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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

Q: There’s been some talk of “Best of the Best.”

Gaute Godager: The leveling system is quite hardcore, so that means that, I don’t know how much detail we want to go in there, but basically you lose xp when you die; PvP xp when you die. So it’s hardcore. You can’t de-level but oh my god it’s hard to be the best.

I am a bit more casual… which is why I lean more on other people.

If you are highest level PvP you are… there’s not going to be that many of those, to put it that way.

Evan Michaels: We’ve PvP’d in the office about this topic a lot.

[Laughs.]

We actually ended up having a very large discussion about this not that long ago because it is a very important issue to us. We’ve obviously focused on PvP a fair bit and it’s something players will definitely enjoy about the game.

Another thing that we’re looking at is post-launch rewards. We have the current leveling system but we also have plans to reward people for that level after a set period of time. So we give people some time to settle down and fight over their level and then at intervals we’ll look at basically rewarding people based on what level they’ve managed to gain in that period of time. So we’re just keeping an eye on it and seeing what we can implement and what people like

Gaute: At launch, your power increase and standing will be nulled when you increase in level and then after a set number of months, it will enter the game. And then after a set number of months it will change according to the balance at that time and then we will keep doing that. And so it will make a “season” as you might have seen in other games.

Erling Ellingsen: Ok, we have to do last question now.

Q: Will it be advantageous enough to encourage everyone to optimize their equipment based on the content they’re doing or will it be ok to just keep one type of sword, for instance, at all times?

Gaute: The penalties of not doing that is what decides if you force people to do it or not. Today I think it’s a set percentage of the raid targets that will encourage/force you to do it at high levels. And then a fair bit of mobs, lower level, that will be having a certain type of protection gear towards certain types of damage that will encourage you to do it. But the point is that, except for raids, what the player does, the “lazy” type which you’ve described, which is the normal type, he will basically only do it if they find that the drops from that individual mob is good enough for us to encourage it hard enough. So that’s how we’re going to do it. But I think that most soloers will go: “I’m just going to go somewhere else because this is a passage for my high level situation.” Many people think that way.

So I hope that we will be able to do it and it is our goal. If it’s enough – that remains to be seen.

Evan: As someone who has to balance this stuff, it’s obviously a fine balance because we don’t want to make it impossible for people to play if they’re normal. I don’t think anybody wants to feel like they’re chained to their desk having to farm.

A lot of the way that we have dealt with this is by emphasizing the tradeskill system, and the tradeskill system allows for creating customized gear extremely easily with the socketing system. Basically a tradeskill weapon, armor piece, whatnot is a blank slate. It has no specific mods on it at all and it has a certain amount of sockets that you can put the sockets into that are also created by a different tradeskill and the result of that is your item.

So that allows us to have quite a lot of variety quite easily. Hopefully it will be reasonably practical to find a local tradeskiller and get something made up without too much effort. The effort is a big part of what you say about “laziness” and whatnot. If it’s reasonably easy to get, people will get kind of eased into it.

Q: Does carrying items around eat up too much of your inventory space?

Gaute: That’s exactly why the trade/crafting inventory has 100 slots in addition to your normal stuff and we can do it on the fly. You can really see, there’s a set of tools you can just use there and then you add to those types of situations.

Evan: I’ll also mention that for every critical bonus that we have on an item or on a piece of equipment, we have a version of it that only applies to PvP. So basically for every single stat that will buff. So what this allows us for us to create specific PvP oriented gear. So that’s another reason that people will want to consider their gear set, especially if they PvP actively and swap back and forth and things like that. It will be very useful, especially given the bonuses of holding keeps and things like that. It will be very lucrative for players to keep an eye on that.

Q: So a normal PvE weapon won’t necessarily be awesome for PvP?

Evan: It may, it may not. There might be better. It’s depending on what you have; what you have available, things like that.

Gaute: I think Evan and I share one characteristic. Maybe many, but at least one. We find number crunching game-play fun. I designed the AO skill system, and he’s the one that ripped it apart. The AO mainframe – that’s him. He’s too dangerous to have on the streets.

It’s the lookup tool that basically was reverse engineered to complete the AO database, which is also why we made it encrypted for Conan.

Evan: It’s two sides of the coin. You have a lot of people who love numbers who play MMOs, you have a lot of people who are casual and they meet somewhere in the middle and you have to provide stuff for both of them. There’s a lot of crossover there and the casual people do occasionally like feeling like they’re doing something tricky to trick the system. “I beat the system. I equipped this, and I did way better than I was supposed to.” People like that sense of accomplishment.

Gaute: And we encourage it. We on purpose make the system so that you can reveal stuff we didn’t think of.

Evan: So it’s a bit of that and we want people to play with their equipment, and their spec and their character and, you know, try to find what works best for them.

It’s a tough job, but it’s important for an MMO environment, mostly because you’re in with other players so you’re comparing yourself to other players all the time. There’s always a drive there to be better than the person next to you. So we kind of play on that.

Gaute: I think one of the most interesting and challenging things for me personally, in Conan, has been the extreme need to not make the learning curve in Conan in any way similar to AO.

But, and this is the challenging part, let that type of type of game-play blossom towards the end of the game because that’s when you really feel that your mental skill should matter in everything you do. And that back-propagates into the way you move your hands on the keyboard. So that type of mental skill and challenge combines with a physical, playing around, jumping around, and a more hands-on combat than you see in other games.

So that’s been a really fun challenge I think: telling people to do slightly opposite of what they’re thinking they’re doing. That’s been really fun.