Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview

RPG Vault has uploaded the first installment of a two-parter interview to catch up on the status of Funcom’s upcoming Conan MMORPG.

Jonric: Why has development taken longer than initially expected? Why has it been difficult to predict your rate of progress despite Funcom’s prior experience?

Gaute Godager: First of all, I would like to state that we already had the foundation for an awesome MMO when we announced the latest delay. Furthermore, to look at the bigger picture of the genre today, it is not “simply” a matter of delay, but of what level of quality you need to succeed in today’s market. To me, it is also very clear that those conditions have changed quite radically since we started development in 2003.

To continue on this thread, there are naturally many, many additional reasons beyond these obvious facts. Now is not the time to write a really thorough postmortem on the game’s development, but let me discuss a couple of things I deem to be vital. One is that we have learned the schedule is a tool to control cost. Quality is the tool to sell games. We simply decided to invest more in the quality of the game than we initially decided. This was not an easy decision, but it’s definitely a problem where we are proud to have made the right decision.

The other is that the sheer interest in the game led us to invest more in its scope. We see that we have sparked a global surge, almost a movement, for more real, more brutal and more directly controlled MMOs. The feedback we are and have been getting has simply been awesome. It is almost like the people who have played MMOs for nearly a decade now want something, how shall I put it, “meatier” on their plate.

In all fairness, we are not the only ones with experience who have not been able to hit the initial target dates for an MMO. Still, I am not defending it as an “automatic” aspect of MMO game development. What is a fact, however, is that the MMOs of today are in a different league in terms of complexity, and especially now that we are in the post-World of Warcraft era.