Message From the King

Glen "Famine" Swan from Funcom's Age of Conan answers questions, and discusses the game, life, and the industry. Let us know what you would like to hear about.

Author: FC-Famine

Hello again!

It’s been awhile since I’ve had an update to the blog. Dana has been poking me to at least get something updated but the past few weeks have been super busy! We’ve got one hell of an update on the way and there’s a lot to do. However on a different note, I see we have some healthy competition lined up on our blogs. It seems a lot of new developers have jumped on the bandwagon with taking this cool feature on to greater heights. That’s always a good thing to see from our end because we were one of the first to start blogging here. It was our original intention to give something back to the MMORPG.COM community while encouraging other developers like ourselves to start blogging here. I’m glad it’s growing and I hope many more will jump in.

^{(Onyx Chamber)}

Sooo… What do I have here for you today? Well, I wanted to give a small little teaser to the next update. I don’t want to go into too much detail because the guys will have more on the update and all that it entails later on. I would hate to spoil those nice previews or features just because I’m excited about what’s being pushed out next.

Our next update is one of our biggest ones yet. It contains a lot of changes that would take a few pages to convey and I really only want to give a small piece of the big cake. That being said, the piece I want to share is the updates to the RPG system. The updates to that system in short means we’re taking our character statistics and making them more meaningful to the player. We’re taking things like the core attributes (strength, wisdom, etc) and making the ‘trickle down’ of those attributes affect the character more. If that wasn’t enough, we’re also enhancing how the core attributes work in their specific bonuses.

^{(Onyx Chamber)}

We’re also introducing a few new systems to the update of the RPG system. I won’t go into too much detail there but I’ll just say that it allows us to enhance our items, abilities, and even our buffs better than before. This is important because it means that items and even abilities become more meaningful and rewarding to the character when receiving them. On top of that, it also allows more dynamic character and item builds in the long run.

What excites me the most about changes like this is that players will have a variety of statistics to consider when building their characters. Having those statistics means that players can really focus on the things that perfect their roles in-game. Now tanks will be able to focus on the things that make them a better tank and DPS’ers will be able to focus on the things that improve how they deal damage. Players will be able to enhance the hell out of their previous or new builds and get the most out of it in Age of Conan.

How do you feel about character statistics in game? Does having a variety of meaningful statistics to consider that also play a significant role in your character output that much important to you? If not, why?

Greets!

Just recently, I stumbled onto a video that was created by a member of our community. I always make an effort to check out all player created videos as much as I can because they’re almost always freaking awesome. Well the other day was my lucky day because I stumbled onto a thread that contained a wonderful gem that helps bring in our one year anniversary with Age of Conan. The video itself is a sequel to another excellent video published many moons ago and covers everything we’ve done since the beginning and up until now (one year later). It’s absolutely breathtaking to watch and I wanted to share it with everyone on the MMORPG.com community as it shows what we are now.

One Year Later [7:30 HD]
Credits: CptHeatSink

Post this on your facebook! 

With the anniversary things on the way, I wanted to congratulate Age of Conan and the many players who have stuck with us this long! It’s been a wild ride since before beta and up till now. I’ve been lucky enough to be through it all and I have to say it’s been a blast. Even though we’ve had our share of problems, I think the year to come will be a very exciting one just based on how we're ending this year now. Even then, we can’t forget the past, we must keep moving forward to continue on the path we all want to be on.

So here’s to another exciting year, healthy community, and severed heads from carcasses of the men and women that have given their lives to Crom for the magnificent beast within the Hyborian world!

*raises drink*

Cheers!

Hey-O!

Today we bring you the developer introduction of Jarle Snertingdalen the Associate Producer on Age of Conan Systems Team. You'll take a ride inside the mind of the man who helps manage and drive all of the game systems under the rainbow from within the world of Hyboria.

So on with it...

(Jarle Snertingdalen)

Famine: Who are you and what’s your function at Funcom?

Hey, my name is Jarle Snertingdalen and I’m Associate Producer on Age of Conan.

Famine: Do you have any prior experience in the industry or what made you jump into system design?

I joined the Age of Conan team in August 2004 and have worked with it since. It is the only experience I have with game development, apart from having a background as a pretty hard-core gamer. I actually started out as a programmer on in our tools department, and I have had a handful of roles in the team since the beginning. I made the “jump” from my previous role as Technical Director to system design due to my genuine interest in MMORPGs and game-play systems.

Famine: For those who might not know, can you tell us what an Associate Producer actually entails?

We have a few Associate Producers on Conan responsible for different areas of the game. Without getting into too much detail, my team is responsible for combat, class design, character development, RPG systems, items and loot tables. We are also involved with any feature that’s produced for the game.

My job is to make sure our plans are followed, well thought through, out on time and of quality. It’s also my task to ensure that the people on my team are able to work as efficiently as possible and that everyone has the right focus.

A normal day for me involves reading and discussing feedback, attending production, planning and design meetings, following up on tasks, coordinating with other teams and departments, and reviewing work we have done inside the team. I try to squeeze in time for playing the game, which I also do after hours.

Famine: You help manage the systems team. Do the guys on the team all work on the same systems or are they assigned to specific systems?

While there is a lot of overlap in the skill-set team-members possess, I can give you a broad picture; we have specific people working on itemization, classes and spells, some on the RPG systems and budgets, trade-skills and on core scripts and combat. This is not the entire picture, though, as people help out in other areas than their usual ones when needed. The work needed for new items, for example, will vary a lot from update to update. To become more flexible and increase knowledge and skill we have invested time in cross-training designers in different disciplines.

Famine: Now that we have you here. Give us some details on what your team is doing for update 1.05!?

Learning about the scope and the nature of update 1.05 last year was one of the reasons why I was excited about taking on this role. It’s a challenging feat to alter systems in the way we are now, considering we are Live and have a large amount of customers already. The update is highly needed to strengthen the fundamentals of the game so we can keep building and improving on it over the next years.

Update 1.05 is obviously a very large undertaking for my team. We’ve worked mainly on this update for some time now, so it heavily involves everyone on the systems team. We have gone through and updated all the statistics budgets, made several new systems like the damage mitigation system, we have enhanced a lot of the items in the game that have stats on them, we have also updated all combos, feats, spells and monsters to balance them around the new budgets and conform them to the new systems, we have revamped gem cutting and changed the heroic system. In addition to this we have a substantial amount of new class abilities and feats.

As we are now getting closer to a good version, the work we currently do mainly involves fixing bugs and iterating on changes based on testing and feedback from our public test server players.

Famine: Speaking of classes! I think a lot of players would want to know the process behind class changes and class balance. Can you share any insight on how you guys go about that process?

Classes in a traditional MMO can never be completely balanced; it is an on-going process that will never stop. However, we have a lot of documentation and tools internally ranging from high-level visions to complex calculation spread-sheets and tools. We have, for example, a budget for how high DPS a certain class should be able to reach. Every spell, combo and feat created that affect DPS will thus need to be made within the scope provided by ¬the budget. This will give us the “theoretical” DPS, but we also have numbers based on empirical testing to make sure that reality is not far away from our calculated theory.

Balancing out PvP is a very hard task, considering the sheer amount of different combos, spells, feats and crowd control abilities people have at their disposal. We have always stated for Conan that class balance is mainly focused around team game-play.

(Character concept)

The process behind a class change usually starts with us being made aware of a problem. The source of this information can be developers, QA, Advocates, players on Live servers or feedback from our public test servers. Normally we start off by evaluating if there actually is a problem. Feedback will often provide us with the symptoms of something being wrong, so we have to make sure that we understand what the source of the problem is so we can fix it in a good way.

If we find that there is indeed a problem for example, we discuss how to best solve the problem while still keeping the ability to be on budget, in line with the role and vision we have for the class in mind. When the change we agreed on is finally implemented, we then test a lot with the team to ensure the change works as we originally intended. If it does, it is put into a version that we hand off to our Quality Assurance team. If they deem the change to also be good, it is patched out to our public test servers for player to give feedback. If need be, we iterate on the change until it is exactly how we want it to be.

Not all class-changes originate from revealed problems, though. We also design and iterate on abilities and feats to move the classes in the direction we want them to go.

Famine: There are a lot of requests on where crafting is heading. Is there anything in the pipeline for the crafting system in the coming updates?

We are well underway with crafting already. There were updates to Alchemy in the update 3 series and the upcoming update 5 will contain a complete revamp of gem cutting. The change offers a more understandable system, predictable outcome of cut gems, enables more player choice and gems are with this change brought into a good balance with other items. There is a good article about this revamp on our public test server forums that I recommend all players to read.

As for future updates to crafting, there isn’t much I can say, except that we of course have internal plans to further expand and improve on our crafting systems. We got a lot done in the year that has now passed since the launch of the game, and there is more to come!

Famine: A lot of people don’t know how complicated it is to develop and maintain systems. Can you share some of the general struggles you and your team have faced and what you have done to resolve them?

A very broad question, but I’ll try to say something meaningful. There are lots of challenges when you design RPG systems and budgets and implement them into an environment with thousands of concurrent players, but I can at least talk a little bit about one of those challenges;

We have goals with any system we make, and we design the system to ensure that we reach the goals we defined. There are though cases where the player-base uses a system in a way that we did not anticipate. An MMO on Conan’s size is a very complex game, and all the systems in the game interconnect so it is hard to foresee every possible use of a system before it reaches the masses on Live servers.

When we experience that players are using a feature in a way we did not intend for it to be used, we have to evaluate if it is acceptable or not and possibly take action. Taking action involves getting back to the drawing board and discussing with peers how to best solve the problem that has arisen. This will from time to time force us to make very hard decisions as one part of the community might enjoy the way the system plays out, while another part of the community is asking for changes to be made.

As a general rule, a simple and consistent system is less prone to produce unexpected behavior, and I will do my best to ensure that systems are designed with this in mind.

Famine: This is coming to be a standard question in these interviews but how important is community to you and your team?

It is very, very important. The community is an important part of the entire lifecycle of an MMO, and goes from being important before the launch of the game to vital after the game has launched. The improvements and investments we make to the game after launch are heavily based around feedback from the community. It is, after all, the community we make the game for.

My team and I read and post on the forums daily to collect feedback and communicate with players. We also have people in the team who actively assist and play with players on the public test servers to get efficient and meaningful feedback. We maintain lists internally with top issues raised in the community, and we work with and review feedback from the Advocates.

(Vanir Head)

Famine: What’s the most exciting change coming in the update to you? Don’t be shy!

With this update we are confident that players will be more excited about rewards and loot they receive, and that the changes we have done in correlation with improvements to different parts of the GUI will enable players to understand the game better.

All the changes in the update are important, exciting and needed to the game. I think the most exciting part of the update to me is how all the changes are tied together and how the entirety of the update will make for a much stronger game.

Famine: Is there anything you would like to say to the community?

I urge you all to copy your Live characters onto the public test servers and try out Update 1.05. The public test server forums contain Update 1.05 articles and preliminary update notes. I’d also like to thank all the players who spend time there and for the crucial information you give us.

Your feedback is integral and a necessity for making us able to improve the game!
 

Greets!

This week starts the beginning of our first set of developer introductions! As mentioned previously, I'm going to start snagging some developers time to time and have them either drop by or answer some questions. Today, it's fitting we start with the right hand man on the project with a interview that helps introduce our victim as well shares some detail about what he does for the project.

So it begins...

Famine: Who are you and what is your current position in Funcom?

My name is Henning Solberg, and I am the Producer for the Age of Conan Live Team.

Famine: Do you have any prior experience in the industry or what made you jump into game development?

I have been with Funcom since the summer of 95’. 14 years in the industry is rather hard to boil down to a few lines of text, but here goes: My first assignment was to establish Funcom’s Quality Assurance (QA) department, and for the first few years I stayed with the QA department as Quality Assurance Manager. In the years that have passed, I’ve been involved in most of the releases that Funcom had produced with a variety of positions like Designer, Lead Designer, Lead Scripter, Director of Online Services, Associate Producer, and finally as the Producer.

Famine: Some may not know what a Producer of the Live Team actually does. Can you tell us what your position entails?

The producer in general is the team leader of the project. The specific responsibilities tend to vary from studio to studio, and from project to project. My current role entails a number of various things with the project by: Planning, organizing, setting overall priorities, staffing, and etc. With that said, the most important task of a producer is to enable each and every team member to do their jobs as efficiently and smoothly as possible. The team makes the game, the producer helps make it happen!

Famine: Can you tell us about the different teams you help manage and a small summary on what their focus is on the game?

There are a number of different teams on the Conan project. Describing what they do can easily become a wall of text, since the number of different things that goes into the development process and how vast it can be running a MMO. So, I’ll try to keep it short, and give a brief rundown of the main teams and their core responsibilities:

• Systems Team: This team is responsible for the core game mechanics in-game. Just to give a general idea of what they do, they handle the combat system, character development, class system, item system, and loot tables.

• Content Team: They are the people that design and populate the game world with new cities, immersive adventure playfields and dungeons. They also design the quests and create the many encounters found in Age of Conan. Pretty much everything you could experience when you play the game has been in many ways either developed or influenced by the content team.

• Code Team: The guys that make it all tick. Most of the stuff the other teams want to do will sooner or later end up on the programmers table. They provide the foundation everything else rests upon.

• Audio Team: They are responsible for all sound effects and all music. Sometimes working with external composers, musicians, choirs and singers.

• Localization/Text Team: They write the majority of the game text, and ensure that the quality of the text coming from other teams has proper quality. In addition they organize the translation of the original English text into the other languages you can use when playing Age of Conan (German, Spanish, French, Russian & Polish at this point in time).

• GFX/Art Team: This team produces all the visual assets you can see in the game: Characters, NPCs, buildings, trees, grass. They make all the animations, and they create early stage concepts of things we want to add to the game.
  

(Concept Art - Xibaluku)

Famine: Now we have some understanding of who you are and what you do, can you share anything about next update?

Sure! It’s always a joy to talk about what we have in the pipeline. The next update contains a load of changes, improvements and new content. There is way too many of them to list here, so I will just mention two of the most important things. The RPG system has received a major overhaul, and as a result of this items will become more valuable to the players. In addition the next update will contain the Tarantia Common District. Both these things have been in development for quite some time, and for those that are eager to test it out, feel free to check it out on our public Test Server. Keep in mind though, that what you can see on the Test Server is work in progress and subject to change.

Famine: We talked for awhile just a few weeks ago about how we determine the focus for the updates. Can you share some insight on how we determine this focus?

Information and feedback from a lot of different sources factor into how we decide what to focus on:

• We play the game daily.
• We pay attention to what the players are saying, both in the game and on the forums. Reports containing summaries of the mood, opinions and wishes of the players are compiled, and evaluated, on a regular basis.
• Feedback from the Test Server community. The Test Server is an important development tool for us, and we value the feedback from the players there highly.
• Our QA department provides constant feedback.
• Customer Service provides us with information about the issues that generates work for them.
• A very extensive backlog of things we would like to add to the game.

These are just some of the things we factor when helping determine the focus for one update to a series of updates.

Famine: I'm all about community so I have to ask how important is the community to you?

The community is very important to us! The on-going feedback and communication with the players is a huge part of what makes MMOs so enjoyable to work on. The players help us shape the game. Hopefully we make the right decisions to facilitate for hours and hours of entertainment and challenges for the future of Hyboria!

Famine: There has been a lot of positive feedback lately from the community and the press with the recent updates. There have also been some concerns and issues still on the horizon. DO you have any input on what you've read on the interwebz?

Positive feedback is always very nice to get, and we have been fortunate to see more and more of it lately. Seeing that people enjoy what we are doing to the game is very satisfying. And, knowing a lot about what we have in store for the upcoming months I hope that we can continue to build on the current trend.

Famine: A lot of players ask this and I think it's fitting we ask you this. Do you currently play the game and do the other developers you help manage also play?

I try to play the game most days. Sometimes I manage to find time for just a few minutes, other times I can play for hours. We need, and encourage, all the developers to play the game as much as possible. We even have mandatory playtime inside of business hours to make sure that everyone gets that opportunity, even in the really busy periods. Knowing the game from a player’s perspective is vital when we decide what to focus on.

Famine: Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers?

If you have gotten all the way to answer number 10, I'd just like to say thank you for taking the time to read through it all. :-)

Greets!

I really wanted to get something published last weekend because of the insistent poking I’ve received on the course of preparing something new. I’ve still fail short due to all the craziness going on over here at headquarters (slacker) but I will soon make up for it later on down the road! Nonetheless, those of you who have not kept up-to-date with the current happenings should know that we have been crazy hard at work with launching the free trials; the next big update and picking ourselves back up from GDC.

(Ymir's Pass - Developers slaving away. I think if you look hard enough you will spot Craig and Henning)

Free Trials

Before I spew into it, let me just toss a shameless plug of the free trials. We are happy to have launched the trials and we’re also hoping to see some fresh feedback from those trying out the game for the first time or even those who might be returning for the new meat. I highly recommend that you head on over to the MMORPG.COM Age of Conan community forums and toss us some feedback on your initial reactions to the game or just general feedback on things you like and even dislike about the game. I frequently troll the forums here and I know many developers do as well thus anything that pops up there, big or small, will still be read.

Developer Update

Moving along here, this week I have a small update on the future developers that will be touching base with us on the blog. I sat down with our game director and our producer of the live team to discuss what special guests I can expect to kidnap. I’m happy to announce that the actual producers will step up to the plate and stop by to introduce themselves as well toss us frequent updates on their progression with the game. Just to give a peek, the producers and associate producers will represent the following teams:

• Live – The current game as we see it now.
• Content – Dungeons, Quests, and etc.
• System – Classes, Crafting, and etc.

This will be very interesting for of those who are becoming onlookers because we will surely introduce some new faces to the crowd over the coming weeks. I think the new faces will also open some new doors because of the new informative communication from those who lurk in the darkness from the public eye.

(Ymir's Pass)

Advocate Update

The last blog update was on the Advocate introduction. This week I wanted to share that we have recruited the bulk of our Advocates and have since then put them in place to help round of the current class concerns, issues, and suggestions for the communities they help represent. We have also completed our first round of the feedback process by asking each of those class Advocates to list 1 top issue (assumed bugs) that they feel the community sees as the biggest issue for the class they represent. That list of issues were compiled and sent off to the developers for feedback. We then took the developer feedback and tossed it back at the Advocates to update their top issue list and pass the information on to the class communities.

Now that the initial phases of the feedback process have completed, I’ll just drop right into why we only asked for 1 top issue per class and what ground we look to cover.

This first step of asking for just 1 top issue proves that the process is in place and is currently working how the Advocates want and how we want. The next step is to take it further by covering more ground and doing bigger concern, issue, and suggestion lists per class in the form of waves. What this means is that instead of asking for all top issues for all the classes from within the community, we will ask for the top 10 concerns, issues, or suggestions for 1 class at a time. That way we don’t end up tossing a 30 page report to the developers and overwhelming them with updates to get us the feedback now. Instead, we will take smaller steps to improve on the feedback process time as we have seen similar programs become burdened in that step of the process.

The last thing to mention here is that we do notice the communication of the developer feedback on those Advocate issues is lacking in visibility within the overall community. We notice that we need to develop better channels in which the Advocates can provide updates as well what we can do to increase visibility of those updates. This has been the only visible problem with the feedback process with the program and we aim to improve it for the future. That way you can pop in the class forums, see the top stickied lists, and then see the developer feedback sent to the Advocates in those specific forums as a whole.

Until we meet again!

It looks like our resurrection entry was a success last week. I’m very happy that we are off on the right foot now after being dead for so long.

That being said, I was hoping to get some more developer focused content out today but due to the crazy week, me attracting the death plague yesterday, and the update shooting out today. I think it would be best to share some info on the next big community announcement, the Advocate program. The program itself was suppose to kickoff sometime this week but again due to everything that hit this week it has yet again been pushed off a little. We do however have most of the Advocates contacted and they are just waiting to be released on the community.

The Advocates for those who don’t know, is a volunteer program to improve feedback from the player to the developer and vice versa. In short, it’s like a player lead program based on certain aspects of the game like classes for example. Speaking on classes, we have also been actively recruiting 2 Advocates per class in Age of Conan. We will also expand this later on to include not only class Advocates but also role-playing, player-versus-player, crafting, and etc for the Advocate program.

Since the announcement I have seen many people become excited about the program but I have also seen many concerns with the program failing. Thos concerns are either with maintaining the program or the feedback process with the program itself. Addressing some of the concerns, I can see how many could view the program as something that will be hard to maintain as well hard to make succeed in improving feedback. However, maintaining such a program is not something new to us as we have done similar programs for years and years before as well had our ups and downs with it. Such experience will only help strengthen the program to really benefit everyone in the community with maintaining it and improving the feedback process.

Another concern is why we need such a program when you can just read the forums! We can read the forums all day and all night but that does not guarantee connection to the in-game communities that do not post on the forums. As many of you know, the community is far more than just the official Age of Conan forums. Thus, the Advocates are not just there to help us read the forums but there to also ensure we have a deeper connection with the in-game community as well forum community.

The program itself has been done many times before over many titles including our own. We have seen great success and great failures in them all. Our program will take those into consideration as well hopefully improve based off that same consideration. Other than that, we are just happy we can involve the players as much as possible with the developers as well getting those issues and concerns that matter smashed.

The Advocates will hopefully be announced later this week or next week. I also plan to have some more updates on the developer front early next week. That way we can really start getting into the main purpose of this bad boy with snagging those developers.

Oh and before I forget, we will also touch on some issues pre-launch and what we have done to correct those up till now. *cough*KyleHorner*cough*

Long time no see!

I think it’s time we resurrect this blog as it seemed to have died around the launch of the game. Sadly, I wanted to keep the blog going but the launch sucked a lot out of our time in keeping it updated. Now that it’s over, I think this would be the best time to bring it back to life and really hurl some good information out to the MMORPG community!

As you might have seen, I’ve changed the name from “Ask Funcom” to “Message from the King” to fit the new theme of the blog. Speaking of the new theme, I plan to bring more communication on the game with the upcoming updates, developer chatter, and other community ramblings. Hopefully the new theme, new name, and new activity will take this blog to new heights with promoting developer blogs on the site (our goal with MMORPG.com).

Now that’s said and done, let me get everyone up-to-date with the current news with Age of Conan. Then we can save the big guns for the next entry later on.

(Slaughterhouse Cellar - Update 4 Series)

Update 4 Series (1.04.0 – 1.04.3)

The recent update is update 1.04.0 and has been the main focus of the development team for the past month. The update itself introduces several brand new high level dungeons to the Hyborian world such as ‘Xibaluku’, ‘The Slaughterhouse Cellar’, ‘Cradle of Decay’, and also the opening up of an additional part of the level 80 raid dungeon ‘Black Ring Citadel’. As you can see, we hit a lot of high end and mid level content with this update. We also addressed various game mechanics with raid loot options, GUI updates, new PvP resources for trade skills, tweaking several raid boss encounters and quests.

(Xibaluku - Update 4 Series)

Letter from the Game Director

If that big content update wasn’t enough then we have a nice peek into the next big update series from the game director himself. The letter covers the focus with enhancing items and statistics based on the feedback since launch as well some additional tweaks from our developers on ends that we thought could use some loving. Item wise, we have concluded that we had misjudged the importance of items and statistics to character progression. While the intention had always been to be less item-centric than other titles as Craig ‘Silirrion’ Morrison points out, we probably went a little too far in the other direction. Therefore we have set out to expand and develop the RPG system so that it offers better and more interesting character progression and customization.

What this all means from a game director point of view is that the ‘average’ gear will not feel a great change in the game, but you will have the potential to get better by working up towards higher end gear. In short, the new system does incentivize keeping your gear up to date and it adds more weight in the core attributes (i.e.: Strength, Dexterity, etc). You can check out that letter on our community portal.

Ending…

Now that everyone is on the same page on where we are right now, we can shoot out some more juicy topics later in this week or the following week. I know to most this information is not as informative as it should be to the majority but this is only the resurrection post to get us back on track with the blog again. My goal if it wasn’t clear enough is to enhance the blog so it’s a good read for everyone and not just the Conan player. Then of course complete all of this while mending another good source of communication from us to you with all the rawness that should be expected from a great dev-blog written by one community mouthpiece.

Cheers!

Hello everyone! Athelan came to me a week ago with the idea of having me contribute to the blog with some more gritty class, race and player program information that I have been secretly planning and compiling behind closed doors. He knows I am a sucker for the community and thus I couldn’t resist the chance to come here and provide some good quality information and updates on what’s going on with the game and progress to launch.

So let me first explain exactly who I am and what I do for Funcom.  My name is Glen Swan, I am also known as “Famine” on the Age of Conan forums and Anarchy Online forums. I am the Community Coordinator for those communities and also help manage those specific communities with the Funcom community team that is lead by Oliver Kunz, also known as “Tarib”. I also work with player feedback with the online communities for both the public forums and the beta forums.  In other words, I get to develop programs to help ensure that your feedback as a player is whispered among the ears of the developers throughout the development of Age of Conan.

Just to be informative about myself, I wanted to also share some of my gaming background with you. I am the typical hardcore online PC gamer as opposed to the typical hardcore console gamer. Although I had a console way before I had a PC, I didn’t really start getting as religious in games until the ages of 15 and 16 with multi-user dungeons (MUD). My first online game was a great player-kill (PKILL) multi-user dungeon (MUD) that I had played for over 4 years before I even started branching out into massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). Overall, I have around 10 years experience with playing online fantasy and SCI-FI PC games cross genre. I also have been playing more specifically player-versus-player (PvP) online games for the same amount of years. Although I am not old, my gaming background in the roots of online gaming is considerably large when compared to the average MMOG player in most games.

I know it sounds like a good background for a junior designer but I chose community because I am a player and community leader at heart.  With that, a lot of the future blogs from me will be from a player side of things rather than the developer side of things. So the goals of the dev-blog will still be along the same lines highlighted by Athelan but with more additional insight from a player-to-player concept with showing more specific class and race sneak peeks from the Conan dev-team.

There will be more to come and please feel free to let me know what specific class or racial aspects you would like to see in the future blogs up until the launch of ACHA.

Check out this email I just got!

Hi, the first OPen beta keys will start dripping out soon. Can you please post the following message to go live ASAP? The keys start to roll in 15 minutes so please be quick!!!!!

Unless the heavens fall and cruel Hyborian gods says otherwise, the first batch of Open Beta keys will go out in a few hours! That is right, your first chance to get the coveted Beta spots are soon here, and at first 5000 lucky winners wil be chosen. As soon as you get a key you will be able to download of the game, but please be aware that the keys are given out in waves. This is done is to secure optimal download speeds for the client. Clocking in at almost 13 Gigs, it's a healthy size for any game! The good folks at Fileplanet knows through experience how to handle such downloads in an optimal way, and this means that the keys and downloads will go out in batches. As soon as the first batch of 5000 calms down, the second wave will be initiated, and so forth and so on, until all the 50.000 keys are out. So, if you want a spot in the beta and are not lucky first time around, please make sure to check your mail and the Conan Fileplanet minisite from time to time.

Should you be able to get hold of a key, please be aware that you SHOULD choose the download location which is the closest to you (if on the west coast of USA choose a west coast location etc.). If you start to download on your "first and best" choice, and get a slower than anticipated speed, you should know that cancelling the download means you will be only bumped back in the queue. So, please make sure to check this thoroughly prior to inititing download.

Oh, in conjunction with Fileplanet and IGN we also have some cool prizes and whatnot for you all. More info to come soon!

We wish all of you the best of luck in getting hold of a key, and we hope to see you in Hyboria very soon.

Last time we talked a little bit about my history with the project, the very beginning if you will and the influences we used in designing the combat for Age of Conan.

We had our most basic elements, directional combat, combo’s, no auto attack. But we needed to identify the elements that made up the combat in the games that inspired us. Here are my personal assessments as I remember them.

Dynasty Warriors

• Seamless combo system, essentially no activating of abilities primarily (except musou of course)
• Wide variety of characters and weapons
• Feeling of Heroism in epic proportions
• Movement in attacks
• Collision between friend and foe
•  Cone Targeting
  

Ninja Gaiden (the Xbox 3d one)

• Seamless combo system, allowed for a lot of free flowing chains of your own design
• Movement in attacks to the extreme
•  Weapon based targeting

Soul Calibur (Good old Dreamcast)

• The pinnacle example of a weapon based fighting game of anything to aspire to this would be it

Rune

• Fast paced and furious, one of the best examples of taking the action/fighting type game successfully onto the PC.
• The control aspects here were the key elements we were looking at     

Mount & Blade

• Fun and tactical feeling combat, especially mounted combat and archery

At E3 2005 we had combo’s and directional attacks in and were demoing in one area called Eiglophian Mountains. We had some Picts riding a Mammoth, and a large NPC vs NPC battle we could start to show off the engine’s ability to handle a lot of enemies. But we were still missing something, so we went back to our inspirations and dissected them like I did before but in even more detail. We looked for common traits and ways we could incorporate them. One of the big things that we noticed was movement in attacks. 90% of all fighting games the feet do not stay planted during attacks as balance must be maintained and often momentum and weight transfer are applied as well.

And so began the first of many major revisions of the Combat in Age of Conan, to add in movement to attacks. This meant more motion capture work, and implementation. It also meant code changes would be necessary to handle things like what happens when you can’t move but still need to attack etc. At first this was solved by having pushback on impacts which created a tug of war type appearance. The issue was that mobs could then be pushed around and cornered, and that interrupting the animations all the time made it hard to have both attacks and impacts happening and look good.

Animation prioritization would be an ongoing challenge in bringing combat to the table at the level we desired. Eventually we lost the pushback on all attacks and instead incorporated the ability to stop the forward movement but maintain the sideways movement allowing the character to slide if impeded, which looked much better than simply allowing the character to slide completely and removing all movement.

Obviously we knew that some things might be technically unobtainable when it came to meeting the standards of our inspirations but that was all part of the challenge and the fun part when it came to the design, and getting to attack such a lofty goal. What we realized through this first major iteration was that combat was going to be a dynamic thing and that for the rest of the project it would be changing and growing and polishing all the way through the development process on our way to launch.

Stay tuned for the next part as we focus on the changes to the combo system and its interface on the road to release.