Great news this week is that the new version of the Conan engine was patched to the live servers this week with great results. The team is working hard to remove some last small issues for some users...and when this short period is over they will be HELPING US! The engine being patched to live is a great step in us finally having a stable version to really grab hold of...when we fix issues in this version they will remain fixed...and this is of course VERY exciting to us. Getting the dual-client new engine development environment up and running here has not been easy and is getting close to what we had in Oslo now...I'm looking forward to being able to show some new shots soon. Once the environment is up and running AND we have assistance from the engine team I'm hoping that the speed of this work will pick up significantly. We all know this has been going on too long and we ALL want it to be finished. Hardware mouse for the love of god!
Startup Experience:
Work on the startup experience has been a little slow as we focus on completing the balance design work and stabilize the environment here...but there is a 60+ page document covering off the bare bones of the new experience and what we believe it needs to include to really give players a good start in their first moments in AO. It has been strange to look back on the creation of the startup area and compare it to other products...in Conan the startup experience was the work of multiple versions and years of work...in AO the current island and content were all made over a weekend by a team of new people (Fixx's dialogue was the first thing I ever did for AO). We fully know the importance of this area and are looking forward to implementing our ideas and some good ones that were brought forth in community discussion.
"Other Stuff":
Some other things that are being worked on:
A general "smoothing over" of the key/SL playfield quests:
A lot of these quests were made a long, long time ago and they have not improved with age. The idea is to remove/change any points that do not provide an enjoyable experience. Good examples of this would be unnecessary amounts of pointless running or farming of low % drop items in large numbers.
they are. They had to wait for the AoC team to finish the engine upgrade,which has now gone live. Now the AoC team will come to AO and apply their engine to AO.
As far as I know, the changes won't be that big. Yes, your models will get new heads and the like, but the animations will remain the same, don't expect the game to suddenly have the graphics of AoC, there are in total 13 people constantly working on AO, and sub numbers are imho below the critical. That said, I love the game, and it will always be my first MMO love (not, it's not the first MMO I played), but it's over.
AO was easily the best MMORPG I ever played. It only got worse with age though; not through outdated graphics and whatnot, but through the stupid changes they made over the years.
Wish this game became popular like in the old days. I'd love to start playing my fav. MMO again, maybe on a new server where everyone starts from scratch.
I hope that after they change the engine, they decide to update the art assets as well.
That whole engineupgrade is in the talks since 2008 or so,finally we can read a "we're still on track for a public beta early next year".2 more years and it will go live,6 months after that AO shuts down
Last month was a strong focus on finishing up the "boring parts" of the Engine Upgrade (as far as you guys are concerned). Which is why there are no screenshots in this letter. Basically, we're doing automatic conversions of all existing playfields and dependencies into playfields compatible with the new formats. Let's just say there are a lot of playfields, and they all weren't exactly made in the same way.
Also, just as an illustrative example of the above, Vhab is making a new and better water-system because the way Dreamworld does water wasn't playing nice with the way the old engine handled water. Because we're not going to have artists go in and manually fix water for hundreds of playfields. There are number of similar issues we need to get cleaned up, as blockers for our planned beta.
On the art front, we're putting together new character models, new animations, new textures, new heads, and mesh armors (I had a screenshot of this on page 7 of last months update).
We're in the home stretch on this, and after the Server Migration the Engine will have the full focus of the entire AO programming team, as it will be our highest priority & highest urgency item.
Badrien, keep in mind, that they dont have a full dev team , only limited resources. In a couple weeks, they will merge the 2 servers (good thing) and then we should soon seen a beta for the new engine.
Man I wish this were completely F2P with all the expansions and everything. I would play the shit out of this game again just as I did when I was younger.
Still the best MMO ever created IMO (mostly because it was my first MMO but still).
they applied patch 18.6 yesterday, which (finally) merged the 2 servers (AO only had 2 servers + the defunct german one). And while population was never an issue (since everybody played on same server, or 2, and not on a thousand shards ^^) its sure nice to have more people on 1 server. They also removed those ugly city plots and made the cities instanced now.
oh and they say that the engine update comes with 18.7 and is currently beta tested internally (of course this will probably still take several months, but at least its moving forward).
here a little clip from the devs with the new grass (there was none before). Dunno how much the model in that clip is updated or not, could just be a internal demo with only the grass modified. Hard to tell.
Haha indeed about time, people were calling this vaporware for a while
Dunno if I'll play again tho. Went back a few times and never lasted more than a few weeks. But who knows maybe there will be some growth in population with this engine.
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But heard so much about it... my first mmo was swg -_-
