purchase the PVP feats you earn access to from special vendors in the Border Kingdoms.

These special PVP abilities will only be purchasable with Blood Coin. You will have to fight to earn the Blood Coin to pay for these new skills that your combat with other players has earned you access to.

This means that only those who truly excel at dispatching other players to their bloody deaths will be able to gain an extra edge on players who gain their equipment only in the safer havens, away from the Border Kingdoms. Only by proving your worth against your fellow player will you be able to gain these PVP-centric feats.

Not all of your Blood Coins will be able to be traded away, stored, or otherwise hidden away from those that would see you as a trophy, or a fat payday if your skills in combat have earned you a reputation already!

We want to hopefully address the cowardly practise of hiding away your valuables when entering PVP as well, but also allow you to save something before being beheaded. Therefore some of your blood coin will always be available to your foes (we'll decide on the balance of this one as we proceed through beta).

The more battles you win and more scalps you collect, the greater the reward others will find in tracking you down and taking your blood money from your freshly slain corpse.

The vendors that accept Blood Coins will also offer various other black market goods, equipment and items that can only be purchased with Blood Coins.

The Bloody Conclusions on PVP

We feel that with this system the day-to-day PVP in the Border Kingdoms will also have a real and genuine purpose independent of the greater struggles that will come around the Keeps, Towers and resources. Reputations will be won and lost. Blood will be spilt and there will always be a reward for hunting down others, and of course the risk that comes with it. The more victories you secure and more foes you vanquish the more your Blood Coins will be eyed by envious souls intent on cutting your throat and your purse!

The Border Kingdoms will certainly not be for the faint of heart!

Also, as a final note for now on PVP we wanted to assure all the PVP fans out there that we will have at least some more 'free for all' style PVP servers once the game goes live. How many will depend on the popularity, but we have the systems being prepared that will let us allow PVP content outside of the Border Kingdoms as well.

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:03 PM

Behind the scenes #2

- Aug 25, 2006
This week we catch up again with Age of Conan lead designer Ole Herbjornsen as he explains a little more about how the design team works.

Hi again! Following up from my previous article I wanted to go into the other designer ‘classes’ that we have in Age of Conan. (Especially since I don’t want anyone feeling left out!) So today we look at the roles of the item, special effects, quest and system designers.

Item Designer

The role of an item designer is a bit multi-purpose, supplying both support for other professions and also being the main source of player-oriented equipment and rewards.

As many other professions rely on items, such as quest designers, NPC designers, and scripters, a lot of time is spent on providing them with the various resources they may require to finish a task they are working on.

The other side of the job is working to create the various boss loot, item rewards, and trade skill items in the game, in addition to working alongside the NPC designers to determine drop locations and drop rates of said items. This aspect of the job requires a large deal of planning, as ultimately players will become quite concerned with both the item design (stats, graphical appearance, and general effect) and drop location (how hard it is to get what they want, and if the risk/reward is worth it.)

Accomplishing the various roles of the job requires working knowledge of most of the internal tools used, including many of the various quest, scripting, NPC, data management, and item creation tools.

Overall, it is a job with many facets—often acting as a “middle man” in tying various elements together in the game—which requires a strong overview of the various aspects of game mechanics and design philosophy.

Special effects designer

The special effects designer makes all kinds of effects happen on the screen - it can be something as simple as a burning flame, it can be as complex as a vortex of unholy power drawing the player into it and closing afterwards. Spells, elements, weather, combat impacts, blood - all of this must be made by the special effects designer. Essentially - It's his job to make parts of the game become more alive.

The special effects designer work most of the time in an in-house tool known as the Particle Tool. The name is misleading, since the tool has far expanded beyond the boundaries of particles and is now using everything from planes and meshes to animations and scripts. Special Effect designers also work a fair bit in 3DstudioMax, Photoshop and our scripting tools in order to create textures, scripts and paths.

Since the special effects designer creates a lot of diverse elements for use in the game, he needs to talk to quite a number of different professions. Artists provide textures, meshes and animations, while designers help connect the special effects to monsters etc. Sometimes you need new code support to show off new types of special effects and other times you need a tools programmer to support the new code in the particle tool. Depending on who requested the special effect.

They also need to talk to that person to find out what it will be used for. Also since the Art Director has the final say on the visual appearance of special effects in the game, they also have to review their progress with the Art team as well.

Quest Designer

The quest designer’s role on the development team consists of many parts. The fist part is designing the quest concepts, both keeping in mind the technical limitations and being creative. It is important for quests to evolve and not get stuck in the same old trends, so it’s important to keep up with the latest games on the market and keep “thinking outside the box”.

The best tool we use for designing a quest is Word. There is no magic mystery tool automatically generating good concepts. Once the concepts are done, we have an approval and feedback process, and once everybody is happy, detailed design and implementation can begin.

Let me use an example. I want the player to talk an NPC, inside a house. Let’s add some mobs too. The quest has to be implemented and linked up in our in-house Quest Tool. Dialog has to be written and added to our in-house dialog tool, Knubot where requirements are set for where and when what dialog should appear. The NPC has to be created, and the dialog has to be connected to him. He also needs to have a special ‘brain’ if he’s supposed to act in a certain way.

The next step is for a world designer to create a house and place it out in the playfield along with the mobs and the NPC. If the mobs are supposed to drop loot, the gfx has to bee requested from the Graphic artists and the items have to be requested from the Item designers and later placed out by the NPC designer. When the quest is ready for testing, often with placeholders while we are waiting for assets, the polishing begins. This part is usually what takes the most of our time, meaning we have to test and trace bugs, both in code and data.

So to sum up, the quest designer's role is not so much sitting in a hammock putting word to paper, it’s mostly running around being a “coordinator”.

System Designer

The system designer as the name implies writes system designs and deals with the RPG mechanics - formulas used, etc. Also these guys work on how character development should proceed and general balance issues. A challenge here is to keep as much knowledge about the mechanics of the game in memory as possible.

The system designer uses Excel, internal content tools, Excel and top that off with some more Excel. On good days, spreadsheets are open on both monitors – duelling spreadsheets!

The system designer has a lot of interaction with the game coders dealing with RPG related areas. Lots of working with the item and monster designers, but not so much with the scripting or quest designers. They act as a general font of knowledge for any RPG questions others in the design team have.

If someone were to randomly take a look over their shoulder, they would typically find one or more of the aforementioned spreadsheets open!

I hope you found this overview interesting, and hopefully it gave you some more insight into how we tend to break down the workload for the game designers. Remember you can also drop by my blog. If you have any questions on game design and I’ll always try and answer if I can!

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:05 PM

New Concept Art

- September 1st, 2006

This week we take a look at some of the great new concept art. The two images featured in this weeks update are also going to be given away as exclusive signed Art Prints at the show at Dragon*con over the weekend, and you have a chance to win on the forums too! See here for details

You can find the two new images here in the concept art gallery.

Watch the Dragoncon thread over the weekend as well for some extra photos, updates and info from the convention!

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:09 PM

Lore Updates

- September 15th, 2006

This weeks updates take a look at the most important Gods of Hyboria. Crom, Mitra and Set. You can find the updates here.

I also wanted to take a minute out to just say a quick word on the various forum reaction to the rumours over the last week or so. We have always had a very specific plan for the release of information around Age of Conan and we are confident its the right way to do things and think its working well so far, and that the coverage of the game is exactly where we want it to be right now.

Community wise we have been releasing one piece of game information every month. For example, Blood Money in August, Border Kingdoms in July, Spellweaving in June and so forth. I am in the process of writing up this months feature (on the tradeskill system) at the moment and it will be next weeks update. I could tell you what next months will be as well, but waiting to find out is half the fun (ok, and I enjoy teasing )

So whilst the date within the month might vary a little, its still the same pace we have always wanted to release material at, and is carefully planned. So its not really changed in any way, it hasnt slowed down or speeded up and is on track.

We will never go down the road of over-promising on details and features that later dont make it, get cut, or just dont work or arent fun when we beta test! We have said that from the very start and still believe it is the right way to do things

The games FAQ and features sections will always evolve in the background as well. We have people preparing that pretty much on an ongoing basis and it will get updated periodically outside of the Friday updates, as those pages are really for newcomers rather then you guys visiting every day or week. We do read the feedback though and take it into consideration when looking at the those kind of features

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:09 PM

Gameplay Preview #11 - Crafting in Age of Conan

- Sep 22, 2006
This week we take a look into the crafting system in Age of Conan.

Whilst the bare hands and ingenuity of a warrior can take them far, even in the brutal realm of King Conan, they are though even better served with some well forged steel or finely made iron sheathed by their side.

Weapons and armor are the tools by which those whose adventures find them in the dangerous lands of Hyboria live or die by. Likewise there is always a need for potions and other medicinal aids, as even the hardiest of warriors can find themselves in need of recovery.

This is where the Crafter prestige class comes in. Crafters in Age of Conan are those making essential items and equipment needed for them and their guilds to succeed in extended battles and harsh conditions.

Supplying everything from siege engines to weapons, the crafter will be the person keeping their friends and customers supplied with the goods that will see them through the dangers that threaten them at every turn.

With crafting in Age of Conan we wanted to create a system that would not be weighed down by the need for constant repetition. We also wanted to ensure crafting is able to yield useful items and abilities so that those who choose to follow crafting as their prestige profession feel that they can really contribute to their guild and other customers.

There will be five different schools of crafting that crafters will be able to progress through. Crafters will have access to all of the different crafting schools. Other prestige classes may have access to one or more of the schools (although they may be restricted in the tiers that can be attained)

Weaponsmithing
As the name implies, a weaponsmith specializes in making various forms of weaponry for arming those he plans to support in battle. Using techniques passed down for generations, a smith trained in these arts can produce some of the most deadly weapons in Hyboria. In addition to creating arms, this smith may also supply various other forms of weapon enhancement materials, such as whetstones and polishes.

Armorsmithing
Similar to the weaponsmith, the armorsmith focuses on crafting various pieces of protective gear in addition to ways to enhance said equipment. Having many avenues available to them in terms of advancement, the armorsmith may choose to provide a very wide variety of armor styles, ranging from leather to full plate.

Gemcutting
Taking advantage of the skills of the armor and weapon smiths, the gemcutter specializes in honing and crafting gems to decorate and enhance equipment.

While some gems only have minor effects, others found in crypts or carried by those practicing darker arts may carry strange powers that can be harnessed by the gemcutter's craft.

As the gemcutter is familiar with working with a fresh set of armor or weaponry, they can also provide some more straightforward modifications such as counterweights or other reinforcement.

Alchemy
Trained in various pharmaceutical and metallurgical arts, the Alchemist specializes in creating various compounds with strange and seemingly unnatural effects.

Utilizing both common and rare ingredients found around Hyboria, those trained in this art may provide many useful consumables to their allies for use both in and out of battle.

Architect
Concerned more with the "big picture" than simply making equipment or potions, the architect is set on designing the more impressive buildings and siege engines used to wage war in the Border Kingdoms and beyond. Carrying a great burden of responsibility to those he allies himself with, architects facilitate the design of cities as well as devices designed to protect his allies' assets or destroy his enemy's.

Progression

There will be some rudimentary crafting processes that you will encounter in the early stages of the game, but we didn't want to focus on the early levels when it comes to the crafting elements. This is because we want to introduce it to people when it can make a difference and when they feel they can produce items, weapons and armor that will be truly useful to them and their friends.

We didn't want to go down the route of forcing people to 'grind' items countless times in order to progress in crafting and at the same time make the process more involved and in keeping with the ancient traditions of learning your trade from a learned master as was the way in ancient Hyboria!

At level 40 players will be able to begin to embark on the crafting quests that will see them progress through the tiers of crafted goods. You will seek out one already well versed in the craft you wish to study and perform a series of quests for them to prove yourself worthy to receive the knowledge they are capable of teaching.

There will be six tiers available for crafters to work through in each of the different crafting categories. Each tier is broken down into various categories, for example in weaponsmithing you will find categories like edged, blunt and ranged weapons.

These categories are then broken down further into specific types of weapon, like for example the edged category might include the knowledge of making daggers, short swords, long swords and bastard swords.

When you find the Master Crafters and seek to learn their knowledge they will ask you which of the categories you first wish to study. Then you will be asked to make an example of each of the separate types of item in that category until you have completed all the quests in that category.

Once each quest has been completed you will have access to that process and can make that item as often as you require (providing you have the components of course!) all the trainer asks in return is that the example piece you produce as part of the quest is returned to him as both payment, and an example of a job well done!

Once all the categories in your current tier have been learnt then you will be able to advance to the next tier of learning.

Crafters will also have the ability to use better or rare components to make a better version of an item from the same recipe. So for example if you already have the knowledge to make a 'Bronze short sword' using a rare or higher quality component might yield you a 'Refined Bronze Short Sword'

These more valuable components will have to be gathered from the wilds of the lands and by those who take the time improve their ability to gather resources through quests.

Making items that matter

Crafters in Age of Conan will be a vital part of the world, and the swords they forge and the armor they craft will see battle and blood and serve their owners in times of peril.

We really want the crafting in Age of Conan to feel useful to players. The items that are created through this system, especially when improved by gemcutters, will be a viable option compared to those items commonly found through your general adventures.

Likewise the toughest of encounters and most dangerous of dungeons might also yield components that will allow you to craft items that might even exceed those made by the great artisans of ancient Hyboria!

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:16 PM

New Character Concept Art

- September 29th, 2006

Four new pieces of character concept art for you today. You will find them in the concept art gallery here.

Enjoy

Quazimodo · 10-29-2006, 02:17 PM

Behind the Scenes #3 - Beta progress

- Oct 06, 2006
This week we catch up Lead Designer Ole Herbjørnsen on how things are going with the games development.

With the internal beta stages of development now in full swing we tracked Ole down to find out a little bit more about what is going on behind the scenes.

"Hi there again! The question most asked at the moment is obviously how we are getting along with the beta! The first answer that springs to mind is that it's very busy but going very well! The team are now working in what we call 'strike teams' on the various areas of the game, roughly divided up across the games level ranges.

Each team has designers, world builders and QA members working hard to ensure the area of the game world they are responsible for is coming together. The quests are being tested and mobs placed out in the playfields, balance being considered and progression being mapped out.

Having 'teams within the team' as it were allows us to focus on specific areas in much more detail. It also ensures that each area gets that special 'hand crafted' feel that individual attention gives it. Each of the teams is deeply invested in making their area of the gameworld as good as it possibly can be!

The coders meanwhile are hard at work on the technology aspects, like the DX10 integration for Windows Vista, and optimising the graphical settings as well as working through the bugs and issues that our QA testing shows up.

Having people playing the game now is a great thing for our progress. When you are testing the areas you have been working on yourself, it's often easy to miss something because you inherently know every little detail of what you wanted it to be. When someone else gets their hands on it however there is invariably something that wasn't as obvious as you thought it was, or something you had forgotten!

Overall though it's going very well, and the game world starts to look more like a living and thriving environment every time I load up a new version of the client. Still lots of work to be done of course but the lands of King Conan are really starting to take shape.

Another aspect of these first beta stages I wanted to touch on was about what we show from the game right now. Hopefully you will all have seen some of the coverage from the recent press events like GC in Leipzig, Dragoncon in Atlanta and the recent X06 showcase in Barcelona but we know that people are always anxious to see more!

Graphical elements though are part of the game that actually tend to come into the project all the way through as they take time to produce. This means that most of the playfields and areas still have some 'placeholder' elements that tend to get in the way of good screenshots

It can also be very tricky at this stage of the process though to produce the top quality images that we want as we work on balancing the game engines performance and settings. When changes are being committed to the system every day as happens during these beta stages there is usually something 'not quite right' that you want to tweak.

Beta is about starting to polish the technology and features and that means that on any given day there is usually something playing up! It might be some textures, models with incorrect textures or lighting or environmental effects that aren't quite showing up in the game-engine as they should. They get resolved pretty quick, but then it's something else the next day!

So whilst the temptation might be to just take some screenshots anyway and trust that people will accept that its work in progress, we know from experience that every little last detail is scrutinised and criticised as appropriate! That's why we show things like concept art and renders more often then we do screens and video just now.

Trust me, we can't wait to show you the game in all its glory! I was wandering around the streets of Tarantia today showing our CEO how the zone is shaping up and it really is something that has to be seen for sheer scale and splendour. Looking up at the sprawling towers of King Conan's palace from the river docks really is a sight that I think will stick in the mind, and that's just one of the playfields!

It would be a massive shame if the fact that the lighting wasn't quite right or the sky was the wrong tint spoiled people's impression of what is an amazing sight. That's the kind of thing we want to avoid when it comes to showing off what we are doing with the game's visuals.

We are crafting a world we are really proud of and look forward to letting you see it for yourselves! We know that many of you are following the game closely and have seen every image but we have to keep the quality up so that the impression we give first time visitors is the best possible as well. Don't worry though, over the coming months though you will definitely start to see more in-game visuals and video, we are just making sure that the visuals are ready to show the game in all its glory before we release them."

10-29-2006, 01:50 PM	#21
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Gameplay Preview #9 - Siege PVP and Massive PVP - Jul 28, 2006 This week take a look into the bloody conflicts that players will be able to engage in within the Border Kingdom PVP zones in Age of Conan Destruction and betrayal brought about by the thirst for power is the nectar of Hyboria - the one constant in the world of King Conan. Death reaps a rich harvest in the battles for power between rival warlords, tribal chiefs and would be pretenders to the throne of Aquillonia. As king, Conan has opened up the Border Kingdoms for conquest. The constant strife from other nations in the area has let him grant prerogatives to whoever holds the area! The border kingdom will once and forever be part of the great Aquillonian Empire! As befits the legend of the king himself only those with the strength of will and sheer ferocity for hard fought combat will emerge victorious in these most challenging of environments! Bloody and hard fought, these battles will be just as integral to the life of guilds that enjoy PVP in Age of Conan. Entire guilds will lay their reputations and honor (or dishonor in some cases!) on the line to hold the coveted battlekeeps! The Aim of the Game! We aim to provide players with truly meaningful goals and ambitions in PVP. The joy of battle and glee of destruction will shape the blood soaked landscape of the border kingdoms. This conflict will provide those with ambitions for power the means by which they can forever carve their place in Hyborian history. We have separated these border kingdoms from the rest of the gameworld for two reasons. Firstly we know that PVP isn’t for everyone, secondly we wanted to be able to craft an area for PVP without compromises to PVE. This system should provide a real sense of purpose to PVP combat (other then casting aside the broken limbs of your enemies of course!) Battlekeeps versus player towns One important clarification before we get into the details on the Battlekeep system is that the keeps are a separate system from the normal player built towns, although they use the same building system, so in learning one you will know the other (we will cover the PVE player towns in more detail in a future article), so player controlled land comes in two distinct types. The resource building playfields that will house normal player towns will not be PVP areas, and will be fully instanced, meaning if your guild has the power and resources to maintain a town, it will always be able to do so. These are the areas where the RTS style NPC AI will build opposing camps and towns and threaten player towns. So whilst the normal player towns will still need defending and not be totally safe, they wont be prey to the most dangerous of opponents – other players! That is where the Battlekeeps come in! We felt this was important so that players who wished to own towns and engage in battles with the NPC towns can do so without having to get involved in PVP if they don’t want to. However Battlekeeps will provide the worthy guilds with the skill and tenacity to survive the harsh world of PVP combat with another totally separate avenue for gathering even greater resource rewards! Battlekeep Zones These border Kingdoms are a dangerous and usually lethal environment. The rivers that coarse through their valleys, or the rolling grass plains that stretch between the mountains are more likely to be stained with the blood of fallen warriors, as they are anything else. Each zone will be home to a number of pre-defined locations where a Keep may be built, but unlike the PVE player towns there will be a limited number of zones on each server, blood will have to be spilt to hold these most coveted of locations. These zones will also be fully PVP enabled, you had best have your weapon at the ready if you dare to venture there as the Battlekeeps will not be the only reason to seek out bloody conflict in the border kingdoms. Each of the Border Kingdoms will be home to a series of other objectives as well, all offering the chance for the skilled to demonstrate their death dealing talents. The Battlekeeps Each keep will function as a hardened bastion for their owners. Hard won iron, stone and wood erected to stand as a mark of their standing in the Border Kingdoms, and a reminder to their enemies of the bloody conflict taken to earn and maintain it. Like their PVE counterparts guilds will be able to populate the insides of their keep with a number of buildings and other amenities. Players will be able to build structures like stables to provide cavalry, forges for constructing siege weapons, sentry towers that provide essential respawn points, as well as farms and other resource buildings. These will in turn provide other useful benefits, like perhaps a vendor that will sell items to those who visit the keeps, or some NPC guards. The difference with a battlekeep is that guilds will have to remember that there will be others out to destroy their hard work, so the investment in the keep will not come without risk! Laying Siege to a Keep Battlekeeps will have periods when they are open to challenges. A period of time when another guild can declare their intent to try and take the keep! We realise its not fun or practical to force players to be on alert twenty four hours a day so this system ensures that you will be given the chance to prove your are worthy of holding the keep by smiting those who would have the audacity to challenge your right to own the keep! Would be attackers can declare their intention to issue just such a challenge by building a war tent outside the keep in question. This is performed by those with the Lord prestige class and will require resources to complete. It is important that it isn’t something a single player can do on a whim! The defenders then have a period to arrange their defence and the attackers to muster their forces! Then the bloody zeal of combat commences and you are thrust into an epic battle for control of the keep, stone and fire will rain down from above as walls are torn down and buildings razed to the ground around the frenzied combat between your troops as the attackers try and bring the keep to its proverbial knees! As already mentioned though, the keeps are not the only reason to venture into the border kingdoms! The Resource Areas These areas that are also rich in resources scattered around the zone will provide collectable resources for those who control them. Mines for iron, lumber mills for wood, prospecting stations along the river where gold can be dredged up and quarries for stone. At any given time one or more of these locations will be active for players who control them to collect resources from. Whoever controls the flag for the resource point will earn resources for as long as they manage to hold the flag. Towers Looking out across the battle scarred environs of the border kingdoms stand several large stone built towers. These are almost like mini-keeps, holding them will provide some bonuses to your guild, but nothing like those of a full keep. You also can’t build anything around a tower. These locations do though provide something that smaller guilds can still take and hold even if they perhaps don’t have the manpower or resource to hold a Battlekeep! Like the keeps, these towers will have periods when they are open for attack. This means those precious bonuses they provide will have to be defended through force of arms! In Closing... Crushing the skulls of your foes is fun, but in the border kingdoms the blood spilled, and enemies cast aside will truly have a purpose. A purpose that we hope will provide PVP players with a dangerous and challenging environment. Striving for the rewards and honor that can only be won in bloody conflict upon these fields of death will be the most rewarding of ways to prove your worth against the most skilled of opponents – your fellow players! These border kingdoms will also be the only place where players can train PVP feats and spend the earnings they have gained from the corpses of their fellow players through our PVP Blood money system…oh wait…we haven’t mentioned Blood money before now have we! That’s definitely a subject for another update though.

10-29-2006, 02:00 PM	#23
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Concept art : Conan's world - August 11th, 2006 This week we take a look at some of the great concept art from some of the locations found in Conan's world You can find the new images here in the concept art gallery.

10-29-2006, 02:02 PM	#24
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Gameplay Preview #10 - Blood Money and PVP - Aug 18, 2006 This week we take a look at the Player versus Player Blood Money system in Age of Conan. Blood Coins will be the currency of combat, find out how you will earn them! The dark and dangerous lands of Hyboria that have seen Conan rise to the throne of Aquillonia make up a treacherous and deceitful world where even the most petty or trivial of disagreements will invariably be settled by the blade (not uncommonly from behind whilst the victim is unawares!) Something is always at stake when reputations are forged by force of steel or the ingenuity of will. In Age of Conan the player versus player combat will always have equally vicious consequences and a bloody purpose that will always ensure you have something worth fighting for. When we came to think about PVP in Age of Conan we wanted to ensure that it reflected that dark and hostile environment. We want to make sure that there will always be something at stake when a player decides to make a name for themselves in the Border Kingdoms. Likewise though, PVP still has to be fun, and no one really likes losing their hard earned possessions, so we have a very special system of Blood Money that operates in the PVP areas. Blood Coins are effectively the currency of combat in the Border Kingdoms, tokens taken from the dying corpses of your foes. These Blood Coins are a mark of victory amongst combatants that will serve as bragging rights, status symbols and also a very useful currency in itself. When you travel to the dangerous and blood soaked Border Kingdoms your passage there must be paid for. When you first enter the Border Kingdoms the coin that would be used to pay for that passage is not taken away, but is converted into Blood Coin. Blood Coins is effectively a separate currency to your normal coin. Defeating other players in PVP combat will result in you being able to loot some or all of the Blood Money that they earned from their previous fights. Everyone in the Border Kingdoms will have some Blood Money value. In addition all PVP combat earns your character separate PVP exp that goes towards earning your twenty PVP levels and gaining access to special feats and abilities that are exclusive to PVP. This means that everyone who enters the Border Kingdom has something to lose should they find themselves on the wrong end of an opponents assault. Blood Coin will also supply another way for players to know where they rank against their fellow players above and beyond a simple count of kills. The treasured Blood Coin torn from the body of a defeated renowned player killer will garner them more fame (or notoriety!) then just picking on easy targets. Also your Blood Coins are even more then just a token of your stature with the bow, blade or mystical arts. Blood Coins will be used to purchase the PVP feats you earn access to from special vendors in the Border Kingdoms. These special PVP abilities will only be purchasable with Blood Coin. You will have to fight to earn the Blood Coin to pay for these new skills that your combat with other players has earned you access to. This means that only those who truly excel at dispatching other players to their bloody deaths will be able to gain an extra edge on players who gain their equipment only in the safer havens, away from the Border Kingdoms. Only by proving your worth against your fellow player will you be able to gain these PVP-centric feats. Not all of your Blood Coins will be able to be traded away, stored, or otherwise hidden away from those that would see you as a trophy, or a fat payday if your skills in combat have earned you a reputation already! We want to hopefully address the cowardly practise of hiding away your valuables when entering PVP as well, but also allow you to save something before being beheaded. Therefore some of your blood coin will always be available to your foes (we'll decide on the balance of this one as we proceed through beta). The more battles you win and more scalps you collect, the greater the reward others will find in tracking you down and taking your blood money from your freshly slain corpse. The vendors that accept Blood Coins will also offer various other black market goods, equipment and items that can only be purchased with Blood Coins. The Bloody Conclusions on PVP We feel that with this system the day-to-day PVP in the Border Kingdoms will also have a real and genuine purpose independent of the greater struggles that will come around the Keeps, Towers and resources. Reputations will be won and lost. Blood will be spilt and there will always be a reward for hunting down others, and of course the risk that comes with it. The more victories you secure and more foes you vanquish the more your Blood Coins will be eyed by envious souls intent on cutting your throat and your purse! The Border Kingdoms will certainly not be for the faint of heart! Also, as a final note for now on PVP we wanted to assure all the PVP fans out there that we will have at least some more 'free for all' style PVP servers once the game goes live. How many will depend on the popularity, but we have the systems being prepared that will let us allow PVP content outside of the Border Kingdoms as well.

10-29-2006, 02:03 PM	#25
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Behind the scenes #2 - Aug 25, 2006 This week we catch up again with Age of Conan lead designer Ole Herbjornsen as he explains a little more about how the design team works. Hi again! Following up from my previous article I wanted to go into the other designer ‘classes’ that we have in Age of Conan. (Especially since I don’t want anyone feeling left out!) So today we look at the roles of the item, special effects, quest and system designers. Item Designer The role of an item designer is a bit multi-purpose, supplying both support for other professions and also being the main source of player-oriented equipment and rewards. As many other professions rely on items, such as quest designers, NPC designers, and scripters, a lot of time is spent on providing them with the various resources they may require to finish a task they are working on. The other side of the job is working to create the various boss loot, item rewards, and trade skill items in the game, in addition to working alongside the NPC designers to determine drop locations and drop rates of said items. This aspect of the job requires a large deal of planning, as ultimately players will become quite concerned with both the item design (stats, graphical appearance, and general effect) and drop location (how hard it is to get what they want, and if the risk/reward is worth it.) Accomplishing the various roles of the job requires working knowledge of most of the internal tools used, including many of the various quest, scripting, NPC, data management, and item creation tools. Overall, it is a job with many facets—often acting as a “middle man” in tying various elements together in the game—which requires a strong overview of the various aspects of game mechanics and design philosophy. Special effects designer The special effects designer makes all kinds of effects happen on the screen - it can be something as simple as a burning flame, it can be as complex as a vortex of unholy power drawing the player into it and closing afterwards. Spells, elements, weather, combat impacts, blood - all of this must be made by the special effects designer. Essentially - It's his job to make parts of the game become more alive. The special effects designer work most of the time in an in-house tool known as the Particle Tool. The name is misleading, since the tool has far expanded beyond the boundaries of particles and is now using everything from planes and meshes to animations and scripts. Special Effect designers also work a fair bit in 3DstudioMax, Photoshop and our scripting tools in order to create textures, scripts and paths. Since the special effects designer creates a lot of diverse elements for use in the game, he needs to talk to quite a number of different professions. Artists provide textures, meshes and animations, while designers help connect the special effects to monsters etc. Sometimes you need new code support to show off new types of special effects and other times you need a tools programmer to support the new code in the particle tool. Depending on who requested the special effect. They also need to talk to that person to find out what it will be used for. Also since the Art Director has the final say on the visual appearance of special effects in the game, they also have to review their progress with the Art team as well. Quest Designer The quest designer’s role on the development team consists of many parts. The fist part is designing the quest concepts, both keeping in mind the technical limitations and being creative. It is important for quests to evolve and not get stuck in the same old trends, so it’s important to keep up with the latest games on the market and keep “thinking outside the box”. The best tool we use for designing a quest is Word. There is no magic mystery tool automatically generating good concepts. Once the concepts are done, we have an approval and feedback process, and once everybody is happy, detailed design and implementation can begin. Let me use an example. I want the player to talk an NPC, inside a house. Let’s add some mobs too. The quest has to be implemented and linked up in our in-house Quest Tool. Dialog has to be written and added to our in-house dialog tool, Knubot where requirements are set for where and when what dialog should appear. The NPC has to be created, and the dialog has to be connected to him. He also needs to have a special ‘brain’ if he’s supposed to act in a certain way. The next step is for a world designer to create a house and place it out in the playfield along with the mobs and the NPC. If the mobs are supposed to drop loot, the gfx has to bee requested from the Graphic artists and the items have to be requested from the Item designers and later placed out by the NPC designer. When the quest is ready for testing, often with placeholders while we are waiting for assets, the polishing begins. This part is usually what takes the most of our time, meaning we have to test and trace bugs, both in code and data. So to sum up, the quest designer's role is not so much sitting in a hammock putting word to paper, it’s mostly running around being a “coordinator”. System Designer The system designer as the name implies writes system designs and deals with the RPG mechanics - formulas used, etc. Also these guys work on how character development should proceed and general balance issues. A challenge here is to keep as much knowledge about the mechanics of the game in memory as possible. The system designer uses Excel, internal content tools, Excel and top that off with some more Excel. On good days, spreadsheets are open on both monitors – duelling spreadsheets! The system designer has a lot of interaction with the game coders dealing with RPG related areas. Lots of working with the item and monster designers, but not so much with the scripting or quest designers. They act as a general font of knowledge for any RPG questions others in the design team have. If someone were to randomly take a look over their shoulder, they would typically find one or more of the aforementioned spreadsheets open! I hope you found this overview interesting, and hopefully it gave you some more insight into how we tend to break down the workload for the game designers. Remember you can also drop by my blog. If you have any questions on game design and I’ll always try and answer if I can!

10-29-2006, 02:05 PM	#26
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	New Concept Art - September 1st, 2006 This week we take a look at some of the great new concept art. The two images featured in this weeks update are also going to be given away as exclusive signed Art Prints at the show at Dragon*con over the weekend, and you have a chance to win on the forums too! See here for details You can find the two new images here in the concept art gallery. Watch the Dragoncon thread over the weekend as well for some extra photos, updates and info from the convention!

10-29-2006, 02:09 PM	#27
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Lore Updates - September 15th, 2006 This weeks updates take a look at the most important Gods of Hyboria. Crom, Mitra and Set. You can find the updates here. I also wanted to take a minute out to just say a quick word on the various forum reaction to the rumours over the last week or so. We have always had a very specific plan for the release of information around Age of Conan and we are confident its the right way to do things and think its working well so far, and that the coverage of the game is exactly where we want it to be right now. Community wise we have been releasing one piece of game information every month. For example, Blood Money in August, Border Kingdoms in July, Spellweaving in June and so forth. I am in the process of writing up this months feature (on the tradeskill system) at the moment and it will be next weeks update. I could tell you what next months will be as well, but waiting to find out is half the fun (ok, and I enjoy teasing ) So whilst the date within the month might vary a little, its still the same pace we have always wanted to release material at, and is carefully planned. So its not really changed in any way, it hasnt slowed down or speeded up and is on track. We will never go down the road of over-promising on details and features that later dont make it, get cut, or just dont work or arent fun when we beta test! We have said that from the very start and still believe it is the right way to do things The games FAQ and features sections will always evolve in the background as well. We have people preparing that pretty much on an ongoing basis and it will get updated periodically outside of the Friday updates, as those pages are really for newcomers rather then you guys visiting every day or week. We do read the feedback though and take it into consideration when looking at the those kind of features

10-29-2006, 02:16 PM	#29
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	New Character Concept Art - September 29th, 2006 Four new pieces of character concept art for you today. You will find them in the concept art gallery here. Enjoy

10-29-2006, 02:17 PM	#30
Quazimodo Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 679	Behind the Scenes #3 - Beta progress - Oct 06, 2006 This week we catch up Lead Designer Ole Herbjørnsen on how things are going with the games development. With the internal beta stages of development now in full swing we tracked Ole down to find out a little bit more about what is going on behind the scenes. "Hi there again! The question most asked at the moment is obviously how we are getting along with the beta! The first answer that springs to mind is that it's very busy but going very well! The team are now working in what we call 'strike teams' on the various areas of the game, roughly divided up across the games level ranges. Each team has designers, world builders and QA members working hard to ensure the area of the game world they are responsible for is coming together. The quests are being tested and mobs placed out in the playfields, balance being considered and progression being mapped out. Having 'teams within the team' as it were allows us to focus on specific areas in much more detail. It also ensures that each area gets that special 'hand crafted' feel that individual attention gives it. Each of the teams is deeply invested in making their area of the gameworld as good as it possibly can be! The coders meanwhile are hard at work on the technology aspects, like the DX10 integration for Windows Vista, and optimising the graphical settings as well as working through the bugs and issues that our QA testing shows up. Having people playing the game now is a great thing for our progress. When you are testing the areas you have been working on yourself, it's often easy to miss something because you inherently know every little detail of what you wanted it to be. When someone else gets their hands on it however there is invariably something that wasn't as obvious as you thought it was, or something you had forgotten! Overall though it's going very well, and the game world starts to look more like a living and thriving environment every time I load up a new version of the client. Still lots of work to be done of course but the lands of King Conan are really starting to take shape. Another aspect of these first beta stages I wanted to touch on was about what we show from the game right now. Hopefully you will all have seen some of the coverage from the recent press events like GC in Leipzig, Dragoncon in Atlanta and the recent X06 showcase in Barcelona but we know that people are always anxious to see more! Graphical elements though are part of the game that actually tend to come into the project all the way through as they take time to produce. This means that most of the playfields and areas still have some 'placeholder' elements that tend to get in the way of good screenshots It can also be very tricky at this stage of the process though to produce the top quality images that we want as we work on balancing the game engines performance and settings. When changes are being committed to the system every day as happens during these beta stages there is usually something 'not quite right' that you want to tweak. Beta is about starting to polish the technology and features and that means that on any given day there is usually something playing up! It might be some textures, models with incorrect textures or lighting or environmental effects that aren't quite showing up in the game-engine as they should. They get resolved pretty quick, but then it's something else the next day! So whilst the temptation might be to just take some screenshots anyway and trust that people will accept that its work in progress, we know from experience that every little last detail is scrutinised and criticised as appropriate! That's why we show things like concept art and renders more often then we do screens and video just now. Trust me, we can't wait to show you the game in all its glory! I was wandering around the streets of Tarantia today showing our CEO how the zone is shaping up and it really is something that has to be seen for sheer scale and splendour. Looking up at the sprawling towers of King Conan's palace from the river docks really is a sight that I think will stick in the mind, and that's just one of the playfields! It would be a massive shame if the fact that the lighting wasn't quite right or the sky was the wrong tint spoiled people's impression of what is an amazing sight. That's the kind of thing we want to avoid when it comes to showing off what we are doing with the game's visuals. We are crafting a world we are really proud of and look forward to letting you see it for yourselves! We know that many of you are following the game closely and have seen every image but we have to keep the quality up so that the impression we give first time visitors is the best possible as well. Don't worry though, over the coming months though you will definitely start to see more in-game visuals and video, we are just making sure that the visuals are ready to show the game in all its glory before we release them."