It’s been a month since Age of Conan launched its Rise of the Godslayer expansion, but developers are already hard at work on their next major project: Upgrading the Dreamworld engine, which serves as a pillar for the game’s gorgeous graphics.

More details surfaced this week when AoC Game Director Craig Morrison described the main objectives of the engine upgrade.

In his June letter to players (prepare your reading glasses–it’s a long one), Mr. Morrison said:

In general our Dreamworld technology integrations provide two or three things for us:

• Improved performance (whether that is rendering, network latency, server CPU or memory usage or something else)
• New tech features (which might tie to performance or might be purely new additions, like deferred lighting or other new rendering features)
• Improved tools for the developers in the back-end (that in turn facilitate better and more efficient content production)

The game director broke down the graphical benefits into two categories: immediate visual and long-term back-end.

For the immediate visual category, players may see a “visual improvement” from deferred lighting options that will improve the look of indoor areas. Aside from deferred lighting, the Funcom development team can offer other rendering features once a new engine is in place.

For the long-term back end category, developers can “create better content more efficiently” with the engine, although Mr. Morrison stopped short of claiming faster updates. It’s only logical though that if the engine makes it easier to craft content, then patches may roll out faster or will come packed with more offerings.

Given the “complex code integration” attached to the engine upgrade, Mr. Morrison predicted it will take longer than usual to test it before going live. Just not too long we hope because a glossier, smoother-running Hyboria should let us slaughter more foes in brutal, ultra-def style.