Buried at the tail end of a press release boasting the sell-out of the collectors edition (111.000 units), Funcom did some additional damage to their faction towards their customer base today. They confirmed what was pretty much known for a while - no (real) DX10 in Age of Conan at launch, and no, it won't be added in anytime soon...
While Funcom is thrilled with the early success of Age of Conan, and proud of the game launching this week, the company regrets to inform gamers that the DirectX 10 version of the game will not ship with the initial launch. As Microsoft’s DirectX 10 is undoubtedly the future of PC gaming, Funcom has decided to ship only the DirectX 9 version at launch, giving the team more time to focus on building a DirectX 10 version worthy of Microsoft’s great vision for the future of PC gaming. This postponement will let Funcom include even more features in the DirectX 10 version of Age of Conan than originally planned.
The DirectX 10 version will be premiered at the German Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, August 20 – 24, 2008. A special preview showing off the advanced graphics made possible by DirectX 10 technology will be unveiled this summer at nVidia’s NVISION event in San Jose, California, August 25 – 27, 2008.
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Interestingly, the Age of Conan retail box contains the "Optimized for DirectX10" tag.
Now before I get mugged by the AoC fanatics who point at the client options and say "but it says DirectX10 right here", a brief explanation; While the client contains a "DirectX10" mode that you can turn on, and while it might actually use DX10 API, it's still using Shader Model 3.0. Just go and look at the "Shader Model" dropdown. Currently Age of Conan uses no SM4.0 shaders (or any other DX10 features for that matter). As Funcom is, by their own admission, going to demonstrate their shiny DX10 mode next August, they are still some way off from actually getting it there.
The press release also contains one other interesting tidbit...
Additional retail figures for the standard edition of Age of Conan are also highly impressive. In total, Funcom is shipping around 700.000 copies of Age of Conan on day one. This impressive figure for a PC game is powered by equally impressive pre-order numbers. As a result of the tremendous interest and recent order increase, Funcom has not been able to fulfill all orders of Age of Conan in several markets due to current server capacity limitations. Extra orders of servers are now in place to facilitate for handling of more customers.
So, it may very well be that my earlier guess about launch will be correct. More precisely, there will be a shortage of game boxes at launch. Let's hope it's not as bad as with World of Warcraft back when it launched...
On a related note, Funcom seems to have locked down their official Age of Conan forums pretty hard - you need to have an active Early Access account in order to even read the forums at the moment. It's pretty common to limit posting privileges to paying subscribers, but effectively asking you to buy the game before you can read what others think about it is almost unheard of. One can only wonder what Funcom's motive for the completely closed forums actually is.
Age of Conan Early Access Sells Out
Minimum and recommended system requirements for Mass Effect
