| Q&A with Shannon Drake |
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Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is the first triple A MMO coming out this year. The game will allow players to immerse themselves in the world of Hyboria, a harsh and brutal land where they can embark in an amazing and action-filled journey, following the footsteps of the world’s greatest fantasy hero: Robert E. Howard’s Conan. With all the publicity ramping up for the launch on May 23rd we thought it would be nice to let our community members submit the questions they really wanted answers to. We gathered the best 15 questions and sent them to Funcom to be answered, with this Q&A as a result. Our thanks go out to Shannon "Pharamond" Drake for taking the time to answer these questions!
Pharamond: The truth of it is, we're still at a stage in computer games development where you have to make tradeoffs. Obviously, as developers, we want it all! But we're limited by what technology can do, to an extent. If you have a seamless world, for example, your character models might not be as detailed as ours are, or your environments might be more static, or what have you. There's always a sacrifice to be made on the technology side. But there's also the immersion and world design side of it. Hyboria is our own world thousands of years in the past and our own world is pretty damn big! Obviously, we couldn't make a world where it took months or years of time to get from Point A to Point B and still have it be a fun and interesting experience. The alternative to that is, of course, making the world smaller, but we thought Hyboria would lose some of its grandeur if you could walk from Stygia to Cimmeria in 5 minutes. It somehow seems less immersive and awe-inspiring that way than a quick loading screen. MMOZone: You have said that Age of Conan will not have any factions in the game. Is this a conscious decision or do you plan to add factions via content updates in the future? Pharamond: Factions in the World of Warcraft sense are not part of the vision for the world. Factions in the "Groups of people pursuing their own agenda" are definitely part of the world, in the story sense. What I'm saying is I wouldn't expect a faction grind anytime soon.  MMOZone: What will be the impact of buffs, potions and food on the gameplay. Are they so important you need to stand in line just to get those buffs when you log in, or will the dependence on these things be more subtle?Pharamond: Buffs will certainly be important, but I doubt you'll see queues for them. I'd call them nice to have. Potions are nice to have, but won't replace a priest in a group situation. They are strictly for when everything is going horribly awry and you need another chance, not something you'd rely on constantly. Food/drinks may provide small bonuses, but you won't be running back to town every time you run out. MMOZone: Speaking of buffs, a while ago it was said that players would be able to have sex and get a buff for doing so. Is this still planned, and if so, how ‘visual' will this buffing be? Pharamond: This is my favorite rumor! We don't have any plans for a sex buff and I suspect that was a developer meeting joke taken out of context. But who knows what we'll do if the demand is there?
"Player housing is something we'd like to add later. Specifics have to wait until we're at that point of "later." I'd hate to commit the dev team to something I blurted months/years before we even started thinking about it!"
Pharamond: No, that's not planned for launch. We have a huge number of armor sets and items, and designing all of them over and over again to look good in bright purple and neon pink and everything else could take years! As much as I like being the guy that looks like he got run over by a paint truck (if there's a guy running around with the worst possible color scheme possible in a game, it's me), we're shooting for something a little more realistic here. MMOZone: What kind of different buildings can we expect to see in player cities, and do these buildings actually serve a purpose? Do they differ from the buildings in battlekeeps? Pharamond: There's the keep, of course, which is sort of the central meeting spot, the heart of the city, if you will. There's also a Tradepost building, as well as profession-specific buildings for each class that does various nice things for those classes if you build them, and stuff for crafters as well. You can also put up walls and watchtowers to keep the bad guys out or impress your neighbors. The options are roughly the same. MMOZone: Will players actually get to buy their own houses and decorate them, or is this a feature you're going to add sometime in the future? Pharamond: Player housing is something we'd like to add later. Specifics have to wait until we're at that point of "later." I'd hate to commit the dev team to something I blurted months/years before we even started thinking about it! MMOZone: Is it possible to equip certain items such as flags and banners to let others know (in a visual way) that you belong to a certain guild? Similarly, is it possible to decorate your battlekeep or city with banners and flags? If not, what other means will players have to identify a battlekeep or city? Pharamond: There will be ways of telling who owns what, but we don't have custom banners/flags/etc.
"After launch, the team will be splitting into two parts. One part will focus on the game we have now, maintaining it, bugfixing, adding new things, and one part will focus on upcoming content, expansions, and so on. We know how important the first days, weeks, and months are, and that's where our initial focus will be until things settle down (as much as they ever do, anyway)."
 MMOZone: The combat system has been re-iterated many times. What were the biggest problems you encountered in developing and testing the combat system, and are you happy with how it currently is?Pharamond: The biggest problem with changing what people are used to is getting them acclimated to it. We saw this with the numerous iterations the combat has been through, and you can hardly blame them. When you spend 5-10 years playing every game a certain way, you log in and you expect to instantly hit auto-attack while occasionally hitting special moves. You see that in the early press, which got a lot of nervous "Well, it's no World of Warcraft…" even though the two systems are completely different. To that end, we've worked on the initial experience, making sure the game introduces you to the combos right upfront, there's lots of tutorial text, and you're doing them from the beginning and understanding how they work. And then there are all the technical issues with making an almost real-time system work, no easy feat in itself. MMOZone: Could you tell us a bit about your post-release plans for game content updates? Pharamond: After launch, the team will be splitting into two parts. One part will focus on the game we have now, maintaining it, bugfixing, adding new things, and one part will focus on upcoming content, expansions, and so on. We can't get any more specific than that right now, since we want to see how launch goes before promising anything. We know how important the first days, weeks, and months are, and that's where our initial focus will be until things settle down (as much as they ever do, anyway). MMOZone: Are you planning to add a more social endgame in the future, besides the obvious PvP and Raid content? (Things like a more elaborate crafting system, more advanced chat and emote support, etc.) Pharamond: We'll see what people want, in that regard, once things go live and players are playing the game. MMOZone: Do you have any plans to support paid or free character transfers between servers? Pharamond: Can't we get characters on the servers before people want to change from them? ;-) I don't know of plans for that, but that's not to say it won't happen.
"The core of the game is drawn from the original Robert E. Howard stories. We've sought to replicate the brutality of combat, the atmosphere of danger around every turn, and these dark and terrible things in the deep places of the earth waiting to strike, but I think the adventure of it all is key. You really want to feel like you're out having adventures and you're part of a wider world, and I think we've accomplished that."
Pharamond: Obviously, we've had to cut features that simply weren't workable or fun, but that's all part of the development process. Gaute just did an interview where he said he wanted to have 4 main concepts in the game from the very beginning, all those years ago. Those were: Hands-on combat, the atmosphere of Robert E. Howard's works, siege combat, and "you can be king." While we had to drop the last one, the rest are all in. The central vision is still intact, while some of the features didn't work out. But, ultimately, you (or at least I) can always tell when a developer shoe-horned in a feature that didn't work or wasn't very fun, but they stuck to their guns because they had a bullet point to meet or they were being stubborn or their fans demanded it. Ultimately, we don't want to be so entangled by our feature list that the game comes out lesser because of it.  MMOZone: What elements from the Conan lore and franchise have been your main inspiration and focus in doing the research for Age of Conan?Pharamond: The core of the game is drawn from the original Robert E. Howard stories. We've sought to replicate the brutality of combat, the atmosphere of danger around every turn, and these dark and terrible things in the deep places of the earth waiting to strike, but I think the adventure of it all is key. You really want to feel like you're out having adventures and you're part of a wider world, and I think we've accomplished that. Like, while you're out completing quests, your guild is building this great city, and another guild is plotting to take it down, but other guilds are plotting against that guild, and in the meantime, you have all these evil sorcerers and terrible creatures trying to kill you. Even when you're not around, the wheels are always turning. In addition to the original stories, we look at the comics (especially the Dark Horse comics), the movies, the RPGs from Mongoose, we talk to Conan Inc.. We're drawing not just from Howard, but from the wider world of Conan itself, which gives us an incredible wealth of information for just about anything you can imagine, and a lot of the other Conan licensees have a real "We're all in this together" air about them. MMOZone: Has the Conan franchise been a limitation on the creation of content for the game? Pharamond: I think every developer dreams of having 70+ years of content, backstory, etc. given to them when they pick up a license. You're being handed the keys to a world that millions of people all over the world already love. All you have to do is develop the game, so the hard work is done, right? (Sorry, I just wanted to make all our developers wince). It's not so much a limitation—except in the obvious "No, you can't ride on bumblebees while shooting space lasers at pirates" sense—as it is a challenge. I mean, on the basic level, you have to make a game the license holder approves of so they don't yank the license, but let's not be crude about it. You're trying to make a world that millions of people around the world already have in their head, one that hews to the lore while still being a game that people can play and enjoy. Ultimately, we're going to stick as closely to the lore as we can while still making a fun game. I think letting yourself get crucified by sticking to the original material too much is doing a disservice to it. It may just be me, heathen that I am, but I don't think the Lord of the Rings movies lose a lot by not having 8 hours of singing and walking around between every action sequence. Not every trope is suitable for every genre, and there's a point where a truly faithful adaptation would make for a lesser product. MMOZone: Is there anything else you'd like to share with the Dutch and Flemish fans? Pharamond: I feel like I should say something catchy in Dutch but don't know any Dutch. Ultimately, I am American!
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