GDC09: A candid interview with Age of Conan's game director part 3

It's not quite optimized yet for the generation below of top-end. So [if you have] what was top-end about a year ago, if you switch from DX9 to DX10 you're losing about 20 percent performance, which still is actually playable on many cards. You'd go from 60 frames per second to maybe 30 or 40. Which is still playable, but obviously not quite as smooth. So that's an area we need to continue to work on and optimize, but that's why this phase is very much a final test.

It's not something we'd consider a release candidate, it's still a test candidate and we've been very clearly labeling it to players so they know what to expect. It's stable, it doesn't crash and it shouldn't cause problems for players systems. It's simply that whether the performance on your machine, your hardware and drivers is good enough for you to warrant playing is really down ti each individual player. But they can all get pretty screenshots now, with the new DX10 features.

In the MMO genre, after a game drop in subscribers there's not a great track record for them coming back. Lord of the Rings Online is a good exception, they had a great launch, then dipped and went back up and have since stabilized. Do you think that Age of Conan would be able to overcome that with these new changes?

Oh, of course. I worked on Anarchy Online before Age of Conan and I had people telling me for the three years I worked on that game that, "Oh, it's gonna die next year. You're gonna have no customers left this time next year." and every year they were proven wrong. Games can certainly stabilize and I think that's what you have seen with Lord of the Rings Online, it has stabilized.

We're starting to see some positive trends. Warhammer Online is still, I think, probably suffering from a downward trend. I can't talk about numbers because we're a listed company, and I'm not allowed. As we said in our last financial reports in January, we are starting to see a positive trend of customer retention and play times.

The reason it's easy to say, "This is what happens in the MMO genre." is because the genre is actually really small in the large scale — there's lots of smaller free-to-play titles coming out and that market is growing. But I think in terms of the large scale MMOs, there's actually very few titles. I can easily point to something like EVE Online, which has seen a constant growth since they started very badly. I think for the first few months they had 10,000 players and now they're up over 400,000. If you actually count up the number of MMOs that are over 400,000 players or have ever had over 400,000 players, you're talking less than ten games.

I think it can happen, it can take time and it requires you to have that constant focus on... I don't know whether it's will, or not? I'm a very pragmatic guy when I sit down and set a goal, and I don't really care about the past — about what happened before. My objective is always to provide the players with fun content. To keep it fun and interesting for them.

And I honestly think — and I drive this home with the designers all the time — if you make it fun and interesting, everything slots into place after that. It all comes together based on if the player's having fun first and foremost. You can't help but do well off the back of that.