Age of Conan – Page 2 – Geir Ove Alnes

Offline Character Progression

I haven’t blabbedblogged about anything on this blog for quite some time now. I have, amongst other things, been pre-occupied with working on the Rise of the Godslayer-expansion for Age of Conan, the release-date for which has finally been made public :)

What brings me out of hybernation, though, is the Offline Character Progression-system introduced in Age of Conan with patch 1.07.2 earlier this week. It has spurred some debate in the MMORPG blogging community (communities? do they all belong to one communtiy, or are there several ones?) about whether this is really a good thing or not, with concerns that this is just the first step towards a bleak future for MMORPGs where players play by not playing at all.

Basically the system works like this: Every four days that pass, another “free level” gets added to a pool from which you can hand them out to any of your characters as long as said characters are above level 30 and under level 80 (the level cap).

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Free, everlasting Age of Conan trial

Out of pure self-interest, I’m going to blatantly promote Age of Conan by mentioning the press release just released (duh, obviously) that announces the offer of a free, everlasting Age of Conan trial (aka “Unlimited Free Trial”).

Basically, if you sign up for a trial account, download and install the game and then log in at least once before January 1st 2010, the trial account will never end and you can keep on hanging around in Tortage (level 1-20 area) for as long as you want.

Some limitations apply to the trial accounts (out of necessity due to the potential abuse by spammers/gold sellers), though; no trade with other players, no use of in-game mail, no public chat channels, no forum-posting access.

Anyway, that’s this year’s Age of Conan (Available in a retail store/webshop/Steam near you!) promotion (Buy now! Don’t hesitate!) from me (Buy your friends a copy too! And your mom!). Now going back to my regular schedule of updating this blog at random intervals.

IFMCA award for AoC composer

Another reward in the cabinet for the excellent music composer Knut Avenstroup Hagen: The IFMCA have just announced it’s 2008 winners for scoring excellence, and Knut was given the award of ” Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media” for his music score for Age of Conan. Congratulations, Knut! =)

Another award in the cabinet for the excellent music composer Knut Avenstroup Hagen: The IFMCA have just announced it’s 2008 winners for scoring excellence, and Knut was given the award of “ Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media” for his music score for Age of Conan. Congratulations, Knut! =)

For those of you who’ve never heard about Knut nor actually listened to the music score in Age of Conan before, be sure to visit his homepage which features both music samples from the game as well as links to various interviews and articles concerning the amazing work he did on it.

In other news, we finally hit the Age of Conan Live-servers with the long awaited “patch 1.04” two days ago, after having worked on it since late October? last year. There have been several smaller updates since then, of course, but this newest patch is the largest we’ve done so far to the game, and it introduces a lot of new cool stuff, like three new dungeons, another raid-instance, PvP updates, and a ton of other stuff. Be sure to check out the full patch notes.

I’m glad we’ve finally been able to push all the great new content of this patch out the door, so we can all start focusing on the next patch!