Age of Conan - GC Interview @ Boomtown

Boomtown attended the Age of Conan presentation at the recent GC in Leipzig, where Erling Ellingsen of Funcom showed them some of the new content and features that were planned for the future:

- We want to make boss fights more interesting and epic. It's not a secret that we love Blizzard's way of making boss fights and we're gonna try and do something similar in Age of Conan.


We were shown a boss fight that took place in a gigantic well. Hordes of fanatic women charged from the side - sacrificing their lives in order to save their ruler. Thus the team had to coordinate in order to win. Some had to fight the boss while others kept the women at bay - else the fight would continue for ever.

The developer is also working on a brand new are for players around level 60, Ymir’s Pass. It's around level 60 that most players run out of quests and interesting things to do, so this will be one of the most welcome news. We're talking about a massive zone with a very long quest line, that tells the story of Ymir's Son. He is a half-god chained to Earth in a new instance that follows the zone called The Amphitheater:

- The fights have to be more epic - and we think we've achieved that with Son of Ymir. He is extremely cool and it's gonna be interesting to see if he is thankful for the interference by the players in godly business or not…

Read the rest of the interview here.
More information.

Regarding how the game looked with DirectX 10:

Not only does grass and flowers move when you pass through it - they also react to magic. If you shoot a fireball through a field, the flowers will bend away when the fireball passes.

Odd, that sounds more like a physics system than a DirectX thing.

Indeed, that doesn't sound like an upgrade from DX9 to 10, there has to be more to it than that. It would certainly be an interesting feature tho.

So far I havent seen any dx10 effect that would really impress me to buy and install vista. But that does sound interesting - allthough I dont see how somthing like that is dx10 effect only. Its definetly sounds more like physics stuff than graphical tweaking.

In ww2 the 88mm FLAK cannon had a similar effect when fired across a field of hay. They say it was quite a sight.

I suspect it's some kind of shader effect as described here.

That's a pdf link btw.