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Our Gamers Get the Scoop

In the marketing scheme of things, it often doesn't pay to tell general reporters about quests. They want to hear things about blood and sex, and since there's plenty of this in Age of Conan, the quest system often gets ignored.

However, the Ten Ton Hammer staff members are more than just the general press; we're tried and true gamers. Cody "Micajah" Bye and community member Ben Avery took an extra day with the Funcom developers to really get to the heart of the details concerning the quests in AoC. To do this, we talked with Joel Bylos, quest designer for the game's 40-60 level range, at length, asking him numerous questions concerning the gods, his favorite quests, and the idea of branching quest lines.

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.

• Age of Conan Interview with Quest Designer Joel Bylos
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