It's taken a year to get the patch out which resolves major issues in the game.  How often do you think there'll be a major patch update, and have you already started working on another one?
 
We are always working on the next one, and usually elements of the next two, we have already done three or four major updates since launch and we do not intend to stop now. The live game will continue to be expanded and improved with major updates. We are already hard at work on the next update as I have described for our community in our monthly community letter.

Have you found that sticking to the IP and the stories of Robert E. Howard has limited you in any way?  Are there points where you've had to address changes in the IP in order to do something with the game which isn't referenced or mentioned in the original stories?  If so, what?  And can we see them in this latest patch?
 
It hasn’t limited us at all! Rather it is a constant source of inspiration. Howard described a very visceral and real world (it was after all a re-imagining of our own world in the first place) and it provides us with everything from specific stories to inspiration for an area. For example in Ymir’s Pass we were able to take the iconic Conan story of the ‘Frost Giants Daughter’ and weave it into the game-play in a really fun and interesting way. Then on the other hand you have content like the gangs in Tarantia that simply takes it’s inspiration from the city that Howard described. Howard described a very real and harsh world that has real and bloody realities to it. It is then easy to have that inspire game-play that feels genuine and suitable for the IP. I don’t really think that has been any situation where we haven’t been able to look to the lore to be able to find inspiration for something we want to achieve.

Now that you're resolving the problems of the PC version, when can we expect to hear something about the Xbox 360 version?
 
There a small team working on getting the technology working on the Xbox platform. I think it’s safe to say that the technical challenges in this area have turned out to be greater than we originally envisioned, so there isn’t any update there at the moment, but it is still being worked on.

Item stats in update 5 have been changed massively to make them easier to understand, have more of an impact on characters and to resemble how they work in other MMOs. Why have you decided to make this change now, and why wasn't it like this originally?

As before, strictly speaking, that’s not really for me to say as I wasn’t involved. I do think that hindsight is an amazing thing though and it is easy to say now that this was the better course!

I am sure that the original team had very valid reasons for the choices they made prior to launch, it just didn’t work out as expected, and wasn’t popular enough to grab players attentions. Sometimes it is only when the masses get a hold of your game that these things become apparent. I think that is mainly why we have now made the changes we have, the feedback clearly told us that people didn’t think the RPG system provided enough incentives!

Prior to launch I am sure there were people who genuinely believed people would like it and react well to the way that it was, and sometimes in that scenario it takes the feedback of actual real gamers before you know whether you succeeded or not. In this case unfortunately we didn’t get it quite right the first time around.

What can you tell us, if anything, about the expansion?

I am afraid I’m not able to talk about the expansions just yet, under strict orders from the marketing folks as we will be doing a major reveal of the expansion at the Gamescom convention in Cologne in August. So mark your calendars for that!

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