Age Of Conan Interview
Age of Conan has been dominating the MMO genre since it's release earlier this year. With its innovative combat system and one player campaign that tutors the players into the Hyborian world, this has proved to be a massive hit with the MMOGer community.
Erling Ellingsen has been kind enough to talk to us about how he feels, as the product manager, the game has been recieved.
So... you must be tired ?
I just had a one week vacation soaking up the sun in southern Norway, so I'm actually back to renewed strength! But yeah, the last few months have been very hectic and tiring. But it's also been a lot of fun! Definitely worth the effort.
One of the main stories making headlines this month was breast reduction due to a
bug. How can that even happen? Are you sure you didn't just try to scare the players?
We had a few problems with overly creative plastic surgeons! No, not really. In all seriousness it turned out to be a so-called "body morphing bug". We changed some of the values on character models and this had some unexpected side-effects! It was not intentional at all, so we brought it back as quick as we could! What's fascinating how this was picked up by mainstream media across the world. I guess that only goes to show that these stories sell!
We saw a system designer try to explain some of the stats mecanisms in the game like attack and defense. Explaining how things work has never been something important to Funcom with Anarchy Online. And some players kind of enjoy working things out for themselves. Did you feel a bit compelled to start explaining the gameplay for Age of Conan because the game has a broader audience ? Or is it something you don't mind doing, wanted to do ?
We always knew that Age of Conan had to be less hardcore than Anarchy. Not because hardcore is a bad thing, it's just that Anarchy is a different game. So we have definitely made different choices in the design to make it more obvious, and we are actually working on making things even more transparent for the player --especially in terms of item usage and their statistics.
When can we expect the trial program to work ?
There are not immediate plans for a trail program right now, it's too early. We might
choose to do something like this at a later stage, but right now.
Despite recent changes, mount seems to remain somewhat useless in combat. Can we expect any further changes?
I think that's in the eye of the beholder and it really depends on the player skill, but yeah, our mount team is working on improvements to this system. At this point in time we are looking over a lot of the feedback coming in from the massive player-base, and you will see improvements on what people point out to us.
Spellweaving is considered by many to delicate to be used, any plans to maybe make it more accessible?
Spellweaving is intended to be delicate. It's something that should be used in groups when the caster can be protected by others. We do not have any definite plans to change this system right now, but we will hopefully expand on it in the months ahead making it even more elaborate and even more interesting to play around with.
Any detailed information about the coming improvement to the guild cities? We know about the NPC, anything else?
We want to hold off on those details for now, it's a major improvement coming and we don't want to spoil anything just yet! We have started introducing some NPCs to the cities now, and future plans include adding some sort of city life by adding NPCs who roam around and create a living cityscape. We would also like to give guilds the chance to customise even more -- but now I'm saying too much. ;-)
Soon, there will be crafted unique items, PvP stuff and purple raid gear. Is any of those better than the rest, or are they equal in power and offer three different way to specialize your character?
That's a very complicated question! Our goal is to achieve maximum balance, so you will not have to only use PvP gear or only use purple raid gear if you want the best. There will be different levels of power within all of these, and you will find purple raid gear that is better than PvP gear and vice versa. We have some of our top people working on this right now, and balance is a huge part of the equation.
Can we hope for changes and improvement concerning the market system (most people rather use the chat for trade than the NPC)?
There are no specific improvements that I can talk about right now, but as with all things in Age of Conan, we are constantly looking at ways to improve this. So please do stop by our forums and voice your opinion. I wouldn't be surprised if one of our developers puts that suggestion into the game, we're doing it all the time now!
Thank you for your time Erling!
IncGamers would like to thank our French sister site, Mondes Persistants for conducting the interview.
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