Ask Funcom
Jason "Athelan" Stone, Game Designer for Age of Conan and Glen "Famine" Swan answer questions, and discusses the game, life, and the industry. Let us know what you would like to hear about.

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.

At E3 2004 I was first face to face interviewed for the chance of becoming a part of the Age of Conan development team. At the time I did not know what the design position was going to be for and was very interested to learn what Funcom was up to after having spent many many hours playing Anarchy Online. The hints I had been given were “next gen combat” and “from a major fantasy license”, wracking my brain I had only come up with licenses that were already in the works or completed from Dungeons and Dragon, to Lord of the Rings etc.

When I was told the license was Conan I was blown away and at the same time very excited. I felt it was a wonderful license that had been lurking under the surface like a shark and waiting for a time to strike and make itself known again; getting to be a part of this re-emergence was something I looked forward too. At this time I had no idea HOW we were going to do action based combat, but I went home to “study” prior to leaving for Norway anyway. I played loads of games, and spent a lot of time in Shadowbane to learn about city building and siege warfare. In addition I bought the Chronicles of Conan and read Robert E. Howard’s works and any other book about Conan I got my hands on.

Arriving in Norway there was still lots to be done for design. We had three things for sure. Multi directional attacks, no auto attack, and no click/tab targeting for melee. We made a list of all the games we loved the combat in and looked at different elements of each which we enjoyed.

I will list them off and let you guys think about the different elements of these games and continue with part 2 on Wednesday.

The primary games we used as influences were.

Dynasty Warriors

Ninja Gaiden (the Xbox 3d one)

Soul Calibur (Good old Dreamcast)

Rune

Mount & Blade

Of course there were many others but each of these had elements we were interested in. Stop by and check out the next part of the series hopefully on Wednesday. And don't forget to do your homework :)

Next week is the New York Comicon April 18th-20th. I was asked if I would come out and am really looking forward to it as I have never been to New York. For you fans of the game in the area we will be having an Age of Conan Panel from 2:00 to 3:00 on Sunday. You can also join us for the MMO Round table which will include myself and many other developers from the industry between 4:00 and 5:00.

I do not plan to be overally specific with what we will be talking about as I would like to base the panel heavily off questions those in attendance have. I will be bringing my trusty laptop and hopefully being able to show off some of our latest trailers and maybe some in game stuff also.

Big news on email a couple days ago, as one of my fellow developers put together a video from some of our Beta Players raiding Vistrix. Vistrix is one of the 24 man end game encounters and it was quite heart warming as a designer to see players finally experiencing the challenges we have worked so hard to put together. Raiding whether you like it or not brings together so many elements that it shows off well where the game currently stands on its way to launch.

I have not gotten permission to show it off externally, however I am pushing for getting some similar raw gameplay videos out to you the fans.

A little update for those of you to let you know how things are going.

Beta is still progressing and more people are getting in. We are finally seeing some player tests of the cities as guilds on beta are building up their resources.

I mentioned in some of my first blogs here about our plans for the community site and the creation of a more in depth FAQ. That is now up internally and being populated with information. The goal with this "Community FAQ" is to draw from the questions asked on the official forums and other sources to create a library of information that can be viewed and commented on.

As most of you know I have tried to answer a lot of the questions that have been made in comments on the blog as well as a lot of Forum posts and what not in the past. Continuing these effort we have teamed up with the guys over at Tentonhammer to do an "Ask the Devs" Feature.

http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=455

Essentially if you ask a question it will be moderated and if it is appropriate and not a "repeat" it will be posted here where myself or another one of the Dev team can answer. Once answered it will move to the answered question part of the forum.

Hopefully these same types of question and answers will also be what we are able to include in the Community FAQ to provide a robust resource.

First I wanted to let you guys know that things are continuing to go great in the Beta. We have seen patches on a very regular basis and the game is getting more solid. I went up to Eidos in San Francisco last week and had the opportunity to show the game off again and it ran well, and played well we had very few issues.

We are still adding more people to the beta, and the PvP server is up and kicking as mentioned before and quite a few people have moved over to play there.

Player cities are working on the server, but not activated for the general player base.

Keep your eyes on Tenton Hammer for a new Ask the Devs feature with me soon.

Now for the perhaps out of place and too personal request.

As you guys know I am recently married as of October of last year. Thank you all for the warm wishes and support that you offered on hearing that news. My mother in law has been battling breast cancer for a few years now and it had moved into her bones over a year ago. She is currently in the hospital and her condition has decline very fast. I ask that for those of you who do choose to have a faith please pray for my mother in law and my family. Thank you - Jason

Last week was GDC as I am sure you all know. And hopefully you have been enjoying th