Server populations on Age of Conan are apparently not at the levels Funcom anticipated. Aiming to ensure "more healthy" populations, the company will be merging servers in both Europe and North America.

Game director Craig Morrison writes on the game's official forums that Funcom is "actively working on an approach" to the server merge.

"Still, there are many complexities involved in this, and we want to ensure that everything happens as fair and streamlined as possible," says Morrison.

"That work has now started, and we are naturally making sure that guilds and players can get to new servers in the best possible way. We will come back with more info on this, but I hope that this will serve as a positive injection to the social scene in the game."

Morrison also says that players can expect to see DirectX 10 functionality, which remained on the internal test servers for Age of Conan's launch, entering the full test server environment with the next gameplay update.

"How long it will take to transition to live will depend on the testing of course, but it’s starting to shape up nicely," he says.

In mid-August Funcom called AoC's launch a success, at that time having sold over 800,000 copies and gaining 415,000 customers. While the company expects subscription dollars from the game to drive its third-quarter revenue, it also pledged to "commit enhancement and corrections" to AoC based on player feedback, as part of its retention strategy.

[The preceding article by Simon Carless originally appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]