Funcom's Craig Morrison Interview

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Eurogamer: For the players who have left the game since launch - how do you get those people back? What's your strategy for showing them that the game has changed, and for encouraging them to come back and try it again?

Craig Morrison: I think that's more a question for our sales and marketing people than it is for me. They'll have strategies for re-evaluations and things like that - they have their plans for that. In terms of what we do, as the production team, it's mainly about demonstrating to the existing players that we have listened, and that we are working on things - that they're starting to see the changes.

In the MMO space, word of mouth is incredibly important. If we can show that the players who are playing the game are having a good experience, that the game has improved and that they can see that - that they're talking to us, and we're engaging with them... That has a positive knock-on effect. When people first mention the game, they don't necessarily hear a negative voice - they start to hear people going "actually, you know, the guys have fixed all of that - the game's better now, you might enjoy it now".

From our point of view, that's what we focus on - making the game as good as we possibly can, so that our own players become advocates for the game. They can see the difference, they can tell their friends what they've experienced, that the game is improving... If we continue to focus on that, that's the best thing we can do.

Eurogamer: Sketch out the near future for us - you say we're getting the PVP consequences system in the next few days, what's on the menu after that?

Craig Morrison: After this update, the next major update will contain Ymir's Pass - which is the largest playfield that we've added to the game yet. It's actually looking really cool. I'm very impressed with the work that the designers have done with that playfield. They've now had even more time with the tools and the features for creating content, and they've got player feedback on what they were doing before launch - and it's allowed them to make a really interesting and unique playfield.

It's a fully-featured playfield, and it's also got a dungeon instance included, with a really great boss encounter at the end of it. That's taken straight from the Conan lore itself, and I think the Conan fans will get a real kick out of seeing it.

Funcom is trying to add more personality, as well as stats, to armour sets.

Alongside that, in terms of content, we're continuing with the process of updating and revamping some of the existing dungeons - like we have over the previous updates - so you'll see that. Like I said earlier, the team is very hard at work on the DX10 version. It's looking very promising at the moment.

On top of that, the itemisation is currently in progress, and the systems guys are very hard at work on that update to address those issues with the statistics and the itemisation. With those three things - the content, the systems and the technology - there's a lot to focus on and get out over the next couple of months.

Eurogamer: Do you have a goal for how frequently you want to push out large content updates?

Craig Morrison: I take that as it comes. We have plans for the major content additions that we want to make - and internally, that's broken down into features. When a feature is ready for an update, we look at the update schedule and see where we should slot it in, so that we don't have very large gaps between content updates. So, we might push a smaller feature out in between so that we have an update between two larger ones.

I'm not one to put arbitrary dates and specifics, or say that we're shooting to patch every 28 days or whatever. I would much rather see that the content is tested correctly, and if that means three weeks between one update, and five weeks between the next, and then one week to the next one... To me, that's fine, as long as the quality is there and we've taken the time to make sure that the updates are worthwhile for the player.