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Interview with Erling Ellingsen by MMOG Welten |
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Welcome Erling Ellingsen, can you introduce yourself and explain your function at Funcom?
My name is Erling Ellingsen and I work as a Product Manager with Funcom. Basically I am that much hated and sometimes beloved buffer between the development team and the outside world. I do a lot of marketing and strategy related things, and I work closely with the development team to bring news and tellings of what they do to both our community and the media out there.
We asked our community to propose some questions about Age of Conan. One important point is the difference between group and single content. Can you give one example for solo- and group play and is it necessary to play in a group in the endgame?
Age of Conan has been designed from the ground-up as a game that is lenient to casual players. You will never be forced into grouping, and we strongly believe that people should be able to log in for just a short amount of time and still get enjoyment from it. You can go through large parts of the game without going into a group, but as always, you will be richly rewarded if you do decide to play with other people. By facing challenges that do require a group, you will of course recover riches that are unreachable for a lone wolf. I think we would be blind if we did not recognize the fact that the MMOs that decides to be casual friendly also are the MMOs that have the greatest success, and that is why it is important for us to cater to those who want to play by themselves.
Role playing is another point. Can you express the potentialities of AoC concerning to that point, for example separate RPG server, emotes?
I think Age of Conan will give players a truly outstanding environment for role-playing. Not only is the setting itself any role-player’s dream, but we’re also including actual gameplay elements that will make it easier to become immersed in the world around you. Take for instance the drunken brawling. In Age of Conan, inns and taverns will have a functionality and players will congregate around these places to get drunk and have fights with each other! They will also be able to build entire cities, fight for their guild’s glory on the bloodsoaked battlefields and follow intricate quest lines that will have them meeting known characters such as King Conan himself. There are tons of emotes and we’ve spent hundreds of hours in the motion capture studio, and combined with the deep character creation system, I am confident that players will have everything they need to express themselves the way they want to and become a unique character in the world of Hyboria.
PvP is a major focus of the game. In a few words can you explain your PvP system and is PvP only possible in the pvp scenarios?
Player-versus-player combat is not something that is tacked on in Age of Conan. These systems were designed from day one and will play a very central part in the game. Basically there are three different types of player-versus-player combat in Age of Conan – there is the massive sieges, the drunken brawling and the mini-games. The most obvious one is probably the massive sieges, where guys will be able to build or capture so-called battlekeeps in the Border Kingdoms. Guilds will have to build upon these and defend them from attackers, and we’re making it possible for large groups of players to clash together on the battlefield using anything from horses to catapults in order to defend or conquer these battlekeeps. The drunken brawling is all about getting drunk and fighting with each other at inns and taverns. Your character’s abilities and equipment becomes meaningless here, and its all about what you drink and how much you drink! So this is a fun way to get into player-versus-player combat without investing too much time. The mini-games will be things such as the arena battles, where player groups or individuals can fight for glory and riches.
We all have seen your impressing action combat system. Is it possible to move my character by gamepad and how important is player skill in a fight and how important is the equipment?
You can control your character using the keyboard, a mouse, a game-pad or any combination of these. Combat in Age of Conan is fast, dynamic, action-packed and real-time. You control the sword yourself – you direct your swings as you wish – and if you are an archer you will be able to string the bow and aim manually as if in a first-person-shooter. If you’re a melee fighter, you will control the direction in which you swing your sword and you will be able to make different moves that strings into combinations such as decapitating fatality moves and more. Combat is a mix of player skill and character abilities. This is still a role-playing game, so how much damage you will be doing for instance, is determined by your weapon skill, your weapon, your strength and the equipment and statistics of your enemy. Where you hit, the direction of your attacks and how you relate to the environment around you all affects the outcome of combat. You can even hit many enemies at once by doing a sweep with your sword! Combat is just really exciting in this game.
Some questions about riding in the game. We have seen that my Conan can attack from a mount. First question: Can player only ride horses or will there be other mounts like mammoth? The second question is about the price of a mount. Can any player at any time afford a mount or are there some restrictions?
There will be three types of mounts in Age of Conan – horses, camels and war mammoths. Players will be able to attack while mounted, and mounted combat is actually one part of the game we have paid much attention to when designing. For instance, the speed at which you are riding actually affect how much damage you’re doing, so if you’re charging into a group of enemies with your sword held high – and you swing you sword the second you are close enough – you will end up doing more damage than if you were just standing still. Imagine a big group of mounted players charging into enemy footsoldiers! Apart from having a real function in the game, they are also status symbols, and they will have to be acquired through hard work – though not too hard!
We have seen NPCs attacking player cities. Can those NPC-armies destroy the hole city or only some buildings?
There will be a camp of enemy computer-controlled characters living close to all player cities. Players will be able to go out and attack this camp and bring the loot back to their cities. We are still tweaking how much impact the enemy can actually do to your city, and we can’t go into any details on this right now. It is important to us to make sure that players won’t have to walk around constantly worried about their city being attacked – it’s simply no fun having to guard your city twenty-four hours a day, so we’re making sure this system will – most importantly – be fun.
According to this. Can you explain a typical siege of a player city?
Siege combat is first and foremost centered around player-versus-player combat. In Age of Conan, guilds can build cities and battlekeeps. The cities will be located in one part of the game world and other guilds will never be able to attack your city. However, the battlekeeps that have to be built in the so-called Border Kingdoms, will always be under the threat of invasion from enemy guilds. A guild may challenge another guild by setting up a war tent outside the enemy’s battlekeep. The two parties will then agree on a time and date for the battle, and when the day finally comes, hordes of players will meet on the battlefield and fight with anything from swords to catapults! If the battlekeep falls into the enemy’s hands, that guild will take it over. Battlekeeps will be built and maintained by players, and will offer exclusive benefits to that guild.
An interesting feature is the headhunting system. Can you explain it in a few words and what can I do if a headhunter is looking for me?
We are not ready to go into details on this feature just yet, but we have said that it will involve players being able to chase other – criminal – players down. We will be spending a lot of time focusing tests on this during beta and determine how exactly it will work in the end.
Cheating is always a tough theme. What is your strategy against cheaters?
We have a zero tolerance towards cheaters. In the past, with our other MMO Anarchy Online, we’ve struck down on them harshly. People who break such rules will be banned. On the other side, our developers are working hard on creating systems that will minimize the possibilities of cheating. We’re being proactive about this, trying to beat the cheaters to it.
At last some technique questions about Age of Conan. Have you any plans according to a german localisation?
Age of Conan will be localized for the German territory, and there will be a German version of the game. We will also have dedicated German customer service representatives.
Some players are afraid that their computers are to old. Can you hush their fears?
This is definitively a next-generation game and it is going to demand more of your computer than older games such as World of Warcraft. That being said, we are aiming to let people who do not own a monster computer still play the game. The exact system requirements are not yet set, though. The settings system in Age of Conan is very flexible and people will be able to scale the graphics according to their computer power. You can also choose to run either DirectX 9 or DirectX 10.
Will AoC support Core Duo?
Yes, Age of Conan does support Core Duo.
What are the major difference between the DX9 and DX10 versions?
Working with DirectX 10 is still very new to us, as we’re one of very few games actually developing a version of the game for this technology. We’re also the only MMO in development right now who supports DirectX 10, so we’re very much feeling our way forward on this. But we are working very closely with Microsoft and nVidia, and with their help we’re bringing some amazing DirectX 10 features to Age of Conan. Players will be able to see a substantial increase in graphics quality, ranging from sharper textures, more foilage in woods, individually modeled leafs,
And finally, will Xbox- and PC gamers play at the same servers?
These are detailed that are still being ironed out, and we’re not ready to go into that just yet. One idea we have been throwing around is to have some servers that are shared and some that are not, to give players the freedom of choice. There are, however, a lot of consideration that has to go into these things, and seeing this is the Xbox 360, Microsoft will definitively also be a part of the decision-making process when it comes to details surrounding these things.
Thank you very much for this great interview!
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