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

Last week at GDC 2009 was exceptionally busy, but that didn't stop us from talking with Age of Conan's game director Craig Morrison and discussing what went wrong with the game at launch and what's been done since to improve upon it.

You're in for a treat, we think.

After the jump, you'll also find discussion on free trails for this year, the DX10 client, successful MMOs and upcoming content philosopy for Age of Conan. It's a bounty of information even King Conan would be proud to see!%Gallery-9836%Massively: There's quite a big push right now to get the players back in Age of Conan, and you're in a period where you're telling players to come back and try the game again. Can you tell us about that?

Craig: When I took over late in the summer, the first thing we did was sit down with the team and go through the player feedback to assess what the players had reacted well to and what they hadn't. So that way we could prioritize the areas we needed to focus on and what to resolve. And more importantly, what order we needed to resolve them in and I think that broke down really into four areas.

The first one and most important — which we focused on immediately — was the stability of the client by fixing the performance issues, insuring that the memory leaks were resolved and was really my number one priority when we took over. We needed to fix [performance], people needed to be able to play the game.

So that was done, and then the second one was adding the PvP systems that didn't get in for launch. For me, PvP is an important part of any MMO. It's perpetual and it's self-creating gameplay for players and we saw very immediate results once those systems were put into place. There were very clear spikes in player retention and the amount of time players had spent playing the game. We usually have graphs for that, because [the change is] very minor, but you could literally see the day we patched that play time stayed up there. It was very important to the progression of the game.

Then we looked at the game's content itself, which is a little bit more of a lengthy subject so I'll come back to that in a minute.

Lastly, we looked at the itemization and the RPG system itself. What was wanted to achieve with the original game was that Age of Conan wasn't an item centric game. And I think with all best intentions we went too far in the other direction. When a player equips the level 50 dagger after having a level 30 they wanna feel a difference. Even if they don't want the game to be necessarily as item centric as World of Warcraft or EverQuest 2, they do want to feel a difference. They wanna know that, "Okay, I've just done this quest and it was really hard and I got this cool dagger and... oh, I don't really notice any difference to this one I picked up in the newbie area." won't happen and we didn't get that right.

So what we started doing at that point was we began rewriting the RPG system. That update goes to the public test servers next week. It's way more information than I could talk to you about inside of 30 minutes, because it's literally four or five months work of systems. We started the process in the last couple of weeks with producers' letters from me, which explain the top levels of the changes. There's a lot more information going out next week when the update hits the public test server. And we will be going through iterations with the players on the test server to go through it and see what's working and see what's not. It does fundamentally change many things in the game, because it effectively adjusts the budgets.