General Discussion

The folks over at Funcom have announced that Anarchy Online will be getting a face lift in the form of a new engine. Game Director Craig Morrison takes the time to answer a few of our questions as we present a trailer featuring the new engine.

MMORPG.com:

What was the rationale behind developing a new engine for a game that launched all the way back in 2001?

Craig Morrison:

We still have thousands of new players every week through the free player offer and we realize that while we are very proud of the games art direction, it is starting to look its age compared to modern titles. With so many players still signing up and trying the game every week we felt it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t bring the engine up to date and little and improve the visuals. We know we have a great game with a lot of depth so in doing this we hope we can also attract people with a modern looking engine.

Check it out here.

Damn that looks good. Models look the same but textures, water, shadows and that sky! AO has always had the best sky of any game for it's genre. But damn, that just surpasses the already great sky lol. I cant WAIT to see the redone character models and particle fx :)

all i can say is, cerebrix is pleased.

I never understood why FC didnt make AO2

It would surely be much more succesful (and easier to make) than Conan

Woohoo - very nice. Great article - thanks MMORPG.com. AO being free to play -- uhm.. this is nice!

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Originally posted by Lobotomist
I never understood why FC didnt make AO2
It would surely be much more succesful (and easier to make) than Conan

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Hey great now everyone can do the same instanced generic missions and grind their way up to 220 with new graphics.

No player involvement in storyline no updated mission system but new graphics?

Go back and do some research on the early days of AO and you may find they had intended to have a "prison system" and player made missions and quests.

And here I thought they were only moving it to use DX9/hardware for performance reasons. I did *not* expect that.

Can't wait to see what the characters look/animate like in the new engine. Hopefully they get some kind of upgrade, too.

In any case... wow.. Looking very good.

wow, hopefully they can pull it of as I very well may go back to it if they do.