Q&A: Funcom's Craig Morrison

Boomtown: Hi Craig and thanks for taking your time to do this interview. Before we get into specifics about the latest huge update for Age of Conan, please let us know how you play Age of Conan yourself. Any favourite classes and quests?

Craig Morrison: I play several classes a great deal on live, and try to play every day (which isn’t always possible) but make sure to try and experience as much as I can from a players perspective. Playing our games has always been very important to me, and Age of Conan is no different. My favourite quest so far has almost certainly been playing through the whole storyline in Ymir’s Pass that ends in the Amphitheatre dungeon, it’s really a great encounter that perfectly captures what we were trying to achieve with that zone…I also love some of the boss encounters in Xibuluku.

1.05 brought huge changes to Age of Conan. What’s the most important one in your own opinion?

Obviously the changes to the RPG system are the most important for us moving forward. The revamped items and statistics give us a solid foundation from which to work from and will allow us to create better and more compelling content in the future.

With items and classes being changed so much, how has the reaction been from the community?

Overall I think it has gone very well all things considered. It is easy to be more than a little scared about rolling out an update like this one, and I am a natural cynic so I think I have been very pleased about teh recption. Most players seem to appreciate the new build of the items and that they can now easily see how the items tie into their character. Likewise I think the new content has been very well received ad people are really enjoying the experience in Tarantia Commons, and the guild changes have also been welcomed.

There are of course also areas that people have some valid concerns with. With something on this scale we knew that there would be elements that would require additional tweaking and adjusting and were prepared for that. As we also expected the greatest challenge there is in the class balance. The follow-up to the update is very important so we can adjust the areas of the balance that weren’t quite right ‘out of the gate’ as it were. That is what we are already working on now, I think with the new systems we didn’t quite get the relative strength of the spell using classes against the melee damage in PVP. I think in PVE things have come together quite nicely by and large and there is less to tweak there, which is encouraging, we do know though that we have to make the adjustments for PVP promptly and properly so that we ensure the PVP game-play is also as fun.

Hard to please

MMO players are extremely hard to please, some might even say that they complain no matter what. How are you dealing with the community before implementing big changes in order to facilitate a good reception of them?

Yes, I think it’s fair to say that there will always be discussion about changes in the community and that some might indeed say people complain regardless. Personally I have always advocated trying to give players as much notice as possible about changes, and allowing them to discuss it. We started discussing this update and how it works with the community many months ago. To me it is a vital part of the design process. Yes, it can be hard on occasion to filter the actual rational objective feedback from the more misguided or subjective feedback, but I think the effort is well worth it.

So we do use our forums and communicate with the players about what is coming, and how we are looking at things. It has been especially important with this update. I think to some degree people always want more information and it is hard to satisfy everyone, but I think most players appreciate the amount of information that was available through this process, and that they were able to discuss and give feedback in advance.

Of course in an MMO setting you can’t please everyone all of the time, and people’s opinions will differ, and not every decision will please everyone, but I do think it’s worth spending that time to engage with your community and try to get as much value as possible from that relationship. The good constructive feedback is certainly worth it.

Tarantia Commons seems to bring a much more dynamic zone into the game than what we’ve previously seen. How well do you think your goals for the zone were realised and what have you learned for future zones during the development process?

I think what we really wanted to do was to capitalise on the urban settings, and make it stand out as something different. Tarantia Commons I think has ended up being really quite cool in that we were able to leverege that urban setting to our advantage. With the civil unrest and riot events, the gang quests and the game-play based on the rooftops of the city there are some really dynamic elements that I don’t think you find in other locations. The team has done a really good job of making that urban experience really interesting. It feels and plays in ways that are really in keeping with the environment and pulls the player into the squalor and danger of the Commons district.

I think the lessons we take are how to think about content so that we ca make it as engaging as possible. Trying to figure out ways to make events like the riot work in a multiplayer enviornment for example. That was a real challenge. With quests and tasks that allow the players to interact with the outcome of the riot it meant our scripters had to account for all the possible permutations. It would be hard enough to get something like that to work in a single player setting, that they managed to have it work in a multiplayer setting was really an accomplishment I think they should be proud of. It is figuring out things like that, what rules are needed, and what we need to do, that allow us to take that experience and use it again, and improve on it in future.

Changes

Gear and loot have been changed a lot, too. How will that affect the game? And have you seen a change in player behaviour on the servers after the change in terms of loot and gear?

I think we will see those kinds of trends develop over the coming weeks as players experiment with the new builds and possibilities. Things are still settling down in that regard, but I am sure that it will drive some changes there for sure.

There seems to be a lot of balancing and changes for every class. What has been the overall design goal? I’ve heard some talk about ranged characters now being too easy to play?

It wasn’t so much about specifically re-balancing, more that we had to make every class, feat, ability, combo and spell work with the revamped RPG system. The meant that we had to go through all those areas and decide how to change things around to accommodate the new system. The overall goal for this stage was to ensure we maintained all the class roles through into the new system and used the opportunity to address some of the class feedback and concerns. Class balancing is something that is constantly evolving and on-going and something you will see continue to be addressed in future updates.

As I mentioned above, the balance between the spell using classes and the melee classes isn’t quite there just yet, but are working on addressing that promptly.

Being an old Dark Templar player I have to ask – do you think you finally got that class right and why did that particular one take so much time to get decent?

I think the players think the changes for that class are good and sound. That’s the main indicator. As to the why I think we would have addressed some of their concerns a little sooner but we had to spend resources working on the RPG revamp and there wasn’t much mileage in making changes that would then have to be re-done in the new system, so we rather focused on getting the changes wrapped into the revamp.

You can now create a level 50 character if you already have a level 50 character on your account. That is the first time I’ve seen that, usually most MMO’s rely on players spending a lot of time on every character, and here you cut “the grind” more or less down to half. What made you do that?

A couple of things really, I think players do like to try other classes but are sometimes put off by having to start from scratch, and given we knew that there would be interest in how things worked after the RPG system revamp we felt it was nice reward for veteran players to be able to try out another class after the update.

Guilds have been named as the most important feature of the next big update, 1.06. Can you tell us a bit about what we will see in terms of guild gameplay?

We will be getting into the details there once we are done with the current update cycle, but for now I can say that we are looking to add more goals and objectives for players to achieve for their guilds and adding more diverse and interesting rewards for that effort.