-Img courtesy gamespy.com
Funcom is soon to be adding to it's sparse high end game in Age of Conan, with two new high level zones and several end game dungeons, in what is rumored to be the game's first expansion. This was reported by Producer Thorbj�rn Olsen, who is in charge of the expansion's development. Product manager Erling Ellingsen also claims many of the existing dungeons will be receiving some love as well, to "make them more memorable." He mentioned WoW in the plans to add strategic big boss fights, and Dungeons and Dragons in relation to new duneon traps.
Notable elements of the upcoming zones include a quest line that revolves around two warring gangs in the area called Tarantia Commons and the appearance of the titular malicious entity from Howard's popular story "The Frost Giant's Daughter" in a line called Ymir's Pass. Fans of "Conan the Barbarian" will appreciate the so-called "Wheel of Pain" nestled in a valley in Ymir's Pass, which they may remember as the wicked torture device that turned Conan from a scrawny teen into Arnold Schwarzenegger in the popular film. -gamespy.comAlso in the foreseeable future is the PVP Consequence system, which will gain a player consequence points for killing other players a certain level below them. This will cause the offending player to progress through the ranks of criminal and finally murderer, which will limit what that player can do in the game world. Guards will become Kill on sight, and other players will receive a bonus for killing them... its a system you may remember from Lineage. Along with this will be the introduction of PVP levels, which will grant players to armor and other rewards (similar to WOW's title system for pvp).
Rumors abound AOC will be moving up to Directx10 as well.
While this is all well and good, Funcom has not given it's subscribers a timeline for these events, and therefore it probably best to not reactivate for a second go just yet. Unfortunately, AOC was sold on the brutal pvp, and now even its devs are name dropping other popular online games to highlight the "new changes," which are actually just the same old used features of other MMOs.
