Each month, to coincide with the release of the Age of Conan Newsletter, MMORPG.com brings you a profile of one of the developers working on Funcom's Age of Conan. This month, it's Quest Designer Joel Bylos who answers our questions.

MMORPG.com:

Tell us a little about your childhood. How did school and where you live influence your choice to join the video game community?

Joel Bylos:

I grew up on the east coast of Australia, in a little town called Maclean. Maclean is about fifteen minutes from the beach and so I spent a lot of my younger years surfing. My father bought a C64, and surfing gave way to playing the SSI Gold Box games and the classic Bard’s Tale Trilogy.

I went to the University in Newcastle, Australia, where I spent most of my time playing games, surfing and avoiding Geology, Philosophy and Literature classes. By the time I left Australia for Norway, I was certain I was going to be a game designer or a writer, I just wasn't sure which.

 

Read the whole article here.

Hopefully this will be the Holy Grail of MMOs. Developers feel our pain. You have seen enough of the same mistakes made by the other MMOs on the market and how the player base in a whole is disgruntled. Listen to your community stay true to the IP and the community and you will be a success. If you decide to change a game midway through or swing the nerf bat everytime you get you will go down in flames. Vanguard and SWG comes to mind at this particular moment. Conan had been in development for a long time now hopefully you will make us all proud and justify the time you spent working on it. I will be in game on Day 1. My challenge to all of you is to keep me there!!!!

Answer number 2 is repeated twice ish!

Hey, I'm happy if there is some Auzzie humour or influence in the quest dialogues that bodes well for a smile or two.

Joel seems like a nice bloke. Good luck to him in his career.

Very nice interview, hopefully the game lives up to the hype :)

Great interview, Thanks!!

Id be interested in finding out just what sort of education he had to get to land that job.  I've always wanted to get into the gaming industry, especially into helping develop an MMO (can you say job security?) because my greatest talents are by far my creative and writing abilities and quest/dialog design is right up my alley.

Also makes me wonder just how much technical coding knowlege he really needs on an average day, I'll be honest.. Code pisses me off.

Good to see more Aussies contributing to major titles. Between this, Ratbag and Fury we are starting make a name in the industry finally.

Nice interview... I remain at Hypecon 3 for AoC.

I trully hope this game will be all i expect it to be. Looks very good so far.