It looks like Friday the 13th wasn’t so bad. Funcom, publishers of Age of Conan announced that a whole new horsecart is gonna be pulling into the station soon with a booty full of goodies.

You can have a read of AoC’s official newsletter here, or…sit back and let me give you the highlights:

Decent, as we’ve come to expect it, none of this schoolboy baby business, PvP implemented. Yay! For anyone that’s accustomed to playing PvP roles as opposed to PvE has come to realize that AoC is lacking a bit where others make PvP pretty darn close to white knuckled combat.

One tiny little jab at Funcom if I may? There’s one sentence that sticks out like a sore thumb in the newsletter:

“Following the launch of Age of Conan we sat down immediately and started fleshing out some ideas for what we wanted to do with the PvP (player vs. player) features in the game, and now we are ready to reveal it to you.”

Ummmm. Following? I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a jackass here but uhhh…wouldn’t you want to map out the PvP strategy and development BEFORE you launched the game? Call me crazy….

Colors! Yes, color codes. A new fugitive system is being implemented whereby a color coded system will correspond to the appropriate wanted status of each character. This is based on how many lower level players they’ve killed. The basic David v. Goliath scenario is set here, as there are greater PvP rewards for killing a more wanted player. Theft of items and money will be awarded to death of the player with the highest fugitive status.

Awwww yiy….LOOT baby! The AoC loot system is being retooled. In case you haven’t noticed, loot in AoC thus far has been…well…almost insignificant. Funcom is changing this presumably to make loot a more integral part of character progression. The AoC street sweepers union is rather happy about this.

Powerpoint FTW! No, thankfully you’re not going to have to sit through a 32 slide presentation in order to play. Powerpoints refers to the new achievement system being put into place. These are points earned primarily during endgame play, but…you can continue to receive them in a steady influx provided that you keep your subscription status active. Powerpoints are pretty much, more or less similar to WoW’s Marks of Honor, and can be spent on special abilities and/or gear. Fear not…Funcom’s been tracking you, and these Powerpoints will be applied retroactively once launched. In other words, all the time you’ve already spent ingame has been tallied, tabulated, and will be waiting for you once the patch is applied. And in this slide, you’ll see our productivity vs. cost and performance is increasing due to….(sorry, I couldn’t resist)

Chit Chat. Ummm…yeah. Funcom. Funny that the name com (as in communication?) is part of the brand’s name, but yet, communicating ingame should provide an achievement award in itself. A completely new chat interface will be hitting your UI soon.

Strap your seatbelts on riders, as all this a few more improvements are heading your way in late June/early July.

All in all, I’ve been OK with AoC. Funcom’s latest offering gets the OK seal with a bit of trepidation. It’s got a lot of things going for it, and I’m almost pulling for it like the little engine that could. Graphically, the game is stunning, sound is not so bad, but there’s also that nagging suspicion in the back of my head that just keeps saying to me “They rushed it to market, they rushed it to market….”. Does this sound familiar with any of Funcom’s other offerings. Yes. Me too. Ok, I’ll say it: Anarchy Online. Do it with me now….roll eyeballs….groan. Yes, it was bad. Very bad. But…on the other side of the coin, Funcom got their $H@& together might fast, and within a year the game was actually pretty decent. The Shadowlands expansion pack changed the whole face of the game, and if you hadn’t been in on the original release (or lived on rocks and never read forums) it might have even passed as a good game. I have the very same hopes for AoC. It’s got good bones, and hey let’s face it, even market leader World of Warcraft wasn’t perfect when initially released upon the world.