Age of Conan Game Director Craig Morrison has written written his February letter the the community, and he gives players some details on the upcoming 1.07 update. This will be the final update before the Rise of the Godslayer expansion goes live, so the patch will be comprised mainly of "under the hood" changes.

Morrison did note, however, that update 1.07 will include a couple changes to the game that players will notice. The patch will add more travel options within the playfields and introduce a new offline progression system that will let you accumulate levels over time to give to your characters in character creation. This service will only be available to subscribers. More details can be found in Morrison's letter after the jump.

Getting back to the expansion, Funcom has given IGN a preview of the new Kara Korum zone. It looks like players will have to face "mutant dudes and giant lizards," so get ready for that.

With players enjoying the 1.06 update, Guild Renown and the new raids this month’s letter gives me the opportunity to reveal a little about the immediate future, the expansion updates and a couple of significant changes coming your way.

The road ahead

While the expansion is the next major addition to the game, there will be a maintenance update up next to prepare the live servers for the upcoming expansion. This will take the form of the 1.07 update for the live servers. Now unlike most major updates most of the new stuff in this update is ‘under the hood’ as it were, the updates required for us to release the expansion. It will allow us to put some of the systems in place ahead of the expansion.

There are lots of new code systems that have to be integrated and prepared, both on an account level (allowing us to see who is an expansion player and who isn’t for example) as well as on a gameplay level.

While we haven’t announced just yet the actual launch date pending the finalization of the pre-order offers and sales plans, the expansion itself will officially be version 2.0 and will follow relatively quickly (all things going well) after the 1.07 update. That is not to say that 1.07 won’t have some things you will notice…

Expansion growth and travel

One of the challenges with creating an expansion is the distribution of players. With any expansion that is content based rather than system based you add a lot of new gameplay regions and areas for the players to explore. The lands of Khitai are very large, and we wanted to ensure that we help players with their travel options. We want players to be spending a better percentage of their time playing as opposed to purely travelling.

Off the back of the veteran’s system we noted that the new paths and recall items were by far the most popular items so we started to look at all the travel options and came up with some additions and improvements to provide better options for players.

Now when we looked at it, we felt that the travel between regions was pretty well handled now. What we wanted to address was the travel within the playfield. So in the next update you will find more travel options within the playfields themselves. New wagoner NPCs will be present in major outposts and quest hubs who will allow players to travel to notable locations within that playfield. So for example in the Eiglophian Mountains you will find the new NPC in the village of Dinog and he will offer one way transportation to a number of locations such as the Hunting Lodge, Ymir’s Pass or Yakhmar's Cave.

In addition there will also be recall items available, as a purchased consumable, that will allow you to return to the central hub for that playfield.

Now that doesn’t mean that we felt the need to allow players to just pop wherever, whenever, that is why this system is based around the quest hubs, and the reason for the recall items being consumable. You will still need to reach the hubs, and explore the playfields to find the hubs, but we do want players to be able to feel like their gameplay sessions are not overloaded with too much travel time. The expansion playfields in particular are large areas, and we very much feel that players will still enjoy the exploration of them. These additions are purely intended to help players enjoy their game-play sessions and concentrate on the action.

Offline progression

Another new additional feature that is coming to all players during these expansion updates is a small, but significant addition for subscribers (this won’t be available to trial players) and that is a new offline progression system. The pace of leveling in the game we feel is pretty much where we would like it to be, but we also understand that players like leveling alternate characters, and like to explore additional classes, but can’t always ‘keep up’. This new system will award players with additional levels accrued over time that can be allocated to your characters in character creation. It isn’t designed as a ‘power leveling’ system (it would take you something like nine months to max a character using this method alone! …and that amount may be tweaked yet) but it is designed to allow you to earn and allocate additional levels to your characters over time.

It is of course important to remember that this will be completely optional. You will be able to choose where, and when, you allocate these extra levels from the character creation screen.

This is intended as a small bonus to subscribers, and isn’t seen as any kind of a replacement for actually playing the game, we just wanted to add something that is an ongoing bonus for your subscription. So even if you go on holiday or have to take a break from playing you will return to some extra levels allocated to your favorite characters.

In Closing

We will be demonstrating the expansion to press at GDC in San Francisco in March, in order to show off the content and features of the expansion, and reveal some more of the wonderful locations and encounters that you will get to enjoy when Rise of the Godslayer launches.

Hopefully you have all enjoyed the expansion location reveal so far and I am looking forward to being able to show you all much more off the back of this event!

I think we are all pleased with how the 1.06 update has been received and are really happy that the new Guild renown system is providing people with the new goals and objectives that we hoped it would. We firmly believe that the expansion will continue to build on all of that hard work and bring you all a lot of great new content to enjoy. We are currently working very hard to make sure that happens as we work through the final (and always the most hectic) stages of the development!

See you in Hyboria!