AoC's Craig Morrison Interview

30 Jun 2009 at 13:11:03 by Bill Vaughan

IncGamers recently got to speak to the game director of Age of Conan, Craig Morrison, to find out how the game was coming along, what he would have done differently with hindsight, and what's to come for AoC.

Read the full interview below:

AoC was a highly anticipated MMO title which promised to introduce new styles of gameplay we'd not seen before in an MMO (talking about mounted combat and a new combat style, as well as little adult touches like getting drunk and visiting hookers).  Why do you think the game didn't retain its subscribers after launch?

I don’t think there was one single reason; it was a combination of many factors. Of course there were issues with the games content and performance at launch. I think performance we have resolved virtually all the significant issues so there I think we suffer slightly from the fact that due to those issues there are a significant number of ex-players out here who didn’t have a good experience and understandably haven’t been here to see it resolved.

This means that it’s only natural we still get those kinds of negative opinions thrown around, in such cases it does take time to turn around the ‘word of mouth’ on the games performance. All we can do is keep focusing on improving it and we are already starting to see the players acknowledge, and hopefully tell their friends, that the game experience is much smoother now. I think that is starting to turn now, but we have to keep improving things to have a chance at getting people to try it again.

It’s pretty similar on the game-play side, many of the issues players flagged up immediately after launch have already been resolved, and are continuing to get focus in our game updates. The team is doing a fantastic job at the moment of maintaining the momentum, and by focusing on the right areas and making sure that the updates are launched as smoothly as possible.

At the end of the day I think the system and the game itself didn’t grab peoples attention and allow for enough of a feeling of progression. If the game had been more fun overall and offered better incentives for progression maybe people would have given it a little more time. That is why the item and RPG system was important to revamp and update.

Some AoC players expressed disappointment with the lack of content in the past, and hence lost interest in the game.  Do you think you underestimated how much content should have been released when the game launched?

I can’t really answer that one as I wasn’t part of the launch team. I think this is an area that is a real challenge for MMO games in this day and age. The bar has been set very high by a few titles that are now a good few years old, and have numerous expansions and content additions already out and part of their package. That means it is easy for players to compare and find a newly released game wanting. That said, I think it is definitely true that there were also a couple of genuine gaps in the launch content, and those are the areas that we have worked to fill in over the last year.

There is a concern that, with the newest region which is primarily focused at the higher level player, there still isn't enough game-play for those in the mid-range.  What will players between level 30 and 70 have to do, and will there be new content specifically for them?

That is something we have already addressed through the course of the last year, while the latest major update did indeed focus on high level content, the previous major updates since launch have added a lot of content to those level ranges. Soon after launch we added dozens of new quests and have revamped and improved the launch dungeons. Then last year we added the largest game-play area to the game yet, Ymir’s Pass, which added a huge new playable zone for levels 55+ and included some great dynamic story content which ends in a brand new level 60 group dungeon. So we got to the higher level content after already addressing the mid level content.
 

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