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Letter from Game Director (5/21)
Jarlo
Member Posts: 221
Wow! My hype level for this game just shot up. This guy sounds just like me... fun combat, fun pvp, apprentice systems so friends can play together... <droooool>
Linkage..
community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi
Quotage:
Age of Conan's commander in chief, Gaute Godager, puts his thoughts on paper as he addresses the community in this first installment of a new "Letter from" series.
Greetings fellow Barbarians!
What you are reading right now is the first of my new series of letters directed at you, Age of Conan’s great community. Hopefully I can make this a trend! Today’s message is about being “Savage and Sexy”! Let me start with, hm, savage. Better get this out of the way first, huh? (By the way, thanks to the marketing department for so lavishly supplying us with that double-s ;p)
Why would we want to talk about something like being savage. Let me start as any boring essay by listing the definition: (another thanks: dictionary.com Follow the link for a full definition..)
–adjective
1. fierce, ferocious, or cruel; untamed: savage beasts.
2. uncivilized; barbarous: savage tribes.
3. enraged or furiously angry, as a person.
4. unpolished; rude: savage manners.
5. wild or rugged, as country or scenery: savage wilderness.
Ah, how beautifully does not this encapsulate what we want to achieve with this game?! Beasts, tribes, persons and sceneries! To me this transcends a description of the game though, and comes in as a factor on how we make it! Not only do we try to have savage beasts that will tear off your head before they eat you, tribes of degenerates that screaming let their eyes roll back into their skulls as they attack you, wild unexplored landscape and scenery that begs you to travel, unpolished or rude individuals letting their anger roll over you or even letting you – the player – harbor the anger of Conan – no, we approached making this game with brutality!
We tore, screamed and fought with the fiercely sediment standards of the MMO industry – something I so lovingly had worked on establishing with Anarchy Online at the end of the previous millennium (Hehe, lucky with that one, huh? ;p). For me personally I think it started by getting a slight fatigue with doing the same in every MMO. Harvesting quests, hitting 1,2,3,4 as I watched my hotbar icons during fights, falling asleep as I was grinding my in-game dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I love the genre!
Truth be told, after making MMOs for 10 years (Wohoo! An anniversary.), non-MMO games must be very very good to really capture my complete imagination. A couple of games per year, or something like that? Because I simply love the social aspect of the MMO games. Chatting, competing, co-operating and killing monsters and other players (Darn, marketing help me!). To me, non-MMOs simply often seem – empty.
This was my problem though: I saw myself getting more and more and more impatient. I stopped crafting. I always picked the DPS classes because I figured: quick kills equals fastest way to max level. I gathered as many quests as I could – never reading the “story” – to the point where killing a monster without getting a quest update felt like a waste of time. Yes, I felt depressed when I saw an NPC with the quest marker showing the available new quests. Oh no, more work! I stopped exploring the world and simply used an online service that taught me to run here and there to maximize my exp per hour potential. And God forbid, I admit to once buying grind gold from an online service (ooh the shame – don’t do it!!). I never used bots, leveling services or anything like that, though.
Yes, I know 
The major blame for all this has to lie with the author. They were all excellent games with twists and individuality, full of creativity and love when they were made, and contained many excellent ideas I would never have dreamed up myself. Credit where credit’s due. The point was, I stopped doing what I loved. I was no longer social. I never read any quest descriptions or story. I didn’t explore. I stopped cooking dinners, I simply stopped believing! Another major point was that I never kept up with my friends, I couldn’t play with them. I have two kids, a loving wife and a demanding job. I could never play with my friends as they out-leveled me. I was in a precarious situation – I was a hardcore player with casual time budget.
This was something that forced me to become savage! Brutally I wanted to do something different when we started the pre-production of Conan.
The first thing we did was to tear down the norm of the combat system in MMOs. Out with the watch-the-hotkey-bar combat. Nothing wrong with it, except we wanted more location, direction, distance and hands on player skill to matter! In a Conan game combat must be more than a means to an end (to kill, gain exp) – it must be super-fun in itself. I am happy to say – we are finally close to this.
We didn’t need to pull the solution completely out of our own a***es though. Plenty of good fighting games out there -- especially on the console. And then the multi-direction hit system was born. BTW, have we told you we’ve reduced the number of directions from 6 to 5? More on that that later. To make distance, orientation and player skill matter we had to enforce some other changes too. Characters and monsters have collision. 50 characters won’t stack on top of each other in a raid all hitting the main boss. You must plan and choose. It helps being able to fight with a spear, halberd or ranged weapons though! I’m sure you can stack close to 20 welled planned melee fighters around a boss.
This is all about the feeling, the experience of combat. You feel those skulls imploding. You experience the joy of battle stepping around using speed and control to gut your opponents.
Secondly we wanted to make quests more than a collection of experience boosters. We wanted to present fewer, but better written, quests with more meaning. I am not saying that we have revolutionary quests, world changing events or massive pict invasions during every quest (well, perhaps a few ;p), and the majority is true and tested game mechanics. We just present it better. Close up multiple-choice dialogue, often with voice – all beautifully grounded in Hyborian lore. Fewer, but with feeling and meaning, is my slogan.
Thirdly, we decided to make crafting quest driven instead of grind driven. It seems like a bad idea sometimes, I know. Many hundred quests to create – but what the heck. Just to make crafting a story, a journey and not work – it is worth it.
Four: Let us put creativity into spellcasting. Few things are as boring as being forced to only one thing (like healing) just because you want to hold a supportive role in a team! You should be able to support without repeating yourself endlessly. Spellweaving, cone heals and area heals were born. You must think, place yourself with tactics, and watch more than the health bars in your team GUI to survive as a team.
Five: Integrate and make PvP important. Nothing is as non-repetitive and fun as PvP. That is it. A new type of server was also coined: RPVP. (Role Playing Player versus Player). This is true Conan – eternal strife! Killing your friends is never out of character
Finally – something that will let me play with my bachelor friends – an apprentice/master system. Letting me become an apprentice will let me access some of their level content, allowing me to at least have a minor role in their teams.
That’s it! Doh! No more room here. I will have to get back to sexy in the next Letter from the Game Director. I had planned to talk about how Casilda – a woman you rescue on the beach in Tortage – offers to reward you in a new and surprising way, as an example of quests-with-emotions ;p, but that will have to wait for the next time. Or maybe I should simply change the heading? Nah, we all need our centerfolds I guess ;p
Cya!
Gaute Godager
Game Director
Comments
All I can say is thank you Funcom for at least trying something different. I think you have the ability to pull it off too.
This is what Vanguard was not, an next generation MMO.
Past: EQ, EQ2, DAoC, SWG, WoW, LotR, VG, WAR, GW, GW2, Rift
Present: The Elder Scrolls Online
Future: Everquest Next
Yeah this guy made me more pissed about the wait, lol. I think it sounds better and better everyday. This game is going to shatter a lot of games out there right now. My picks for domination of the market are AoC and WAR.
The quest thing.... It's done in games like Knights of the Old Republic and stuff, but it doesn't solve the "not reading quests" problem. That's up to the user. They'll just click through the multiple dialogue the same way they always did.
RPvP - Been done by WoW - RP-PvP. It's not new and he didn't "coin" it.
I still fail to see how clicking directions is different than clicking buttons. You're still clicking. (This is just me though. I'll have to play it to really see the difference)
I do agree that it's refreshing that they're trying new things, it just seems like these new things are the same thing as the old things, just with a different look to them. And this isn't a bad thing. It's just that I don't think they should be displaying them as revolutionary when they're just evolutionary.
Meh, either way. It seemed like your average developer talking about his game, using really pretty and impressive words to describe what is in his game, and simple unimpressive words to describe what is in other games.
Hope everything really is different.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.
Big suprise!!Checkthis500 make a new rant,again
Keep it up dude,allways fun to read your negative post
Just to speak to one small part of your post...
A game is going to be what you make of it, sure people can click thru all kinds of quests, no matter how you present them. The IDEA is to present quests in a different manner than is typically done. Of course it's not going to make people who want to click thru it stop, but then again, what is?
Many of these ideas are in fact 3rd generation types of features for MMO's. They are bringing new things to the genre, and that's one of the truly awesome things that I think Funcom is doing, dont keep the same old, same old, break barriers, and try something new. Maybe they wont all work, maybe they will, but it's the kind of fresh, and forward thinking that Funcom is demonstrating that the industry needs.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
wow nice
make some bars, were people can fight dirty
- throw mugs at each other 
,
daggers flying- teeth getting knocked out
- eye gouging 
- toe stomping 
rage action 
YEEHAW!.
stick out your tounge
and throw both fingers at another player 
as there flying out the window.
then sit down and finish the steak they were eating.
This game is either gonna be an exciting new, MMO breaking phenomena or its gonna be a huge disappointment. I am hoping its the first myself.
I have been trying to keep away from any news but unfortunately I seen this letter and had to read it. I am trying not to get my hopes up especially since Vanguard was such a disaster but this letter didnt help that much.
Oh well, I guess we just wait and see, lets just hope they pull it off!
Out of every 100 men, 10 should not be there,
80 are nothing but targets, 9 are the real fighters.
Ah, but one, ONE of them is a warrior,
and he will bring the others home.
-Heraclitus 500BC
AoC has a very good chance of being a very good game - Funcom did a great job on AO.
I've never bashed the game, just pointed out the parts of the game that I'm skeptical about. Skepticism is a very good thing with a game that is claiming do reinvent the genre.
I was just "objectively" looking at the letter. Ranting would be calling the game crap, which I have never done.
Notice I ended my post with "I hope things really are different"
Just skepticism, maybe a dash of ranting, but never completely negative.
EDIT: To Baikal. I see exactly what you mean and that was exactly what I was trying to say. I like that they're trying to show the same old things in a new way, and that's why I said I hope things really are different, but my point was that the director was saying that this "would" fix it, and I was just showing the counter that no matter how you show quests, people that want to level quickly are always going to click through them.
I just find making voiced over, lengthy quest dialogues a bit annoying in the long run. If they have an option to just read it, or to turn the voices off, or to thumb through the dialogue in a fast manner, then I'm all for it.
It just seems that if the quests are really in depth and have multiple dialogues, while it's a great idea for a single player game, takes away from the play-time in an MMO.
Bottom line is that the reason why people click through the quests is because they want to get to the action. I don't think there are many people that want to play an MMO and spend even 5 minutes reading through quest dialogue, and making choices. Especially if there are wrong choices, because then you have to go back and reselect and try to figure the right choices. (Hopefully they won't have wrong choices in the dialogue)
Again, just expressing concern at how I'm viewing these changes that their proposing. If they're doing it differently than what I'm expecting then I could be all wrong.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.