Age of Conan now has offline character progression. So if you have a level 30+ toon, you don’t ever have to adventure to level again, if you so choose. But honestly, who still plays AoC?

Here is the official announcement from Tarib, the senior community manager of AoC.

With this new feature you will get additional levels gained over time that can be allocated to characters in the character selection screen if you wish. It is designed to earn and allocate additional levels to gain over time even while being offline and it’s only available to put on characters that are at least level 30.

The system started off today with giving each active account four levels to distribute. Every 4 days from now on there will be one additional level added to your pool. In character selection screen you will be able to assign these levels to any of your characters. The only requirement is that the character is at least level 30.

The mentioned 4 days are real-time days meaning it doesn’t matter if you ever logged in with your account during those 4 days or not, the additional level will be added to your pool. It is a requirement though that your account is active and has a running subscription.

If all your characters are level 80 and you can’t therefore use these additional levels at the moment, you will keep on gaining levels but won’t be able to assign them to a character unless you start a new one and that one reaches level 30.

It’s important to mention that this feature is completely optional. So you could also choose to never assign any additional level from your Offline Character Progression pool to any of your characters.

Please note: once you have assigned a level to a character it can not be reverted. Customer Support would not be able to take that level away from your character and add it back to your pool. So please be careful when assigning these levels. There is also a button to assign all available levels to the character currently active in the character selection screen. Please make sure you have the correct character selected when using this option.

This month’s letter is here from the Director of Age of Conan.. Whose name is not shown, presumably so no one can contact or harm him. This month he talks about the recent shows they’ve presented at. Along with a view on the current patch, the next patch 1.06, and class balancing overall.

For those of you interested, you can find the article here.

If you wander over to MMORPG.com they have an interview up with Q&A developer Jarle Snertingdalen about their upcoming update.

Why did the team want to change the items and statistics system?

While there were several reasons for changing the items and the statistics system, the most important one was that we wanted to increase the contribution to character power from items. One of the goals pre-launch was for Conan to not be an item-centric game, but we quickly discovered that we had taken that vision too far.

If you want to learn more about what they have in store check out the rest of the interview.

Age of Conan’s Game Director Craig Morrison fills us in with the state of the game. He remarks on the upcoming 1.05 update, and what you should expect.

This month’s letter marks the anniversary of the game’s launch and it’s been quite a year by any estimation with more than its fair share of highs and lows. It’s kind of hard to reconcile that it has actually been a year already!

Before we get into the all important ‘come on, tell us something about the new stuff that is coming’ I thought I’d take a slight trip down memory lane on a few of the moments that have defined the Age of Conan experience for me personally.

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In the Letter from the Game Director April 2009 it described how things are coming with the latest patch that is now being tested. This is a pretty big one as it fixes and redesigned almost every piece of equipment in the game and overhauls many of the classes; fixing feats and cleaning up skills. However there is one extremely interesting addition they plan on putting into the game.

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Nanyea of Castlerealm recently sat down with Craig Morrison, Game Director, to discuss the latest issues and developments for the MMORPG Age of Conan. Age of Conan was released last year and started off with a rush of potential subscriptions with a large influx of box sales. Unfortunately the game proved to be unfinished, riddled with bugs, and completely unpolished. Age of Conan saw a sharp decrease in subscription renewals after the first few months.

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