Friday, June 13, 2008

Age of Conan - Coming this Fall... KINGSHIP

Words cannot describe how awesome this first MAJOR content update sounds. I know a few folks (KEEN) who might be interested in reading this. This is one of many new things planned for AoC this year, and I'll be damned... it all sounds fantastic. You can read about the new PvP System, the Fugitive part of that, new dungeons, new chat system, Powerpoints (odd sort of achievement system), new lore quests with voice overs, well... a whole lot of NEW at this LINK.

Am I still excited for WAR this fall? Yes. Will it be hard to pull away from Conan on a daily basis if all this makes it in by then? You bet your ass. The TTH Guild and its alliance will own Hyboria one day this fall, mark my words. Anyway, read about the Kinship content update below:

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Kingship revealed - Huge upgrade planned!

We will be doing a lot of improvements and additions to Age of Conan in the weeks to come, and we will be sure to tell you about it. But let’s also take this opportunity to gaze deeper into the glass ball, to see what awaits us in the future – later this year!

Okay, so we’re not ready to give you all the juice on it just yet – this is, after all, some months away from going in the game. But we want to lift the veil a little bit, as we feel that this is such a powerful community builder that it deservers some anticipation!

The tentative name for this update is Kingship, but that might change as we move close to patching it onto the servers. This is basically an update that will introduce some very groundbreaking new features into Age of Conan, such as guild alliances, legendary battlekeeps, and so-called Wonders of the World. And some other, secret stuff!

The Kingship upgrade will also be rooted in the Powerpoints system, and we will be introducing several new features and content. Here is some of what you can expect!

Guild alliances

We want to allow guilds to get together and form alliances, creating strong accumulations of power that can take on some of the biggest challenges on the server, and we will be employing various tools for them to create a strong common identity for the alliance.

Here is a list of some of those tools:

* Alliance flag – you will be able to acquire a flag that you can carry around on your back, and this flag can be customized for you alliance.
* Alliance cloak – you will also be able to acquire a cloak that you can customize for your alliance, showing everyone what gathering you hail from.
* Alliance chat – of course, just as with guilds you will be able to share a common chat channel with all members of all the guilds in the alliance.
* Alliance name – you will be able to select a name for the alliance, and that name will be shown after your guild name and your character name.

A guild alliance will be quite a political entity, and this among other things involves holding elections to choose alliance leaders and such. Rest assured, guild alliances will have plenty of tools at their disposal when they set out to conquer the known world!

Legendary battlekeeps

Already in the game your guild have the opportunity to build player cities and eventually also conquer battlekeeps. We will, of course, be improving these functionalities as well as we move ahead in the coming months. Kingship will also expand on this feature.

Situated next to the three big cities – Conarch, Khemi and Tarantia – will be something called legendary battlekeeps. Massive constructions that can be seen from inside the major cities themselves, and there will only be three of these in total in the online world – one for each capitol city. Conquering these battlekeeps will be the ultimate challenge!

Guilds will effectively have to team up with each other and become alliances if they want to have any chance of conquering a legendary battlekeep. These will be gigantic battles, and we are aiming for over 300 players to be involved in the battle simultaneously!

That also means we will be doing some technical improvements to the massive battle system to allow for this great number of players in one battle at the same time.

Wonders of the World

These battlekeeps will all have different benefits to provide the alliance that owns it, and they will all be visually very different from each other. You can customize and build upon your legendary battlekeep, just as you would with the “ordinary” battlekeeps.

Another feature we will be introducing with this upgrade is Wonders of the World. These are powerful constructions rooted deep in the identity of that nation (e.g. the “Golden Lion of Tarantia” for Aquilonia) and they look epic and magnificent. Each nation has two of these wonders, and they can be built in the legendary battlekeep for that nation.

Building these wonders is a huge effort for anyone in the alliance, and will involve a lot of team work. Once you have built the shell of the wonder in your legendary battlekeep, other guild alliances can steal it and bring it to their city – so you need to protect it!

The benefits of owning one, two or more of these wonders (can you steal all of them?) is beyond anything you can imagine, but those details are to be revealed at another time!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This certainly sounds awesome. Me and my guildies were climbing up walls when we read this! My only worry like you is I won't have enough time for WAR!

Anonymous said...

Lets recap that: Relic raids from DAOC + WAR City raiding + basic alliance functionality (chat channel is really a feature worth mentioning?) = Huge upgrade?

Overly negative sure, but I mean come on. Toss in a Tome of Knowledge quest structure into the next patch, call your city siege game tiered, and you might cover the feature set of WAR before WAR is released and everyone who is left jumps ship. Reeks of desperation to me.

Elementalistly said...

@syncaine

Yet...everything WAR does is WoW+DAoC...I do not understand the difference

LOTRO was WoW+EQ2

AoC is...well some WoW with some sprinklings of Guild Wars and Console games...
At least it has strayed somewhat from the norm in my opinion...

heartlessgamer said...

Fact is, AoC promised these items for launch and BARELY got the basics of these features in. Before they start talking about all these massive upgrade plans, they need to go back and FIX the BASIC systems that are NOT WORKING CORRECTLY currently.

This happens with every MMO launch. There are these massive amounts of "almost finished" features that get cut from launch and then everyone gets fooled when the first couple of patches are full of these almost finished parts. Then BAM, there is nothing left for the developers to pass off as "hard work" and all AoC will get for years is bug fixes to broken features.

By the time this patch hits AoC, most of the features listed will be cut or reworked. A lot of players will be gone as well. People were gone in the first week because of unfinished content.

AoC may have launched smoothly, but as I've stated elsewhere, we'll see the truth in a couple months. Another average MMO, with tons of promies, but in actuality did little to nothing unique.

Anonymous said...

Heartless - I don't remember reading anywhere that Funcom promised these features for launch. They promised these features, sure, but they certainly didn't promise them for launch. How's it any different than LOTRO advertising features for its' next Book patch? They're advertising features soon to be implemented.

By very nature, this is End-game material, so the majority of players won't use it for several months. Those who do hit 80 early, still have minigame PvP, city-building and raiding to take part in, all fully implemented.

Bildo said...

You'll have to forgive Heartless.

As much as I enjoy his musings, he often is very much... heartless.

Even if it's a game he's been known to enjoy (WoW), he's prone to ripping them to shreds. That's his milieu.

It's the nature of the "beast".

(Sorry, Heartless for calling you a beast.)

Elementalistly said...

@Bildo

No need to tell Heartless you are sorry...
He really has a one track mind...
Everything but WAR is a WoW clone...and he still loves his WoW but wants his WAR which is all different and all new...

EVERY MMO has promised something they could not deliver...and the fact that AoC is the new kid on the block, well, they will get the brunt of the trollers until WAR comes out..
I hope they are not disappointed...