GDC09: A candid interview with Age of Conan's game director part 2

What it means is the items are now more consistent with what players expect in an MMO. I think a lot of the problem is also in the representation. We had stats that were defensive rating plus .2 percent. That was a turn-off, and it scaled from .1 to .5 over the course of 80 levels. [laughs] You know, I don't think anyone found that really appealing, so we've moved those to ratings players are familiar with instead. A lot of the details are already available on our forums and people can read them and see what the changes are, because I could talk for days on all the changes. It's also meant that we've been able to re-balance and go through and tweak all the spells, abilities and combos in the game to fit with the new system. That's allowed us to correct some things and change some things and tweak the balance here and there, where required.

So those are really the four areas and once this next game update is out, that'll really be those four cornerstones covered. And that's really what puts us in the position now where we're more comfortable with trails. I think the most important thing to me with the trails coming up and exciting players to come back and try the game again is, what would you say to players who want to come back? I'd actually say to them, "Don't listen to me." I could sit here with you and wax lyrical about how wonderful we're doing and we're really improving, but at the end of the day that matters nothing.

The proof is in the playing, and in talking to players who're actually still playing the game. You know, the players who're playing and enjoying the game now — listening to them going, "Actually I'm having fun now. I like like this! I still don't like this element a little, but it's being addressed in the next update, but I'm having fun." because especially in our genre, word of mouth is very important. I don't want players listening to me as much. Obviously I want them to go to your site and read this interview [laughs] but, I don't them to take my word for it. I want to get a message out there that we're happy for them to come back and try the game again, but it's better for them to try it for themselves and not take my word for it.

Are there free trials currently being offered?

They will be starting very shortly.

Will they be 14 day, or something else?

I think it depends on which channel you get it through, because we have exclusive deals with several sites. I think it's either 7 or 14 days.

How did the recent DX10 update from the other day go?

No it went live yesterday, but it's a final testing phase, but in the live environment and I'll explain that a little. Obviously we do have a public test server and it has a very dedicated but relatively small community — at peak there's only a hundred players or so on the server. We found that we wanted to collect more data, get more performance benchmarks and see a wider range of hardware, software and driver configurations that we just can't get from testing.

We can test and we've tested a lot of different rigs and setups, but I don't think there's any testing as good as there is in the live environment. So on Wednesday we put out a version of the DirectX 10 client. It's clearly labeled a test version, but it's available for everybody that has the relevant hardware. I was looking at the feedback this morning before coming to the hotel for interviews. By and large I think if you have a very high-end rig, the game plays smoothly and you can switch the DX10 features on and it's quite good.