GDC09: A candid interview with Age of Conan's game director part 4

It seems like nowadays players are more finicky. If Age of Conan came out say, four years ago, do you think it would've been a totally different story?

Maybe? I think when you have a game as polished as World of Warcraft on the market, it raises the standards, clearly. I actually don't think that the launch of a game like AoC or LotRO or WAR was actually that different from WoW's launch.

Most people tend to forget that WoW actually had quite a rocky launch at least in terms of content and stability. They didn't explode to 10 million customers on launch. They built up very gradually over that first two years after launch because it was a polished product. But in terms of content it wasn't that far removed from all those other titles. So it's a great challenge for other titles now to launch alongside that, because people don't compare it to WoW at launch, they compare it to WoW now — with five years, two expansions and dozens and dozens of content updates. And they go, "Oh, these games don't have as much content." and I'm like, "No, they don't!" [laughs] you know, funny that one.

So I think it is a challenge for MMO developers to work with that. I think it's hard to say, because Conan would've been impossible to make four years ago. One of the key advantages I do think we have is that no MMO will look as good as our game for some time. Our game will age very well because it's right at the cutting edge of graphics now. Without great expenditure, you can't really improve your graphics engine. You've really got to pull the stops out to replace and upgrade graphics.

As far as expansions, we know you guys have talked about an expansion soon. What can you tell us about that?

I'm not allowed to talk about the expansion right now, sorry. Everyone's asked the same question today and I've had to give the same answer. The marketing guys would kill me and they're in the other room.

There's actually one very good reason why I don't want to talk about the expansion. I don't think people want to hear us talk about the expansion yet. We do have part of the team working on part of the expansion, we have said that. But, we're more focused on resolved the issues that players had after launch and working through those issues and creating content for the live game. That's been our focus and I don't want to detract people's attention from that. It's not a kind of, "Oh crap, there was negative feedback after the launch... quick let's make an expansion and everyone will focus on that!" That's not the approach we're taking.

We're taking the approach of very methodically working through the issues and making sure that we resolve them properly. So that way we put ourselves in a sane position to move forward and then the expansions built on a better foundation.

I can tease and say it's looking really cool! [laughs] But no, I'm not allowed to talk about it just yet. It'll be down to the marketing guys when they decide that the time is right to lift the veil on that one.