Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview

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Written by BuckGB on January 2nd, 2008

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Eurogamer: One of the most notable things about Conan is the attempt to make this into a mature game - you've commented previously about wanting to break away from the traditional view of MMOGs as cartoony and family friendly. The level of violence and the degree of sexuality are obvious moves in that direction - but what other things have you done that make this mature? Violence and sex seem mature if you're a thirteen year old boy; are there things you've done to actually make this appeal to adults, as opposed to kids who want to play "adult" things?

Ole Herbjornsen: When we write the story and the quests, they have a much more mature theme than you're probably used to in most MMOs, or other types of game for that matter. The locations and the art direction also lend themselves to a more realistic perspective - more gritty, more sinister. Hopefully we've managed to realise Robert E Howard's vision of the world, and in a mature way.
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Joel Bylos: There are definitely a lot of the design elements in the quests - and of course, that spills over into world design and so forth - which are more mature. A lot of people look at games and think of children; but we have quests where the player really has to think in an adult way.

I have one quest where the player has to sentence people to execution - they have to talk to these people and weigh their crimes, and then decide whether they live or die. It's not an easy choice - there's no simple situation where someone killed another man, so he's a murderer and you kill him. It's very much a case of people who have done something bad, but are also good people in other ways. The player has to make a decision, and the outcome of that will affect the reward they get.

Eurogamer: You've implemented a conversation system in Conan which is more like an adventure game than an MMOG - is that an indication that moral choices will play a major role in the game? How does that relate to the violence of the world, and how much impact will it have on people's individual experiences as they play?

Joel Bylos: First of all, we have a very talented dialogue writer, who is a former Mongoose pen and paper writer that has come to work for Funcom. I think he puts a lot of personality into all the characters in his dialogue. Essentially, a part of the design philosophy in the game is 'What Would Conan Do?' - in the same way that people say 'What Would Jesus Do?'. In a lot of the quests, we put players in the position where, if they ask themselves what Conan would do, they'll come up with the best way through a quest.

That said, there are tougher situations. Not all the quests are easy decisions - a lot of them are, but there are a lot that aren't as well. There are times when you'll have to really think about what way you want to go. For example, we never force a Stygian character, who might worship Set, to defend their god if they're in an argument with a Priest of Mithra. You'll always have that in the dialogue system - you'll always have the option. If you don't believe in this god, you'll have the right to say that, and as dialogue writers we've tried hard to put that in the game.

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