Letter from the Game Director #1 - Savage and sexy!

Age of Conan's commander in chief, Gaute Godager, puts his thoughts on paper as he addresses the community in this first installment of a new "Letter from" series.

Greetings fellow Barbarians!

What you are reading right now is the first of my new series of letters directed at you, Age of Conan’s great community. Hopefully I can make this a trend! Today’s message is about being “Savage and Sexy”! Let me start with, hm, savage. Better get this out of the way first, huh? (By the way, thanks to the marketing department for so lavishly supplying us with that double-s ;p)

Why would we want to talk about something like being savage. Let me start as any boring essay by listing the definition: (another thanks: dictionary.com Follow the link for a full definition..)

–adjective
1. fierce, ferocious, or cruel; untamed: savage beasts.
2. uncivilized; barbarous: savage tribes.
3. enraged or furiously angry, as a person.
4. unpolished; rude: savage manners.
5. wild or rugged, as country or scenery: savage wilderness.

Ah, how beautifully does not this encapsulate what we want to achieve with this game?! Beasts, tribes, persons and sceneries! To me this transcends a description of the game though, and comes in as a factor on how we make it! Not only do we try to have savage beasts that will tear off your head before they eat you, tribes of degenerates that screaming let their eyes roll back into their skulls as they attack you, wild unexplored landscape and scenery that begs you to travel, unpolished or rude individuals letting their anger roll over you or even letting you – the player – harbor the anger of Conan – no, we approached making this game with brutality!

We tore, screamed and fought with the fiercely sediment standards of the MMO industry – something I so lovingly had worked on establishing with Anarchy Online at the end of the previous millennium (Hehe, lucky with that one, huh? ;p). For me personally I think it started by getting a slight fatigue with doing the same in every MMO. Harvesting quests, hitting 1,2,3,4 as I watched my hotbar icons during fights, falling asleep as I was grinding my in-game dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I love the genre!

Truth be told, after making MMOs for 10 years (Wohoo! An anniversary.), non-MMO games must be very very good to really capture my complete imagination. A couple of games per year, or something like that? Because I simply love the social aspect of the MMO games. Chatting, competing, co-operating and killing monsters and other players (Darn, marketing help me!). To me, non-MMOs simply often seem – empty.

This was my problem though: I saw myself getting more and more and more impatient. I stopped crafting. I always picked the DPS classes because I figured: quick kills equals fastest way to max level. I gathered as many quests as I could – never reading the “story” – to the point where killing a monster without getting a quest update felt like a waste of time. Yes, I felt depressed when I saw an NPC with the quest marker showing the available new quests. Oh no, more work! I stopped exploring the world and simply used an online service that taught me to run here and there to maximize my exp per hour potential. And God forbid, I admit to once buying grind gold from an online service (ooh the shame – don’t do it!!). I never used bots, leveling services or anything like that, though.

Yes, I know ;) The major blame for all this has to lie with the author. They were all excellent games with twists and individuality, full of creativity and love when they were made, and contained many excellent ideas I would never have dreamed up myself. Credit where credit’s due. The point was, I stopped doing what I loved. I was no longer social. I never read any quest descriptions or story. I didn’t explore. I stopped cooking dinners, I simply stopped believing! Another major point was that I never kept up with my friends, I couldn’t play with them. I have two kids, a loving wife and a demanding job. I could never play with my friends as they out-leveled me. I was in a precarious situation – I was a hardcore player with casual time budget.

This was something that forced me to become savage! Brutally I wanted to do something different when we started the pre-production of Conan.

The first thing we did was to tear down the norm of the combat system in MMOs. Out with the watch-the-hotkey-bar combat. Nothing wrong with it, except we wanted more location, direction, distance and hands on player skill to matter! In a Conan game combat must be more than a means to an end (to kill, gain exp) – it must be super-fun in itself. I am happy to say – we are finally close to this.

We didn’t need to pull the solution completely out of our own a***es though. Plenty of good fighting games out there -- especially on the console. And then the multi-direction hit system was born. BTW, have we told you we’ve reduced the number of directions from 6 to 5? More on that that later. To make distance, orientation and player skill matter we had to enforce some other changes too. Characters and monsters have collision. 50 characters won’t stack on top of each other in a raid all hitting the main boss. You must plan and choose. It helps being able to fight with a spear, halberd or ranged weapons though! I’m sure you can stack close to 20 welled planned melee fighters around a boss.

This is all about the feeling, the experience of combat. You feel those skulls imploding. You experience the joy of battle stepping around using speed and control to gut your opponents.

Secondly we wanted to make quests more than a collection of experience boosters. We wanted to present fewer, but better written, quests with more meaning. I am not saying that we have revolutionary quests, world changing events or massive pict invasions during every quest (well, perhaps a few ;p), and the majority is true and tested game mechanics. We just present it better. Close up multiple-choice dialogue, often with voice – all beautifully grounded in Hyborian lore. Fewer, but with feeling and meaning, is my slogan.

Thirdly, we decided to make crafting quest driven instead of grind driven. It seems like a bad idea sometimes, I know. Many hundred quests to create – but what the heck. Just to make crafting a story, a journey and not work – it is worth it.

Four: Let us put creativity into spellcasting. Few things are as boring as being forced to only one thing (like healing) just because you want to hold a supportive role in a team! You should be able to support without repeating yourself endlessly. Spellweaving, cone heals and area heals were born. You must think, place yourself with tactics, and watch more than the health bars in your team GUI to survive as a team.

Five: Integrate and make PvP important. Nothing is as non-repetitive and fun as PvP. That is it. A new type of server was also coined: RPVP. (Role Playing Player versus Player). This is true Conan – eternal strife! Killing your friends is never out of character ;)

Finally – something that will let me play with my bachelor friends – an apprentice/master system. Letting me become an apprentice will let me access some of their level content, allowing me to at least have a minor role in their teams.

That’s it! Doh! No more room here. I will have to get back to sexy in the next Letter from the Game Director. I had planned to talk about how Casilda – a woman you rescue on the beach in Tortage – offers to reward you in a new and surprising way, as an example of quests-with-emotions ;p, but that will have to wait for the next time. Or maybe I should simply change the heading? Nah, we all need our centerfolds I guess ;p

Cya!

Gaute Godager
Game Director

Letter from the Game Director #1 - Savage and sexy!

Recent Articles