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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.”

style="">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.

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

[ style="">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

style="">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.

style="">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?

style="">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.

style="">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?

style="">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.

style="">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?

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

style="">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.

style="">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.

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

style="">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.

style="">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.