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Big Iron had the opportunity to catch up with Funcom's Jorgen Tharaldsen (JT) at Dragon*Con, and was able to ask him some questions about what's in store for the hardware freaks as far as Age of Conan is concerned. Their willingness to speak frankly about what the player base has brought up as points of concern is great to see, and the fact that they're so up-front about what they're doing to address these items is laudable.

From their July Developer's Note (for those who haven't seen it):

When it comes to the overall performance of the game I also have some good news. While most players have a great time with the game, we also know that we have ways to go for those with the oldest machines. We have therefore continued to look at our memory handling and how to increase general performance, and updates on this are continously in the works. These will be brought to the live servers as we finish them, and while I won't go into specifics I know that those of you with older machines will notice improved performance in the weeks and months to come. On the other side of this spectrum you have the DirectX 10 part of the engine, which is now being worked on.

-- Gaute Godager, AoC Game Director


The first point JT addressed was brought up by another participant in our conversation -- the memory leak that's been giving users fits when they're trying to play for an extended period, or frequently changing zones. This is the number one item on their Honeydew List. I'd be surprised if it's more than a patch or two away. Hyboreans, rejoice!

BI's query was a bit further down the pipe; namely, What sort of support will AoC (and subsequent titles) have for multi-CPU/multi-core systems? At the moment, according to JT, AoC makes use of a second CPU core primarily to handle some secondary tasks and physics effects (it will also engage Nvidia's PhysX effects if your system's got those particular toys available). The roadmap currently calls for the game engine to make greater use of a second core, and, slightly further down the road, scale across a third and fourth core to further boost performance.

Given the heady demands it already makes, there's a good chance that folks would have invested in a potent, multi-core system as part of their intent to play, so it's nice to see that the extra horsepower these folks have available won't continue to lie fallow down the road. No ETA was given (despite the threat of vigorous noogies and much batting of eyelashes -- charisma was obviously my dump stat) for when this will come to pass, but it's good to see that it is part of their upcoming plans for the title, as well as future releases.


A brief aside about Funcom's setup at D*C - they had set up what amounted to a LAN Lounge in the vending area, with kiosks set up to allow folks to play AoC, Anarchy Online, and Tabula Rasa. Their folks, along with some of the gang from Sony Online Entertainment, were hanging out on couches and sharing pizza, veggies, and snacks with whomever wanted to swing by and chat. Their approachability (not to mention their willingness to engaged in some serious zingers with the folks from Massively and WoW Insider during the MMORPG Costume Contest) won them big points in my book.

Any man who can give BI's resident big mouth unrelenting abuse for how he wears his kilt is all right in my book. Alan Crosby of SOE, you are so doomed next year. I'm just sayin'. It's a skirt, he says... next time, I'll bring the inflatable sheep myself....