Winds of change are blowing through Hyboria.
Since its successful launch in May 2008, Age of Conan has been hemorrhaging subscribers over technical bugs, game imbalances and the lack of content. FunCom has put herculean efforts towards salvaging their game, going as far as to change the game director 5 months into the launch. The upcoming patch 1.05 would be the biggest overhaul so far.
During development, FunCom focused on solving the technical issues of their combo based combat, and had little resources left to work on the game mechanics. The mechanics were quite outdated, rushed and many parts of it did not work at launch. With the technical issues resolved, FunCom finally put their head towards the game mechanics, and it will be a complete rework. The current system of working out combat is based on multiple calculations. A roll to see if an attack hits, one to see if the target evades and another to see if it was a critical hit. This multiple rolls system is a legacy of pen, paper and dice gaming, where splitting up an attack into multiple parts makes it easier for players to work out modifiers, leading to less charts.
However on a computer, you can do away with multiple rolls and put the statistical chances into a single roll. Making this change might not appear to be a massive step but it demonstrates FunCom’s willingness to overhaul a weak system. This change means that anything that affects combat results need to be revamped: all items and character stats. A bold undertaking a year into a game.
There would no longer be different invulnerabilities, evade chances and mitigation, the whole system is being streamlined to a single armour rating for physical damage, and a protection rating for magic. They also removed fractions for whole numbers, armour in Age of Conan currently feature silly stats like 0.03% invulnerability. The bolt-on system of Heroic stats to deal with elite mobs has also been integrated into the system.
Age of Conan began with a philosophy that items should not make a big influence in the combat result, a combo-led combat system should favour player skill. They have had to accept that a large part of the attraction of MMORPG is having goals that encourage players to log on in order to achieve them, and the most obvious goal is to get better items. Currently, items influence about 25% of the character’s statistics, but FunCom would be moving it up to 50%. This decision has its supporters and detractors and is perhaps one of the more controversial of the upcoming changes.
Another interesting change is that stamina and mana costs of skills and spells would be increased. Currently players can pretty much use most of their skills repeatedly without worrying about running out of stamina and mana. With the change, a new game dynamic comes into play, that of containing a player by constantly depriving her of stamina or mana, at least two classes currently have mana burning skills that previously had minimal impact. Players have to manage their pace to maintain damage while their stamina and mana pool is under stress.
Long duration buffs are one of the things that boggle my mind about the decisions made by game designers. Buffs that do not contradict with other buffs or have a negative effect: in other words, no-brainer buffs, should be passive effects rather than long duration buffs. Also, why give a buff with a 1 hour duration a 20 second casting cooldown? It adds nothing to gameplay nor challenge the players in any way. FunCom will finally change several long duration buffs into short instant-cast tactical buffs, so caster classes have an added role of battle field tactical buffing. This is in line with the action oriented playing style of melee combat, and healing in Age of Conan.
The changes are currently on the test server and many players are there figuring out what the implications would be for their favourite classes. No doubt it would go through many changes and fixes before its introduction to the live servers. Perhaps FunCom is targeting May 2009, Age of Conan’s first birthday to bring the final piece of much needed change to the game to finally justify its AAA rating.
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