Game Director Letter – July 2013
The summer lull is upon us, and most of the development team is currently enjoying a couple of weeks of hard earned rest. As such this update is short and sweet, just to let you know the status of the various things that we have been working on.
Server Merges
We have nailed down all the technical considerations involved in the server merges and our goal is to finalize them in August. I covered most of the details of how the servers will be merged during last month’s update and now all that is left is to get it done.
We are aiming to do those as soon as we can when all hands are back on deck in August. There will be a 24hr downtime accompanying the merges and we will give as much notice as we can for when the exact downtime will occur across all time zones.
New Dungeons
The Coils of Ubah Khan is ready for release, and as mentioned previously we have three more Unchained dungeons sitting in the queue. These are the Caravan Raiders, Scorpion Caves and the Halls of Eternal Frost. Once Coils is patched to live, these three will hit testlive and we will aim to release them as soon as we possibly can (pending feedback, naturally).
In addition, The Slithering Chaos has received the animation work that it requires during the summer, so with a little extra gameplay work, it will be ready for testing.
Besides those, the longer term initiatives such as the Tradeskill System, Palace of Cetriss, Uncahined PvP and the unnamed PvP minigame in Dragon’s Spine are all still being worked on for later in the year.
Achievements and Lore
Thanks to everybody who provided feedback on the various achievements that they would like to see in Age of Conan. We have prototyped an early version of the Achievement System and have begun testing it to see how complex we can make the various achievements.
We still require GUI work, coding and scripting resources, but the preliminary steps towards getting the achievement system ported over to Age of Conan have already been made.
Events System
As I mentioned in the update after the anniversary, the functionality to trigger events without a server downtime has been added to the Age of Conan codebase. In the spirit of this, we have prepared several new events and once the servers are merged, we will start to trigger them every so often. Keep your eyes open for new events popping up in Hyboria!
Alright, that’s it for this month’s update, I hope everybody is enjoying their summer and I’ll see you all in Hyboria!
Cheers,
Joel
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