Q: What was the reason that you removed the classes that your taking out, scion of set and Druid of the Storm and changing them to the class the Tempest of Set?
And removing Lich?
Dev: We didn’t remove any classes, we more or less condensed them into one class, which is now the Tempest of Set, the reason for this being that we want people to experience variety in their gameplay, and one of the toolsets was to narrow, and people weren’t having fun.
So basicly what we did was take those 2 classes, and take all the cool things, that people enjoyed, and wrapped it into what is now the Tempest of Set.
And we are really happy with that, we weren’t happy with the 2 themes as they were, but when we meshed them they suit really really good together.
The lich we found was a little to similar to Herald of Xotli.
The lich, what people really enjoyed was the whole idea, dead overlord evil kind of thing, and we thought that worked really well with the necromancer idea that weve tried to evolve a bit to set it apart from the demonologist. So the necromancer now gets a optional ability to transform into a lich. In addition to some of his other cooler abilities.
I think the result is more interesting and more versatile.
Q: What has been preserved from the classes?
DEV: Almost everything, theres a few things we took out, its still a caster class, but he has all the kind of spells and trigger abilities that the lich had.
The tempest of set almost has both skillsets nearly completely, only rethemed.
DEV: I want people to know that we are sorry for those that get upset by this, we aren’t heartless, we are trying to make this a fun game for everyone.
Q: Earlier you’ve said that you’ve allowed people to skip level 1-20, its not to bad, so will you allow it in release?
DEV: We will have the opportunity to skip 1-5 most lightly, not 1-20, what weve done is that weve opened the world up and let you leave Tortage instead.
Q: Cut 1-5 and leave Tortage out of there?
DEV: Yes you can, but there wont be any low lvl content outside of the hub found in Tortage. But you do not have to do the destiny quest over again.
DEV 2: The reason we allowed people to skip 1-20 was that long long ago, you didn’t pick your class, you didn’t pick your specialised class until you became level 20, so you picked a mage, and then at level 20 you picked. a Demonologist.
That has been changed, so you choose your class earlier in the game, that has allowed us to introduce new class abilities starting at level 5, instead of level 20.
So because we introduce that earlier now, there is no need to skip.
We are also going to make more starting areas with time, but not at launch.
And the stories on Tortage is very different.
Q: With the collectors edition, will you be doing a 64 bit version for that or is it just standard 32?
DEV: Its standard 32.
Q: Following that, is the game optimized for quad core or is it just dual core?
DEV: The more cores you have, the better it will run.
Q: The main question on the forums right now is this, can my PC run Age of Conan, and its been said that if it can run Oblivion, then it can run Age of Conan, does this still hold true?
DEV: *nods*
Minimum: Nvidia 5800 + and shadow “something” 2., at least 128 mb ram on it.
Its also coming out with a lot of new features and possibilities, debugging and all, like a total new engine coming out of the box next week. Its memory you use, the type of textures, all the different shaders, and the CPU usage.
One of the things weve done lately is that weve improved the way you load textures.
Your supposed to only use the out of memory that your graphic card can handle, so it adjusts dynamicly.
We are looking into the framerate itself, that will be improved.
We are looking into making the game load more of the stuff a-synchronicly to remove the stuttering pieces of the game, and lets it load in the background and multicore.
And all of this will just produce a much better gaming experience for you.
And I think the coolest feature is something called the third shading, and that is something that regardless of what kind of harddrive we will aim that you have a good framerate, we will get that in, we have it up and running, Im exited because we have a lot of cool stuff coming.
Q: Something I didn’t hear about combos, can someone help me?
DEV: There was a bug a while ago where you didn’t affect in a cone like it was supposed too, but its been changed, it will be on beta soon.
Unless the combo specifies that you will only hit your current target, the combo will hit what your weapon would normally hit. So if your using it’s a quite narrow cone, if your using a polearm youll hit a wide cone.
Q: Again, something I didn’t understand, can anyone help?
Dev: Im so sorry my friend, there was a reason we stopped. So I think the answer to that will be no.
Q: Just kind of a basic question, to go back to the beginning when you started making Age of Conan, what made you decide to go with our direction that you did? Obviously Conan is pretty, but you could have chosen to have less realistic, more comic book characters, why did you decide to do it the way you did?
DEV: I personally like the comic book style, but to be part of hyboria and to feel realism and the grittiness, we went for a good compromise, and dynamics was a really important issue.
As much variation as possible, and the realism, to be a bit closer to the movie really?
Q: Was the movie a big thing in the making of the game? Was the movie a big influence in the way things paned out?
DEV: I don’t know, we went for a *MAGIC* realism, I think that’s a good way to describe it.
Q: What about character customisation throughout the game, later on, after you’ve created your character? to let people be distinct from each other even though they might be going for the same item?
DEV: First I wanna say that I don’t think any other game out there has the kind of choices and variety when it comes to facial and bodily expressions that we do, coupled with the realism of it. There will be A TON of possible changes on your body by itself, like different sets of tattoes, but there isn’t a way to change/retexture items, you cant poor bleach on it and store that to your character.
But definitely that’s something we are interested in, and weve discussed it several times.
But we do have several layers of clothing, so you can wear 4 layers of clothing so the combination can look differently.
But people request it all the time, so its always something we consider.
It’s a meet the violence kind of game, so its always a struggle trying to combine the “Social” with the “violent” parts of the game.
So lets see what we wanna do POST launch.
Q: I heard today that there are about 1 500 different armor/clothing sets in the game so that’s a bit variation.
DEV: And that’s 6 pieces pet SET, so there is a TON of choices and abilities to make your own combinations.