Age of Conan Letter from the Game Director #1
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Brutally I wanted to do something different when we started the pre-production of Conan.
The first thing we did was to tear down the norm of the combat system in MMOs. Out with the watch-the-hotkey-bar combat. Nothing wrong with it, except we wanted more location, direction, distance and hands on player skill to matter! In a Conan game combat must be more than a means to an end (to kill, gain exp) it must be super-fun in itself. I am happy to say we are finally close to this.
We didn't need to pull the solution completely out of our own a***es though. Plenty of good fighting games out there -- especially on the console. And then the multi-direction hit system was born. BTW, have we told you we've reduced the number of directions from 6 to 5? More on that that later. To make distance, orientation and player skill matter we had to enforce some other changes too. Characters and monsters have collision. 50 characters won't stack on top of each other in a raid all hitting the main boss. You must plan and choose. It helps being able to fight with a spear, halberd or ranged weapons though! I'm sure you can stack close to 20 welled planned melee fighters around a boss.
