Age of Conan’s new game director Craig Morrison announced yesterday that Funcom is “actively working” on merging its servers in both the U.S. and Europe.
Despite a positive initial response, including a reported one million sign-ups for the game’s beta program, Age of Conan has been plagued by a host of bugs and other issues, ranging from the amusing harmlessness of under-inflated boobs to more serious technical issues, long-promised but still absent support for DirectX 10 and even a bizarre incident in which a Funcom Game Master was canned over a cybersex encounter with a player. In mid-September, longtime Funcom employee and Age of Conan Lead Designer Gaute Godager announced he was leaving the company, although an insider told The Escapist that Godager had actually been fired over the game’s numerous failings.
In a lengthy message posted on the official Age of Conan forums, Morrison, Godager’s replacement, spoke on numerous topics relating to Age of Conan, explaining various planned tweaks and changes to gameplay, and also confirmed that the company will be merging servers soon. “I can today confirm that we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America,” he wrote. “It’s important for us to ensure the best gameplay experience for you all, and more healthy populations on each and every server will make sure we maintain healthy communities for the game in the future.”
“Still, there are many complexities involved in this, and we want to ensure that everything happens as fair and streamlined as possible,” he continued. “That work has now started, and we are naturally making sure that guilds and players can get to new servers in the best possible way.”
And that elusive DirectX 10 support that Funcom delayed all the way back in May? Morrison promised it’s coming, someday. “It’s now almost ready for the full test server,” he claimed. “Once the next gameplay update is out expect to start to see the DX10 functionality coming to the test environment. How long it will take to transition to live will depend on the testing of course, but it’s starting to shape up nicely.” Morrison refused to speculate, however, on whether the DirectX 10 patch would be ready in time for the game’s cancellation and shutdown.
