Age of Conan Status Interview, Part Two

The second half of RPG Vault’s interview with Funcom’s Craig Morrison about the current state of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is now available.

Jonric: Since it seems pretty significant, what considerations prompted you to overhaul Age of Conan’s RPG systems? What aspects are you concentrating on why?

Craig Morrison: Yes, it was definitely a significant decision, but I think a vital one. As soon as it was apparent last summer that customer retention wasn’t what we would have liked, we set about analyzing all the feedback and getting to the root of the issues – above and beyond the obvious performance ones we were addressing or had already fixed. The player feedback helped us in that respect, and let us look at the system in detail to learn why it wasn’t as appealing as we had hoped.

Age of Conan was designed not to be item-centric. However, our analysis showed we probably went too far in this direction, relegating gear to a position where players didn’t see it as a valid progression path, which I think is a fundamental weakness for an RPG system. So, we didn’t quite get it right, and what we’re doing now is trying to find the correct balance and improve it to provide better progression drivers and to allow our designers to make more challenging and varied gameplay.

In addition, the players felt the core attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) didn’t have enough weight in their characters’ progression. Again, when we broke it down, we agreed with this feedback, and set out on the RPG system revamp to address this too, with the goal of making both equipment and attributes better and more useful without going too far down the “items mean everything” road. They will mean more after the changes for sure, but hopefully, we’ll find the right balance.