August 09 Game Director's Letter
Game Director Craig Morrison addresses the Conan community in this latest issue of the "Letter from the Game Director".
This month's topics include the recently announced expansion, "Rise of the Gods layer", it also make mention of the aoc gold, the 1.06 update schedule, the House of Crom, Veteran Rewards, Tier three raiding, and more.
On the subject of the new expansion, Mr. Morrison discusses the expansion's setting, and how it allows the designers certain levels of freedom that they didn't necessarily have before with the existing zones. This is due to the fact that Robert E. Howard had the lands of Stygia, Cimmeria and Aquilonia mapped out pretty well, but the lands of Khitai were covered a bit less, allowing for more creative freedom. These new lands will also have roughly 30% more explorable terrain when compared to the existing zones.
When discussing more imminent changes, Mr. Morrison states that there will be a Conqueror update, and a new level 80 instanced called "Iron Tower" preceding the 1.06 patch. The 1.06 update will follow, but may be split into smaller parts to get chunks of the features out to players sooner, rather than releasing the patch in it's entirety at a later date.
The House of Crom might be finally seeing the light of day sometime soon as well, and there are some new details on the dungeon:
House of Crom is a level 80 instance that will have social elements. So what does that mean exactly? That means that we are aiming to have two parts to House of Crom, one which is more open and supports several teams in a social dungeon setting (and will have co-operative goals) and a part that will be a regular single team instance. I think the mechanics the team is cooking up for this will make for a very interesting experience!
