Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Joel Bylos: This is one for the lore people. If they've ever read "Conan Antics" by, I believe, Don Henley, there's a very in-depth argument that he presents that the gods in Conan's world are as hard to prove that they exist as the gods in our world. A lot of the other writers beyond Howard took liberties with his original text to make the gods more palpable and to give them a bigger presence in their books. Howard never had the gods really present, and Henley argues that the gods are really spiritual entities rather than physical beings.

So you won't actually be meeting the gods in the game, but that's also because we don't want to go against Howard's wishes.

Joel: During one part of the game you actually get a quest to go to the Speaker's Corner in Old Tarantia, which is actually mentioned in The Hour of the Dragon,  and a priest of Set is actually preaching to a bunch of people. He talks about how great Set is and how Mitra and Conan are terrible for the world. As a player, you basically can get up and debate this guy. There's actually a priest of Mitra in the crowd that asks you to get up and debate this guy. This is one of the places in our game where the quests are unique, because you can roleplay these quests however you'd like.

If you're a Priest of Mitra, you're obviously going to defend Mitra and Conan, and if you're neutral, you can just choose the middle ground between the two. If you're a worshipper of Set, you're more than welcome to join the guy and start saying bad things about Mitra. Based on the three options, you get a different reward.

Joel: Exactly. It's hard to do in MMOGs, but we can do it on a character level.

That's one religious quest, but there are obviously other ones where priests are dealing with issues and things, but they're not too confrontational. We want people to play different ways if they want to.

Joel: It's not in the beta yet, but in the Black Dragon Barracks there are three people that have been sentenced to death. Essentially the barracks commander is very busy and he basically sentenced those three individuals to death because they were captured sneaking into the safe area at night. You argue with him a bit about whether he truly considers that justice, and he basically tells you to go talk to the prisoners and determine whether they should be put to death or not.

It's going to be a fairly black and white option between the three characters [live or die], even though the dialogue with the characters is a bit more interesting. Essentially there are some characters that do evil things, but they've tried to sneak into the area for noble purposes.

Once you've decided how many of the characters you're going to kill, your quest reward will be different based on how many you've executed. If you kill all three you may get an axe of the executioner (Editor's Note: These titles aren't necessarily the official names of the items) and if you let them all live you might get a harbinger of justice or something like that.

Joel: Exactly! Every MMOG has kill quests of some sort, but you never really consider who you're killing when your tasked with those options.

Joel: Not that I know of.

Joel: Definitely! For example, there are certainly some quests where being a female will allow you to open up different avenues of completing a quest that may not be available to male characters in the game. At least one that I know of features the female character getting rid of a male NPC by soliciting him.

Joel: I try to link every quest that I write into the overall story and playfield so that it all makes sense to the player. While things aren't as dynamic in MMOGs as say in a single player game, you are allowed to do things on a character level to spice things up and you can make the static portions of the world as exciting as possible.

Joel: You played through the Sanctum of the Burning Souls correct? (We did, more video on this later.) We have a parallel solo dungeon to that that should take players around three hours to complete. For the most part, the game will be very solo friendly until around level 30, then we'll begin incorporating more and more group quests and that sort of thing into the game while still allowing players to solo if they wish.

Joel: What our gameplay designer does is that he tries to make it so that if you do go in there on your own, it can be completed. However, if you go in there with a few friends it's much faster and easier to achieve. There are dungeons that will almost require six-man groups to complete, but there are many that you can do without so many. Most of the group stuff we purposely set to a higher level to make it a bit more challenging for the players.

Joel: No. We've decided to keep those systems separate from each other.

Joel: Within certain quest lines, yes they will. But it's not like a faction system; it's not an alignment system. They may respond differently if you have been treating them poorly throughout the quest line, but it won't be something that they'll remember every time you talk to them.

We actually have some quests where your decisions actually cause you to go down one side or the other of a branching quest. There's one particular quest where there is this set of mantis people that have been enslaved by an evil Necromancer and he's using them to search the desert for an artifact. However, this Necromancer has gotten so busy that he's kicked his apprentice out of castle. You meet the apprentice on the road as you explore. He's a bitter man; he basically calls you a donkey's ass at one point in the dialogue. When you talk to him, he gives you a certain quest to go kill the Necromancer so he can take over the castle and enslave the mantis people for his own goals.

Quest rewards may be different in branching quest lines.

Later on you find a mantis person in the desert who tells you to talk with the chieftain. They want you to help free them from the evil Necromancer. Both of them ask you to do the same quest - kill the Necromancer - so you get to make that choice and picking one means excluding you from the other. The rewards are different as well.

While this may seem "limiting" to the players, I think people will go onto the internet and look at the items before proceeding upon this quest to see which piece of equipment they want. This also gives roleplayers the option to really flesh out their characters, even if the reward may not be optimal for their class.

That's always something I've wanted to see come out in MMOGs; this idea that making decisions has a consequence. While single player games can show changes based on your decisions, MMOGs can at least have some of this sort of consequence on a character level. It may not be 90% of the quests in the game, but these branching quests are there.

Joel: If they realize it's even branched. They may not even realize it until they look up the quest later.

Joel: There's this one quest in Stygia where you go and there's all these chickens running around a village that you can kill. If you start killing the chickens there's this guy called the "Chicken Handler" that comes out and shouts "LEAVE MY CHICKENS ALONE!" If you keep doing it, he'll eventually come out and kill you. However, there's another NPC in the next town over called the "Cock Handler." Don't laugh....

*laughter ensues*

We're mature people and this is a serious game. *laughs* And he's a rival of the Chicken Handler. He gives you a quest to go kill the Chicken Handler, but you need a group to actually kill the Chicken Handler because he's so tough. He's no pushover. When you kill the Chicken Handler and go back to the Cock Handler he gives you a two-handed sledgehammer type weapon called the Vanquisher of Poultry.

What do you think of the quests described in this interview? Will you be interested in the branching storylines? Let us know on the forums!

Ten Ton Hammer is your unofficial source for Age of Conan news and articles!