Age of Conan – Hyborian Adventures Interview

Let’s admit it – World of Warcraft is the best MMO out there. And I’m not going out on a limb here – 9.3 million subscribers agree. It’s swept all before it, destroying its MMO rivals one by one on its relentless march towards world domination. But that hasn’t stopped other developers from having a shot. VideoGamer.com travelled to a freezing Norway to see Funcom, developers of upcoming MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, to ask product manager Erling Ellingsen, associate producer Ole Herbjornsen and quest designer Joel Bylos exactly why their game stands a chance.

VideoGamer.com: Why did you decide to do an MMO?

Ole Herbjornsen: Well Funcom had already done an MMO with Anarchy Online, so we had experience of that genre already. We saw the potential of the MMO and saw that it was the future – socialising and playing in teams. Counter Strike for example, and you see the online community it builds. We also saw the potential to increase the market for MMOs by trying to attract new players, which is why I wanted to have an easy introduction to the game, with a single-player experience essentially. So we have experience with MMOs and we think it’s the future.

Erling Ellingsen: And of course also recurring revenues. We can all be honest about that. Piracy is getting to be a bigger and bigger problem. With online games, if you can do it right you can make a lot of money.

Joel Bylos: And the technology is there now, where it wasn’t. Internet connections are much faster.

EE: And that’s not because we really want a lot of money, of course we do! It’s one of the ways we can stay afloat. Running a gaming company today is hard.

VideoGamer.com: But then making a success of an MMO is quite hard these days. Is there any danger that Age of Conan might not be a success?

OH: I guess there’s always the danger that it could happen. We can’t brainwash or control anybody. We just have to do our best. We’ve been in beta for some time now, and we need to take all that feedback and put it back into the game. That’s what we can do. Then it’s up to the players to decide if they think our game is good or not.

JB: I like to let the management worry about that and we’ll worry about making the game great. A lot of people think about money. A lot of people seem to think that when you’re making games you’re thinking about money and how you’re going to make them. We’re thinking about what’s fun for us. I don’t think there’s a single person at Funcom who hasn’t played a computer game before. That goes from the CEO of the company down to the cleaners. Everybody here plays games and everybody here knows what they like.

EE: Even the cleaners?

JB: Yeah!

OH: But you know it’s something we always walk around thinking about. We know that if we don’t do it right it can really bomb. That’s why we have delayed the game a few times, because we want to make sure the game is perfect when it launches. It’s difficult to recover from a bad launch.

VideoGamer.com: How popular has the beta been?

EE: I can’t talk about numbers unfortunately because we are a listed company on the stock exchange. For instance we announced that in the first 24 hours after we put out the application we had 50,000 sign-ups. And of course it’s grown and grown after that. It’s huge. It’s fantastic. We have just announced that we have 10,000 people in the beta now. Of course we had many more applicants but that’s the number we have now.

VideoGamer.com: Is AoC targeting people who don’t play MMOs or people who do?

JB: Both. Without a doubt both. I think we’ve taken things that are definite elements of single-player games but they work. People like them in single-player games, they’re things that make single-player games great. We’ve tried to bring them to an MMO environment and it works. And of course all of that time we spent making it work but that’s the rub. I think it will appeal to both types. With the hardcore PvP systems we’re implementing is going to appeal to a lot of hardcore MMOers, but I also think our level one to 20 single-player multi-player area hybrid, including later on the Destiny Quest which basically leads you through the game, plus the way that we’ve designed quests a lot of the time in the game, it’s not your standard MMO. You’ll see all that. It’s going to appeal to both types of player.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think people are getting tired of World of Warcraft and might be looking for something different?

JB: Yeah. There’s definitely that feeling on the Internet. You get that just from online communities, which of course we all pay attention to as well. But I think one mistake a lot of people make is they design a game to be WoW and WoW was successful on its own two legs and that’s what Conan is going to do. It’s going to stand on its own two legs. It has its own formula for success, and WoW has its own formula for success and it works very well and we have our own formula for success.

EE: One of the big selling points is that we’re so different. That’s what we’ve tried to communicate to everyone, that this is not World of Warcraft. It’s completely different.

VideoGamer.com: Is it annoying to always have to say that?

EE: No it’s not annoying because it gives us the chance to tell people why it’s different.

JB: I mean we all respect WoW. Everybody working in the industry respects WoW and what it’s done. But you can’t design a game and think I’m competing with that. You have to think we’re making our own game and we’re making it fun in its own right. It shouldn’t be fun in a WoW sense, it should be fun in a Conan sense.

OH: I think the way we look at WoW is that Blizzard did a really good job of opening up the MMO market and we want to have a share of this market, a piece of the cake.

VideoGamer.com: Does WoW’s popularity mean it will help other MMOs like Conan because more people will have a basic understanding of how it works?

JB: It brings people to try it but it’s not WoW. Hopefully when people come to try it they won’t go well this isn’t WoW. I hope their expectations aren’t that. They should be looking for Conan. So I really hope that people come in to try our game with an open mind looking for something different. Because if they come in expecting WoW that’s not AoC, that’s something else.

VideoGamer.com: Why set the game in the Conan universe?

OH: Robert E. Howard’s book’s, which are like 70 years old, they had a very intriguing universe. The license was also available as well, that’s very important. A lot of other licenses were taken and this was one of the most interesting ones that wasn’t taken already. The mature setting. I guess the stories themselves – how they can inspire us to go out there and build this fantastic world.

JB: I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of the Howard short stories, they feel like computer game levels almost when you read them. It translates so well to a computer game it’s amazing. Everybody’s seen Conan in some form in their life, whether they read comics, read the books or watched the movies, it all comes into the game. When you play the game you get that Conan feeling, that brutal world feeling and that’s something that appeals very much. In a game setting it’s a perfect license for that sort of thing.

VideoGamer.com: What identifies Conan as unique?

OH: The combat system, with all the head chopping and brutality!

JB: I’m a dialogue fan so I think it’s our dialogue system. It’s amazing. It really adds something to the MMOs that hasn’t been there before.

EE: I’d have to go with the combat. It’s just so much fun playing it, especially when you get to higher levels. It’s not boring, grinding combat. It’s just really cool.

VideoGamer.com: Is Conan in the game?

JB: Yes he is! He is very central to the story.

OH: He is in a palace and you will get access to the palace eventually.

JB: Conan himself is a reward in the game, let’s put it that way. To meet Conan is part of the reward system. So if you play your cards right you’ll get there.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time guys.