Age of Conan's Update 5 goes live, game director hints at future improvements
by James Egan 
Jun 24th 2009 at 4:00PM
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Classes, Game mechanics, Guilds, MMO industry, Patches, Crafting
The fifth major update to Age of Conan,"Gangs of Tarantia", has gone live. The update adds the Tarantia Commons District, a high level area with both single player and group dungeons, as well as a revamped RPG system. There are substantial system changes that have gone into effect in Update 5, which impact every class in Age of Conan, covering everything from itemization changes to feat trees, as well as abilities, spells, and combos. Plus Funcom has rolled out a complete overhaul of the gem crafting system and introduced new rewards tied in with guild cities. Any in-depth look at the sweeping changes made to Age of Conan with Update 5 is beyond the scope of this post, but are summarized in the patch notes.
In the June letter from the game director, Craig Morrison explains how Gangs of Tarantia is the most significant update made to the game thus far. Morrison also drops some hints about the directions Funcom plans to take Age of Conan with future game updates. He writes that the next update to Age of Conan will focus on three main areas: improving guild gameplay; new high level content in the House of Crom; and more goals and objectives with Border Kingdom PvP.
Beyond the letter from the game director, Funcom has grouped together a ton of information related to Gangs of Tarantia and AoC in general, which can be found in Issue #23 of the Age of Conan newsletter.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
iWinButton said on 4:23PM 6-24-2009
*downloading now*
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THAC0 said on 4:39PM 6-24-2009
worth going back to? I haven't played since launch.
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Keen said on 11:02PM 6-24-2009
It's never a good time to return to a game right after a "big patch" because you won't get a true sense of where the game is at. People will be excited because something is new or something got fixed, but in a week or two it will fall back onto routine.
If AoC interests you enough to bring you back a year after you stopped playing then giving it another week or two to think it out and see what happens can't hurt.
wolfsterne said on 4:57PM 6-24-2009
Is this the patch that adds fun?
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crsh said on 5:14PM 6-24-2009
Might be time to check out AoC again, it's been nearly a year since I last played.
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Happyfish said on 5:41PM 6-24-2009
Good luck... I tried and gave up on the massive several gig patch download. I guess that means they have changed a lot :)
Vulturion said on 5:42PM 6-24-2009
I am periodically really tempted to give Conan a second chance, but I just cannot shake the travel trauma enough to ever follow through; autorunning for soooo long to accomplish anything, and that damnable Aquilonean city - worst MMO locale ever!
*sigh*
I think I'll just steer clear until the mythical day that add a kazillion instatravel hotspots, or quitting the lovely graphics and crazy animations again will get me down.
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Jack said on 5:58PM 6-24-2009
I told you all a year ago this game will climb back on top they may beat Warhammer soon (not like that is too hard).
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Keen said on 11:00PM 6-24-2009
When you hit rock bottom the only place you CAN go is up. It's best not to open the door to a comparison or competition between AoC and any game. The best things that anyone playing AoC and Funcom can do are be humble, keep their head down, and push forward.
ArrA said on 10:22PM 6-24-2009
Amazing amount of people have returned to AOC with this patch. Global chat scrolls that fast you cannot read it.
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Hub said on 8:40AM 6-25-2009
I tried AoC for the first time a while back and I thought it was a fun game. OK so the low level PvP mini games could be a bit weak and it played havoc with what I thought was a decent gaming rig, but still well worth a look. Lively too, with all the areas full of players and so on with a great community.
The only reason I quit was because I wanted to max out a character or two on LOTR rather than swapping back and forth every few weeks. Once I've finished with the mines I'll be straight back to take a look at this I think. Could do with a good laugh.
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David said on 4:41PM 6-25-2009
AoC is a vastly improved game. The new patch is terrific in helping to clarify one's stats. There are very few performance bugs (like at launch). DirectX10 makes the game look amazing. I personally am enjoying the class balance changes that this patch introduced and the improvements to the guild cities.
Be warned if you return now, there is still a lack of content at lvl 80 and the quest rewards are still a bit out of wack, but on a whole, they have added a lot of mid-level content to help with the level grind.
I'd give the game another week or two to allow for the hot fixes that will come with this patch. There are still some issues with raiding now that the stats and class roles have changed a bit. It will take a few weeks to get this balance out.
As for new end-game content, the game director has said that now that this patch has roled out, the next patch will be focused on new raid content (House of Crom), new guild features and additional PvP incentives.
He also mentioned that they would be revealing information about the expansion at the late summer convention in Europe. I'd expect the expansion to be at least another year or so away. This info will probably be the start of the marketing blitz to come.
Anyway, the game is a lot of fun to play. I find myself logging into it much more than WoW and LotRO these days.
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