Should you give Age of Conan a second chance?

Funcom wants you to give its MMORPG Age of Conan a second chance. It’s reactivated everyone’s account and allowed them to play, for free, for two weeks. But why should you bother? We caught up with director Craig Morrison to find out.

VideoGamer.com: You’re re-activating the accounts of everyone who has ever played Age of Conan so they can play for free. Why are you doing that?

Craig Morrison: We’ve obviously made a lot of progress over the last year since launch and we wanted to give players the chance to come back, revisit the game and see for themselves. It’s very easy for us to sit here in interviews with you and other members of the press and give a slightly biased opinion when it comes to how far along the game’s come and the things we’ve changed and fixed and adjusted and whether they’ll like what they see. The real test is in getting players to come back and see for themselves and try it out and see what’s changed and get to experience it all for themselves.

VideoGamer.com: What are the details of the promotion?

CM: The re-evaluation offer will be going out to all the players who have previously subscribed to the game. It will give them a period of time to play for free with no commitment and just try the game. They’ll have full access to the characters that they had last time they played. If they had a character above level 50 when they last played they will also be able to take advantage of the new system that we introduced in the last update that allows players to create a new character at level 50 if they’ve already got that far, so they can even try out a different class if they like.

VideoGamer.com: How long will it last for?

CM: 14 days. They have a full two weeks to play and see the changes and get an impression of how far along the game has come in the last year.

VideoGamer.com: For people who have played Age of Conan before but don’t currently, what has changed?

CM: It depends on when they last played. Obviously since launch last year an awful lot has changed in the game. We’ve added a lot more content. We spent the first six months after the launch assessing the feedback from the players, of what they felt worked and what didn’t quite work after the launch. We’ve put a lot of work and effort into addressing those areas and making sure that we have taken into account that player feedback and look at the kind of things that we could add to resolve the issues that players had at launch.

If they played pretty soon after the launch, they’ll see quite a dramatic change. There’s an awful lot of new content. We’ve done three major content additions in that time. We’ve revamped all of the dungeons in the game that were there at launch. We’ve added whole new PvP systems from launch, so they can gain XP and items through that. In the latest game update we completely revamped the items and statistics in the game and how those bear on the character. Some of the early feedback when the game launched was that the players felt that the items and the statistics in the items were a little bit obtuse and they didn’t affect the character enough. So we’ve done a major game update that went live recently that addresses those and allows the player to see very easily – the items are much easier for the player to understand now – how they affect their character. So there is an awful lot of stuff that we’ve changed. And that’s before we go into all the new actual new content that we’ve added. There are large new play fields, several new large dungeons and in the latest game update an area called Tarantia Commons, where the players are in a very urban environment in King Conan’s capital city, which is a large outdoor play field with two separate dungeons.

VideoGamer.com: For those who have never played Age of Conan before and might be tempted now the game is having this re-promotion, how would you describe it?

CM: The beauty of Age of Conan is twofold. It’s different than a lot of other games that are on the market at the moment in that it’s a very mature and brutal setting. The world of Conan that Robert E. Howard described in his original writings is a very visceral and brutal environment. It’s not a high fantasy setting; it’s a low fantasy setting. It’s a very dark and foreboding world, and the game world captures that. It does instantly feel very different to the other types of MMO games that are available at the moment. It’s obviously one of the best-looking games in the genre, by far. The visuals bring it out and allow players to see and experience that great world. Secondly, the game’s combat system offers something very unique and different in the genre. It’s much more interactive and dynamic. The players have to think about their positioning, how they use their attack – it just makes for a more involved experience. The player is in the middle of the fight, as it were. It’s not very standoffish as you get in some of the other games in the genre, where it’s very much just waiting to press a button. It’s a very immediate, involved combat system, which gets the player into the thick of the action. It’s more exciting than what they’re used to in the genre.

VideoGamer.com: How much does Age of Conan cost to play in the UK?

CM: For UK gamers the current price at retail varies depending on where you’re getting it. The game is obviously a year old now. I would imagine that it’s perfectly possible in the UK to find it at £19.99 or below. Obviously high street retailers will have their own discounts and sales on older software. The subscription varies depending on how many months in advance you pay for. If you’re paying month by month it’s £14.99. If you commit to longer periods you get discounts on the monthly price based on the duration you’re subscribing for.

VideoGamer.com: Is it good value to be paying for an MMO at the moment?

CM: For sure. In the current economic climate there are very few entertainment options that offer the kind of value for money, especially if you’re going to break it down by how much you pay per hour, for the type of entertainment you get. MMO games are a great source of entertainment when the financial climate is the way it is at the moment.

VideoGamer.com: I’ve read online an analyst estimate that Age of Conan has about 100,000 subscribers. Is that accurate or way off?

CM: I’m afraid I’m not allowed to answer that question. We’re a publicly listed company in Norway on the Oslo stock exchange. Subscriber numbers, we’re only allowed to communicate volumes through our financial quarterly reports. What I can say is we have seen very positive trends in both the subscriber and player online numbers since Christmas. We’re definitely progressing in the right direction and we’re very happy to see that positive progression starting to come after the issues that the game had after its launch last year.

VideoGamer.com: For those who are concerned about the future of the game, they shouldn’t be?

CM: Oh for sure. MMOs are a long-term investment. Just last week Anarchy Online, the other MMO that we currently run live celebrated its eighth birthday of being live. I see Conan running for just as long, if not longer. These games, we’re in it for the long term. We as a company know how to run the games cost effectively in the long term. We’re a publicly traded company. Anyone who wants to look up our financial situation can see that the company is very sound and has a large amount of cash equity sitting there in the bank. We’ll be here for some time to come.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned Anarchy Online. When might you guys do a sequel to that game?

CM: Sequels are quite problematic for MMOs. You don’t necessarily need to do one without the risk of damaging the existing game. AO has been running for eight years now and has a very established community for that game. We’re certainly not considering a direct sequel to it at the moment. AO still makes money and is still successful today. I worked on Anarchy Online before Age of Conan and I loved the game. They’ll continue to push on. They have a very loyal and dedicated customer base that’s been around for many years now and continue to enjoy the game. I don’t think it’s something we would see as making a sequel to right now. Obviously we’ve got The Secret World coming up. Now that Age of Conan is out we’re always as a company trying to have two major titles in the works. Maybe in some point in the future after The Secret World is out then… you never know. It’s certainly an IP that we love. It’s a great game world. I wouldn’t say never, but there’s certainly no plans in the immediate future.

VideoGamer.com: Going back to Age of Conan, it’s generally accepted that it suffered a troubled launch, but would it be fair to say that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has made every new MMO suffer a troubled launch in terms of the standard and the high bar it’s set?

CM: I think it’s definitely a challenge for the industry. Initially Conan had a very successful launch in terms of anticipation and the number of people who bought a copy of the game and wanted another great MMO to compete with World of Warcraft. So the potential was always there. You’re right, a game such as World of Warcraft that’s now been live for four or five years and has four or five years worth of content updates and additions, it makes it very hard for new games to come into the genre and establish that foothold. If you were to compare the games month on month in terms of their content and level of polish, the newer titles aren’t that far away from where World of Warcraft was when it first launched, but obviously that’s not the average player’s perception of World of Warcraft, because they’re used to what it is now. It definitely presents a challenge for other MMO games because you’re not going to get that grace period as it were. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. It sets a bar that other people have to aspire to. It’s certainly a challenge. I don’t think anyone has quite been up to that challenge yet. You only have to look at games like Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, they’re all good solid MMOs, and they haven’t quite been able to get that same foothold into what I guess is the growth that World of Warcraft had. Much of that probably is to do with the fact that the World of Warcraft that people know today isn’t just a result of the six, seven years of development they had prior to launch, it’s also the four years or more they’ve had after launch, where they’ve been able to improve. I don’t think games like ourselves, we never set out to say we will be bigger than World of Warcraft. Anyone who went out and said that would have to have a lot of money behind them and forgiving investors. To have a goal of being that big, you would have to have a fairly significant development team and budget behind you.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think any new MMO will dwarf World of Warcraft or have we reached the glass ceiling?

CM: In the future you can never tell. If you went back four years, people were looking at the expectations for MMOs around the time that EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft launched, no one, and I don’t even think Blizzard thought that they would be able to get that many customers playing an MMO. If you’d sat down with Blizzard six months before they launched and said you’ll have 12 million customers, they probably would have thought you were crazy too. You can never tell. The industry develops. As more and more people get online and are used to playing online games – because the definitions of online games and the MMO genre as a whole starts to blur. You already have some titles in the casual gaming space, like Habbo Hotel, and children’s games like Club Penguin, that do rival World of Warcraft in terms of user numbers. You can never tell. If someone comes up with the right idea… Purely in the genre, if you were trying to copy World of Warcraft, I don’t think anyone will be able to produce a better copy of World of Warcraft if you know what I mean.

VideoGamer.com: You mean like a fantasy MMORPG?

CM: Yeah. Someone for sure in the next two, three, five, ten years, there is bound to be another title that comes out with a slightly different approach, with something we haven’t thought of yet, that allows them to capture that mass market. What World of Warcraft did was it managed to move out of the purely MMO genre and into the mainstream. A number of things lined up correctly for them. It was a great game, well designed with lots of polish. Once a game gains critical momentum and starts moving into the mainstream it becomes a something more than itself. There’s potential for another game in the future to do that.

VideoGamer.com: Was World of Warcraft’s success luck on Blizzard’s part?

CM: I don’t think anyone who has a game that successful and has their track record can chalk it down to luck. They have a great approach to development and they make good polished games that are fun. That’s the key thing. If a game is fun… I mentioned even World of Warcraft had a slightly rocky initial period when they had launch issues just like everyone else, but at the end of the day the game was fundamentally fun. People quickly saw the potential and then they were able to develop it and grow it and make it even better. That’s what Blizzard does best. I certainly wouldn’t attribute their success to luck. Maybe right time in the right place with the right product, but that to me that’s as much smart business moves and being in the right market at the right time than it is anything to do with luck.

VideoGamer.com: Finally, if there’s one reason why people should give Age of Conan another chance, what is it?

CM: It does truly offer something a little bit different. We’ve been talking about World of Warcraft and other games, they all tend to centre on a very high fantasy… a lot of the games are very similar with a similar setting. Age of Conan stands out both with its mechanics of combat and for the mature game setting. The low fantasy setting sets it apart. The visual splendour we’ve been able to put in the game, and the fact that it is using current generation graphics technology to push it as far as we can in an MMO environment, you are getting something truly different when you play Conan to some of the other MMOs. You’re getting something unique that does offer a different play experience.

To reactivate a closed Age of Conan account head over to ageofconan.com.