Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Preview

VideoGamer.com: You've talked about making decisions that affect how different factions treat you. Once you've made a decision is that it, or can you reverse your alignment?

CM: There will be betrayal quests where you can actually betray the current faction that you're on. That'll make things difficult for you for a short period of time because you've not quite earned enough respect with your old enemies for them to go, oh we've forgot all about it! You know, open arms? So the player would have to go through gameplay and do quests to build up their faction then with the opposite side. And I'm sure there are some players who will do that purely because they want to get all the rewards - right I've got all the armour from these guys, okay, betrayal quest time! I'm going over to these. And that's fine. You have to recognise the genre you work in. We're an MMO and it's fine that some players react in that way, and some players will take their choices more seriously and see it as, I want to play through this story. But if they get to a certain point and they've made a decision that suddenly they realise oh, these guys are evil now, I was mistaken before, okay I'm going to switch, I'm actually going to take a storyline choice to switch and see what the other faction has to say. There will also be completists in the story sense who want to experience the story in each of the factions. In many ways you get told aren't you making content then that some of the players won't see? I'm reading Peter Molyneux talking about Fable, that only 15 per cent of his players played the evil side, and the development team spent all that time making that content. In MMOs it gives you the benefit that you're able to allow players to go back and forth. Over time if they want to they can go back and explore that other side of the story as well, so in actual fact over time they get access to even more content.

VideoGamer.com: Finally, can you tell me when Rise of the Godslayer will be released?

CM: It is to be announced. It's a personal thing for me. I very much believe in getting some testing done first. We literally haven't set even an approximate release date yet. We are fairly far along. You can see from the footage. We have it playable on the show floor. This isn't something that's just in our minds. Since the turn of the year the guys have been working. We've split the teams in Oslo. There are still over a hundred people working on Conan. Some of the resources are shared, but we have 30 people working exclusively on the expansion and the design and the implementation of the play fields. So we are relatively far along in the process. People are playing. Online people are actually playing Chosain Province play field at the moment, but I very much want to start the testing process first before we start talking about when the release dates might be. And then we'll make decisions once we're done.

We have the advantage that we have our testing community for our live game. We have test servers and we have a loyal testing community I really can't thank enough. They spend their own time playing on test versions of our game to give us feedback and see where it's going. People who have been helping us there with the live product, they'll very much start helping us with testing the expansion as well. So once the first testing phase is done then we'll have a pretty good idea about time frames and when we'll be looking to launch it.

Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer is due out exclusively for PC.