Funcom's Craig Morrison Interview

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Craig Morrison: It's never really bothered me. All MMO games have some features that developers talked about during launch as wanting to have, or that they were working on, which didn't come to fruition or never came out. Even the biggest games in the genre have features that they talked about pre-launch that never made it in the game.

Sometimes, that's the correct thing. Sometimes you talk about a feature in theory and it just doesn't work. Developers are players too, and they can get excited about a concept and talk about it as something they really want to do - something they are, at the time, planning to do for the game. Then, sometimes, they just don't work.

Obviously sometimes it's a resource issue, and things are just cut due to priorities, and again that's a fact of life in any development environment, not just MMOs. Some things you'd like to do, you don't get to do. I don't let that hang me up - I always just focus on each update, and on asking the developers, on behalf of the players, "is what we're doing fun?" Are we going to give the players some extra value with this update?

That's what it comes down to. If you have Feature A, which might be something that's been talked about for some time, or a new feature, Feature B, which will actually be more fun - I'll always go for the option that's more fun, even if it's at the expense of something that might have been talked about in the past. It's all about making sure that we use our resources and assets in the best way possible to improve the game.

Eurogamer: You talk about using your resources in the best way possible - so where are you focusing your resources right now?

Craig Morrison: We have two main focuses - part of the team is focusing on providing the new content, things like Ymir's Pass, which is coming in the near future, and new playfields.

We're filling out the content gaps that might have been there at launch, where there wasn't as much content in some areas as there was in others... We've been identifying those areas and focusing the content side of the team into addressing that. We have part of the team working heavily on the revamps of the existing instances, making sure that dungeons are populated better and that the experience is more fun for the player.

Secondly, there's the systems side of the game. Our gameplay systems designers are working hard on the itemisation of the game and the statistics, on making the gamplay experience more meaningful.

One of the major issues we identified was that, by intention, we'd made Age of Conan into a game where the statistics available to the player didn't have a very large scale. While we don't want to make the game as item-centric as other MMOs, we came to the realisation that we probably didn't get it right - we went too far to the other extreme.

We had statistics in the game that would only scale between 0.2 and 0.6 over 80 levels! When you picked up a level 20 item, it didn't feel that different to a level 80 item. What the system designers are looking at at the moment is that itemisation and how we use statistics, to see if we can increase those ranges.

We want to do it without compromising the central, core vision of the game, that we don't want it to be too item-centric, but still making the items into a progression driver for players. At the moment, they really aren't. Players can take them or leave them. It's about finding the right balance, and that's one of our key focuses at the moment.

Hopefully Age of Conan's future is less ominous and brooding than this image.

Eurogamer: This has been a persistent issue - early in the game, a lot people thought that the items were bugged because their stats simply didn't actually do anything meaningful. If you aren't driving people towards improving their gear and getting better items, where's the incentive for the end-game?

Craig Morrison: It's a balance. It's not that we're not going to be doing that - we're certainly going to be making items more important than they are. I think it's about the scale, about how people look at your game in relation to other games - because that's a natural part of the process when people have played other MMOs.

If you look at a game like EverQuest or WOW, the itemisation is very important. It's the be-all and end-all of the character's development. We don't want to go that far. We don't want to make a game where the player's progress is bottlenecked by the reliance on gear in all situations.

When you get to high-end raiding, yes, we want to make items more important so there is a sense of progression and a sense that you'll have an easier time taking on high-level content in better gear. But we don't want to take it to the extremes that you see in some other games, because I think that's one of the key things that people have found appealing about Age of Conan. Many players like the fact that the game isn't completely item-centric, and that their knowledge of their class and their skills do factor into the gameplay more.

Eurogamer: One of the first things you announced after taking over is that you wanted to overhaul the crafting system. What exactly are you planning to do with it?

Craig Morrison: The update that comes with the PVP consequence system has a lot of new content for crafting in the game. The way that the crafting designers have been looking at it is, obviously, to add more recipes - to do the basic thing of adding more new items that the player can acquire and build through tradeskills.

But also, we want to improve the interweaving of the tradeskills - the way they interact with each other so that players have to combine tradeskills to make the absolute best items in the game. We're also starting to see some of the tradeskill recipes drop in the gameworld, allowing players to create items, armour and weapons that are more meaningful for them, and give the tradeskills a bit of purpose.

It ties into the itemisation issue as a whole. When we had limited itemisation, the difference between a tradeskill armour, a dropped-loot armour and a raid armour wasn't large enough to make the players make a choice - to see a tradeskill item and think "this is worth it for me". That's what we want to bring back. It's about trying to put purpose back into the tradeskill system,giving players goals so that they can look at the end result and say, yes, I want to do that.

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