Allakhazam Interviews Jørgen Tharaldsen

Allakhazam .com had a chance to sit down and talk with Funcom's Jørgen Tharaldsen, who was keen to answer many questions regarding Age of Conan's lore, combat and crafting:

Tomec: When developing the combat aspect of this title, was there a specific goal in mind that you wished to attain (other than providing the best possible experience, of course), and is there a specific point of influence that you can attribute any of it to?

Jørgen: I think the vision was to give you a more hands on experience, something more active. We started this in 2003. We all felt that the combat in MMO was kind of stale. They were all pretty similar. They were quite static. They were very strategic. There was a lot of involvement. They were quite static in the sense that you can issue a combat and push a few buttons and very often you can sit back and its like a whack and go game by pushing a few buttons. And that's cool and all but then all online games since 1997, since Ultima, but still now we have the Conan game which is all about being barbarians and being brutal and fighting and we need an innovation for this and this is what we are going to do, we're going to make it better and this is how we're going to do it. So the goal was not to just make something better, but also to see how we could evolve the genre. With Anarchy Online we came up with stuff like instancing and lots of innovations which are now standard in the genre and everyone uses them, and with Conan we singled out combat. That's the key element of it and giving that ability. It has been a long, long, long journey to get where we are today, but I think it has paid off. You see it in the PvP and so it has paid off. The vision stayed from 2003. There haven't been any changes in the vision. We haven't had to have a change in the vision. It's simply a matter of improving the experience and the innovations of it. So that's the story - it remains the same. Then you get to level 40 and you can start fighting from Horseback and from the Mammoths and the Rhinos. Then you get to level 60 and you get to the sieging and there is an escalation in the combat, because now there is 6 versus 6, but then you get to 60 vs. 60 and there are Horses and Rhinos and siege weapons. You can build your own Battlekeeps and they are huge and you can rent mercenaries and the system you use for PvP can also be used for signing up as a mercenary. So if you are part of a guild you can just jump into the guild warfare. So it's going to be a pretty escalation of it as well...

Read the rest at Allakhazam .com.