Funcom today pushed live a new update for Age of Conan called The Pit Master’s Arena. “Fight exotic and deadly beasts for fame and fortune within this Cimmerian Arena,” says the studio, “or challenge other players to prove your dominance!” Why would you do this? The blood of your enemies! Just kidding: It’s loot, of course.
“The arena features a slew of new rewards, including new pets, powerful necklaces, and unique faction-specific mounts! Discover four all-new Rune Stones through the arena, providing effects such as additional Constitution, protection bonuses when critically struck, or a surge of power when low on health. Slake the soil with the blood of the unworthy!”
The patch also includes numerous user interface tweaks, adjustments to some pets and mounts, and a handful of bug fixes.
In other Funcom news, the company announced today that it has taken on a $500,000 US loan ahead of its planned share issue, which is intended to raise capital for Conan Exiles.
“With the launch of the raid finder, we also have big plans to improve the current Free-to-Play model of Age of Conan. The goal is to have content in the game be more easily accessible to all players, so we’re looking into removing the more artificial gates (like removing the Premium requirements for accessing certain playfields). We will instead be offering better and stronger incentives to subscribe if you choose to. I’ll keep you updated once we have worked out all the details, but if you’re interested, feel free to check out the recent changes we made to the Membership offer in The Secret World. We’ll want to do something similar that fits AoC.”
Unfortunately, the crafting revamp has been shelved “for now.”
“I don’t want to keep you guys hanging on the hope of getting that feature completed soon, and I’d rather be completely honest with everyone. The current state of the revamp internally is that it still needs a lot of work, and the current implementation has undesireable effects on other features. I think in the time it would take to finish it up, make the system acceptable, and properly integrate it to other game features, the team would be able to produce better, bloodier, brand-new content. That said, there are also plenty of other things we can do in the meantime to improve the current crafting system.”
Thanks, Daniel!
