Not only did Age of Conan put in a developer video diary this weekend, they've also written a developer blog update!

Anyway, with a project that has been in development for several years it is unavoidable that gfx assets get outdated and what looked good last year might not be so hot this year. This is also where the ground textures come in since many of them were made quite a while back and before we knew what the render engine was capable of. A vital part of the polish and optimization process is to review the number of unique assets in playfields, and reduce the polygon counts and textures used on these assets to use less memory and reduce CPU/GPU processing time. (I'll return to this point in a later update and talk more about the tools we use in the polish & optimization phase)

Now someone will just have to explain to me what gfx means, and I'll pretend to understand the rest (I'll take a stab and guess ground effects?)!  Art guys are crazy!  Now for the video portion:

This installment covers melee combat in Age of Conan and features a number of our strapping young lads, including: Gaute Godager (Game Director), Andrew Griffin (Senior System Designer), and Evan Michaels (System Designer). You’ll find out all about the philosophy of Age of Conan’s combat system and see several brutal examples of just how hard-hitting and exciting combat can be.

What an awesome look at combat!  Let's not forget that this game has a rating of M.  So when they say brutal, they mean it!