Age of Conan Product Director is Asked Questions. . .and Answers Them!

In case you spent some time this summer under a rock, in some sort of bomb shelter, or frozen in carbonite, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Funcom’s latest MMO, launched last May amidst much hype and fan anticipation. While the game was initially well-received and sold in record numbers for an MMO without “Warcraft” in its name, subscription numbers have since tapered off. These subscriber drops have been attributed to reasons as varied as the extremely high-end computing requirements of the game to lack of promised features. In a recent interview on Gamespot, director Jørgen Tharaldsen discussed the good, the bad, and the refreshingly realistic facets of AoC.

As far as the good is concerned, Tharaldsen hangs his hat on the many ways that AoC innovated within the MMO market. I actually can be counted among the statistics of once-but-no-longer subscribers for this game, and beyond the oft-discussed active combat system, I’m glad Tharaldsen mentions their novel approach to quests. The starting area of Age of Conan does an excellent job of immersing the player within the storyline; there’s even an option of going into a “nighttime” version of the areas that are player-specific instances where several scripted events take place. That immersion is cemented by Funcom’s undeniable commitment to the world Robert E. Howard created, even risking an M rating to maintain the grittiness of Conan’s realm.

All Hail the King

Moving on to the bad, Tharaldsen admits to some stability issues present in the game at launch. This has certainly come to be expected whenever one of these games launches, simply because massively multiplayer games are, well, massive. There’s an insane amount of features and content that today’s player base expects from an MMORPG on day one. Couple that with sky-high system requirements and a genre-first combat system, and AoC was bound to have some kinks to work out.

Finally, what struck me the most about this Q&A session was Tharaldsen’s refreshingly realistic take on the state of the MMO market today, particularly with regards to a certain seemingly-unstoppable game you may have heard of called World of Warcraft. He goes on at length to discuss how Blizzard has changed everything, how the expectations of an MMO released today, in the “post-WOW era” as he calls it, are staggering compared to just a few years ago. I’ve always felt that for new MMO developers to have any success, they have to first accept the fact that they have to dwell in Warcraft’s shadow and go from there, and it seems Funcom realizes this. Tharaldsen even makes mention of viewing Mythic, who recently released Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, as their true competitors because WoW is simply on another level.