Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interviews
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AoC Vault: A tough skin is needed for people who work in the public eye, such as yourself. Have you ever had any really bad experiences as a result of being a go-to guy? If so, tell us your best [bad] story!Then Eurogamer:
Craig Morrison: I don't think I have had anything that I would describe as a bad experience. Yes, there are times when you need a thick skin, but I think it comes with the territory and you get used to handling it as you go along. It's important to never take it personally. I think the only thing that ever truly frustrates me about community interaction is when someone lies for gffect' on the forums to troll or cause trouble. I do remember one instance with Anarchy Online, where we were genuinely trying to help a user with an issue in the game. Then when we logged in invisibly to go and see how we could help we found him sitting happily chatting with friends, taking great pleasure in describing how he was '˜winding us up' on the forums, not thinking we would ever think of logging in and checking. I think he was quite surprised when I appeared beside him! It is always a shame when actions like that make us as developers a little cynical towards player interactions. As always the actions of a really small minority can easily taint an opinion, so it's important for us to remember that such people are the exception and not the rule.
Eurogamer: You've recently taken the helm on Age of Conan - from your point of view, what state was the game in when you took over, and what were the first priorities you set after taking charge?
Craig Morrison: I think we had a lot of very positive feedback from the launch, and there were elements of the game that people really liked - but obviously, there were also parts of the game which hadn't worked as well as we would have liked. There were areas that we needed to look at and focus on off the back of player feedback, to try and see if we could take the parts which hadn't worked quite so well and develop those.
When I started this process in the summer, we looked at that kind of feedback - at what the players had flagged up as not really working, or not providing the kind of incentives that they were looking for. One of the first areas we focused on there was the game's itemisation and the way that the statistics worked in the game.
Content-wise, I think the team were already on top of everything. They had a pipeline for creating content that was working quite well. So we kept focusing on that area and kept that part of the team working as they were - to pump out new content and fill out the areas that didn't have as much content as they should have had at launch.
At the same time, we had the people who deal with the systems side of the game looking at the itemisation and starting to look at how the character progression really worked. I think that's one of the areas that the players flagged up - it didn't really work.
