3.1 Q: Can you offer some clarification as to the classes that have recently been merged?
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.
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 [
laughs].
Evan: That explains the priest one.
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.
Erling Ellingsen: Can you tell us a bit about what has been preserved from the two classes ?
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.
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.
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…
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.
3.2 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 ?
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.
3.3 Q: So skip 1-5 and leave Tortage after that ?
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.
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.
Gaute: Even at level 1.
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.
3.4 Q: Tortage is really boring the third time.
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.
Erling: But the stories in Tortage are very different, right?
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.
3.5 Q: With the Collector’s Edition, will you be doing a 64 bit client version ?
Pål Hansen: It’s a standard 32.
3.6 Q: Is the game optimized for quad core or is it just dual core ?
Pål: The more cores you have, the better it will run.
3.7 Q: Is it still viable to use the measuring stick of “If the PC will run Oblivion, it will run Age of Conan ?”
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.
Erling: What you got to see today was a taste of what’s to come on the new rendering code.
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.
3.8 Q: With combos, will you hit things around you, or only your active target ?
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.
3.9 Q: What about cinematics like there used to be in Anarchy Online? Will they be all the way through the game ?
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.”
Didrik Tollefsen: It was killing the graphic artist.
[
Laughs.]
Gaute (to Didrik): You worked on them right?
Didrik: It was a nightmare. We’ll see how many customers we get. Maybe we can give them a go again.
Gaute: Not enough monetary bang for the buck.
3.10 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.
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.
3.11 Q: Was the movie a big influence on the way things panned out ?
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.
Erling: I think if there’s anything we learned from the movies, it was probably somewhat that.
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.
3.12 Q: What about character customization throughout the game, after you’ve created your character already, to make characters distinct from one another ?
Didrik: There’s a heap of sliders, but you mean after the actual creation? This is a question for Gaute.
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.”
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.
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.
10/02/2008, 18h38
) mal compris, mais apparemment la localisation n'est pas planifiée pour le moment (et j'a du mal à croire qu'elle peut encore l'être pour la sortie du jeu)
