Q : We haven't heard of spellweaving for a while, what can you tell us about it ?
(2) : it's still in our plans, we revamped it to make it more simple, it still would be a big part of the magic system, we have a fist test case running already but it has still not reached beta. The way it will work is more like you have a special sequence and when that sequence is like fulfilled, you get a big option of doing something really nasty. With of course another effect may add on your character and it's a big risk.
Q : the Soul Corruption?
(2) : Yes the Soul Corruption thing, but ... kind of different
(3) : There will be many various negative effects, as we talked in some of the dev diaries before, one of the examples was potentially killing yourself and that is definetely on the table for the most dramatic spellweaves, the big ones with very large effects, they will possibly kill the caster if they're not careful
Q : Sending yourself to hell, was it still (...) ?
(4) : Actually that's one of the things where I saw people not responding to favorably, when they ... got put to hell during a raid.(...) It's a cool idea and people go like "yeah that rocks!" and then down the line is like "yeah that sucks!". So basically I don't except that. That will be more practical, more (attentive?) but still extremely deadly, for the caster and for the recipient
Q : Female character choice has been disabled for quite a while now, do you except to have it for launch ?
(4) : There is a couple reasons why we didn't do that, it took a lot of time to clean up all the animations as we have like 3.000 animations per character, and to do that properly, but also it was to just making sure that it was good enough before we launch it because people have special expectations for the female and it's going into what we call the mid-january Milestone which is today or actually on Monday and then it should take a week to get to the beta, it is testable right now if you're a GM (blague) Gameplay does not really matter, they play exactly like the male, people have a special need for the female to be hot in common game, it's a delicate balance and we've worked around the clock to make it and to have the rating(?) boards approve it. It's a really a big issue for us beacause we need to hit the mature, not like on the counter (...) (+ autres raisons pour lesquelles ça a pris du temps)
Q (french easier to understand !) : Just to react on the same question I hope we will still be able to create women characters that will not be good looking ?
(4) : To some internal people amazment , yes. So you can make someone that you really do not want to date (...) but there's a special club downtown for people like you (rires)
Q : How much effort did you tried to make just think about female gamers in Age of Conan, because it seems like such a male material ?
(4) : First of all, female players are very very important to us. But you're right, Conan is an adolescence fantasy pulp, world and sort of modern female equalitarian values don't mesh always 100% with that type of world, and I think we made a choice that we would include or try to make it as pure as we could from a visionnary point of view and to welcome all females that wanted to play, after having some based on the vision being pure, if you see what I am saying. I think there's quite a few female we watched on threads from the beta boards, we watch the people talking about the game, but I definitely think that we will have fewer female characters than there is in male fantasy type universe, but I don't think it will be noticeable for the player.(...) But all the elements that female players enjoy are there and all the social aspects that we normally say, you know these are typically female values, they are there, but I must say that there most likely be more males enjoying those values anyway.
(6) : When I've been traveling around a lot, talking about the game in press to female journalists, many of those have actually said they're looking forward to Age of Conan because they can find a chance to play something sexy, and not just a cartoon character or a caricature of character, something that they can identify with more.
Q : Question on looting groups and raid instances, what kind of mechanics are in place to handle loots (pas pigé le reste de la question
)
(4) : We have three different group loot modes : round robbin, team division and random and I think you will also have "first come first served" and in terms of raid, it's the raid leader who can distribute, so there is a talking system in place for handling raid achievments.
(3) : Unfortunately we don't have anyone from the high end gameplay group here, and a lot of that has to be with their planning, of course we have generic systems but how they implement the ... is up to them. I know from talking to them that their're primary going from drops but I've heard talks about a talking system but I haven't heard specifics about what they have planned for it
(4) : I doubt there is something concrete there. We will have 20+ raid targets at launch, we're going to have 24 man teams as raid's target number of players, almost exclusively the raids are high level (75+ to 80). Our estimations state that we have several hundreds hours of raid content, and I hope it's true, but it depends also on how hard we make it. We are planning to have an item based raid levelling system which gear you toward taking the next level of raids in place, and I think there are 3 tiers of raid
(3) : Currently based on these 3 tiers of raid and raid loot planned of increasing the stength that will allow you to start walking on the next tier. They have a very interesting and creative solution going with the way that raid drops versus non-raid drops works and from what I have seen the balance of that and how it impacts non-raiding versus raiding is actually very solid. We were in a unique situation with classes, caused by the fact that most of our classes are what we are considering "hybrid", very very few of our classes only have one role and due to the generic system we use for what people can acquire, a lot of the loots that drop are useful for multiple classes and multiple people at the time. As far as I know there aren't any current plans to drop only say necromancer items or dark templar items if you have no dark templars in the raid (...) I think they're trying to take a very broad approach, make sure the progression is as fun as possible