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The Age of Conan Development Team
From left to right: Didrik Tollefsen, Terje Lundberg, Evan Michaels, Gaute Godager, Pål Hansen, Erling Ellingsen

Gaute Godager: First of all, you can solo to level 80 if you want to. Just like that, our surveys show, not only from Conan but also from other games that people actually solo for almost half their time, even though they’re listing themselves as socializers. So taking from the solo player, is looked not only as that we care for, but also something that is vital for an MMO success today. All of our outdoor playing fields are based primarily on solo game-play, so all our camps and setups should, 85 to 90 percent of the time be solo camps and solo setups that you can delve into. Same goes with 20 to 40, 50ish level instances. Most of them are solo instances.

As you go up in level you will find soloing available everywhere. We even have the infamous auto-con system that we carried over from Anarchy Online. We have a system there where we create the playfields or zones on the fly at your level, which you’ve seen all MMOs copy after we made it back in ’97.

We have this in Conan as well so there are actually repeatable quests with instances that are solo only.

Q: What kinds of server types are going to be available? PvP, RPvP, etc?

Gaute: There are going to be three server types at launch. They’re going to be called PvE; PvP, and PvPRP, which means that on the RP servers there will be PvP to some larger degree than on the PvE servers. We can make new types as well, but that’s what we’re going to launch with. In terms of what are the benefits that you gain from PK’ing someone or killing him in honest combat on a PvP server: there will be something there. But when we open the PvP server on beta now, we’re going to start it without anything and then we’re going to see how people react to it and then we’re going to adjust it accordingly.

Q: Some players want to loot something, or everything from the players they have killed. There seems to be a hard-core approach to PvP.

Gaute: Yes, that is the trend. I just need to say, also, that the vision for when we started out with Conan and how PvP should be: I wanted PvP to be like participating in a “Quake” match or something like that. Super casual; you go in there and you play, and that does not marry well with the hard-core, sort of “delete-the-character-when-you-die” approach.

We have the same discussion internally, and I can safely say that we listen when people say it, and we want to do something in that regard. I honestly do not want to promise anything there.

Q: Will the roleplay server have the same kind of ruleset as a normal PvP server?

Gaute: When we first make it, yes. But I want to tweak it so that what is going to be there at launch is something that… On the PvP servers, you have some rules per playfield that you can apply PvP and non-PvP; you have different types of rules, so that we can, if not on the fly, when we open a new server, you can have new sets of rules on that server. When I have the flexibility, and many needs, I want to be like a politician: vague and promise everything to everyone so that I can get the most votes come D-Day. [Laughs]. So that’s basically what I’m doing to you now. So we will the trend, and I will follow; like a true politician.

Q: How are you balancing healing classes and healing potions? Do you need a priest?

Evan Michaels: A potion cannot be better than a priest. Potions are there to be a helper tool, basically, to people who are playing alone or in groups that get into a rough situation. They’re reasonably powerful but like the rest of our heals they are healing over time. So they’re useful, especially as we found in PvP, and keep that in mind when you’re doing the PvP matches. I don’t know if they’ll let you have potions or not, but they’re very useful. They’re basically a way for a character to be somewhat sufficient and they’re very useful while soloing.

Most of the priests have a different way of approaching healing. The Bear Shaman, for instance, becomes much better at healing as you melee and things like that. You get stacking buffs that make your heals more powerful; these are all things that players have to learn and figure out as time goes on.

But to simply answer your question: Yes, priests will be required at high end, and potions will not replace priests.

I think this goes back to the earlier question of what we get out of beta. We test this internally. We have QA test it but when we’re having hundreds and thousands of people playing a class on a given day, we get a lot of feedback and get to observe a lot of behavior – what people are doing, how they’re doing it, what skills they’re finding useful, what skills they’re ignoring. Those are all things that we adjust and tweak on a daily basis, really.

Q: What about the user interface, and online profiles? Is there anything supported in that regard?

Gaute: The backend for a site that supports making your own homepage with stuff that you do and all that; all that is there and we’re working with partners to find the best solution, but there’s nothing I can say about what will be there at launch, currently.

We have support for some limited UI customization. We have a UI toolkit that you can change the looks of everything. There isn’t any scripting language supported in the UI currently. This was not only a time issue, but also a choice that we made because I think that we didn’t, at launch, want to let that cat out of the bag to make it that way. We will include customization of the UI in the roadmap post-launch, where you can do more heavy-duty changing of stuff. But right now, you can change in the xml files positioning, the looks, the size but not the functioning of elements.

Q: What kind of differences can we expect between the Xbox 360 version of the game and the PC version and what are some of the challenges you’ve faced while developing a MMORPG for a console?

Gaute: Of course, there’s the joypad, which is the main controller interface. Naturally, our game was designed with that purpose in mind, and our combat, especially melee, lends itself very well to that system. We will expect the Xbox 360 version to be slightly bigger than the PC version, so there is going to be extra, added content there that will be available.

There are also, technically, quite a few challenges when squeezing it into the Xbox. I can’t really say which playfield will be added or which feature will be added because it’s too early and we need to let the Xbox have its own run and have its own press releases, and you will all be back for the Xbox version sometime in the future, I hope, and we will discuss how that content will be integrated into the PC version, and if Microsoft wants it, how both will be able to play on the same server, if that’s what they want.

I think what I would say is that I would guess an expansion pack for the PC and the Xbox merger would work well together, so that you could basically see an upgrade to the game, and the Xbox version come out. Other than that, I think Conan is going to be the first truly MMO that is designed for a high-end platform. I hope so, at least.

Q: Are you thinking about translating the game into other languages (apart from the initial Spanish, French, English and German releases)?

Erling Ellingsen: There is no definite plan for it, but it’s definitely one of the most important markets for us in Europe, along with France, Spain and Germany and the UK. So, perhaps, but there are no plans for it.

Q: What possibilities are you going to give the roleplayer in Age of Conan? Things like sitting on chairs, carrying a torch, stuff that’s not really a game mechanic but would be more for the “feeling” of the world?

Gaute: At launch, you will expect to see some interaction but I don’t really know what will make it. You will expect to see a massive list of emotes with unique animations and/or particle effects. You will expect to see special locations made for this, like bars and pubs and whatnot. There isn’t going to be anything regarding decorating your player-made city or village houses like putting up plants in there, like UO style, which I loved, but it’s not going to be there.

So, fairly extensive in terms of the number of things you can do within one category, like emotes, but not too many categories.

Q: What kind of rules will be in place on the role-playing servers?

Gaute: Rulesets in terms of player versus player interaction. There are going to be some rules there that you can do and what you cannot do. In terms of fighting at least, of course we need to control that. Even on a PvPRP server you don’t want to be chain-ganked at your respawn point, or level 1-5 or anything like that.

In terms of rules of conduct, which I think are the ones that you are thinking about, it is natural for us to make, before launch, a list of rules of conduct for those servers; what we expect people to do. What we will do about policing them, that’s a question of customer support and the cost. So I guess we will have to discuss that with customer support. But, yes, there will be something like that.

Q: Can you explain the PvP towers and battlekeep?

Gaute: These are smaller objectives that will use the same sort of technology as the battlekeeps, which means that they will have windows, where they are open, which will give the destroyer an aggressive bonus once he destroys it. The bonus is going to be based around how long the opponent that owned the tower used to own it before you destroyed it, so if someone is chain destroying it, it won’t be as much as if you let someone stay there and then you go and destroy it. You will also be gaining benefits from owning that tower until it is destroyed, continuously. It’s like a mining station; your place on a resource node, so you might say.

These battle towers are going to be much more open for less powerful guilds and groups, because naturally, our battlekeeps are going to be severely PvP, hard-core and there are only going to be a set number of them. We’re not going to instance them, no matter how many players are in the world, and no matter how many guilds we have; they are only going to be the one to nine best ones that will be able to have those battlekeeps.

So these are PvP objectives in the world with bonuses, but will have more easy access.