Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview

IGN’s AoC Vault recently chatted up Age of Conan associate producer Per Storløkken about what the team has in the works for the MMORPG’s not-too-distant future.

AOCVault: Oh we just can’t wait! But what we’re REALLY looking forward to is, of course, raiding. What about Tier 3 raid content – since this is first encounter made from ground up while new RPG system is in place, how do you go about making a more balanced ‘difficulty’ rating for new locations/bosses?

Devs: – This is a difficult question to answer; there have been many changes over the last year that has made a significant impact on the Tier 3 raids. We have spent a lot of time and effort learning from our early mistakes. There are especially three major contributions: The new RPG system, feedback and data we have received from Live and a complete restructure of the foundation we’re building our raid encounters on.

– Most of our current raid content was made before the game was released. We have learned quite a bit about our players since then, their approach to our game, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of our systems in raid settings. We have received a lot of good feedback from our players, both on Live and the test server. Based on this feedback we have both rebalanced and changed existing encounters. I guess the most amusing thing for us was when we fixed a problem that would cause players to get randomly one-shotted by a boss, and there was a massive outcry from the players to the point where we decided to re-introduce the one-shot ability as a slightly less random feature of the encounter.