Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Interview

Age of Conan game director Craig Morrison answers four questions about Rise of the Godslayer in a new interview that popped up on VideoGamer over the weekend.

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.