Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview

Play.tm offers an interview with product manager Erling Ellingsen on the upcoming MMO Age of Conan.

How will Howard’s epic plots be woven into the fabric of the game?

Ultimately, this is a massive online game and that involves bringing thousands of players into the same game world. Not everyone can be heroes, and not everyone can create world-changing events. It’s just the nature of these types of games — we simply have to put in a few more rules and restrictions than you would normally find in an offline game. But there is still a lot of story here, and the game is basically filled to the brim with lore. There are hundreds upon hundreds of quests, and we’re really trying to create small stories rather than tasks (which is typically “go get this for me” or “go kill this for me”). One example is the quest where you will need to sentence a man to death. We also have the destiny quests, a long quest line running through the entire game, an epic drama that has a huge impact on the game.

How ambitious an undertaking is your modeling of the game’s nations and landscapes – and how will this compare to other MMOs?

We are actually putting a lot of effort into making the environments believable. We wanted landscapes in the game to look grand and real. We wanted mountains to look like they were millions of years old, and we wanted cities to have that lived-in feeling to them where it really looks like someone built everything by hand using only hammers and nails. The first thing you will see in Age of Conan is that the mountains really are tall and enormous — you can walk up a mountain path, climb steep cliffs and spend a lot of time just walking up the the top. It’s much more than just a mere backdrop, everything is very much explorable. It’s the same with cities. They are simply so full of detail and complexity, to a degree never before seen in any massive online game before./i>

Spotted on Blue’s News.