Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures for the PC is one of the newest competitors to World of Warcraft's MMO crown, with the online game giving life to the brutal world of fantasy icon Conan. After years of development, the game is finally slated for release in a few weeks. GameSpot AU chatted with senior systems designer Andrew Griffin--himself an Aussie--about wrapping up duties on Age of Conan, the type of classes in the game, and feeling like a lethal killing machine from level one.

It's not long to go until Age of Conan ships globally.

GameSpot AU: SO you're an Aussie, right? How long have you been with Funcom?

Andrew Griffin: I've been here nine years now, and I originally came from Adelaide. I started working here on Anarchy Online, and I've progressed from a world designer to a system designer, so now I'm the senior system designer on Age of Conan.

GS AU: So with launch just around the corner, what's left to do?

AG: We're in the polishing phase now, just tidying everything up and making sure it looks and plays as well as we want it to.

GS AU: Tell us more about single-player in Age of Conan. Are you still locked to that for the first 20 levels of the game?

AG: That's been changed a bit. You still have the core destiny quests which is where you swap into a single-player quests where you're doing you're own destiny quests to progress you through the story. You get the bulk of that through levels one to 20. But we found out in beta testing that players wanted more interaction with other people, so now you can switch back to the multiplayer mode during that period so you're not actually locked in to single-player gameplay. The first five levels are tutorial, and that's just you progressing through the beach until the city. But once you get to the city at level four or five, then you can switch into multiplayer mode.

GS AU: You worked quite extensively on classes in Conan. What can you tell us about that?

AG: We went with a broad archetype system. So you have the warriors and the mages and the rogues and the priests as the archetypes, and then you have specific classes for each of those. An archetype fills a basic role--the soldiers, for example, can be guardians, dark templar, or conqueror. They're the main tanking classes that can withstand lots of hits and basically hold monsters onto them while other classes attack them. And then character development continues with the feat system, which is basically how you spec out your character. Do you want to be greater area of effect damage, for example, or better survivability, or reactive damage.

GS AU: How many different classes will there be?

AG: There will be 12 in all, with three under each archetype.

GS AU: How hard was it to find the right balance between the different classes? We know one of the major complaints from other MMOs is that some classes can feel vastly overpowered compared to others?

AG: It is quite a challenge, but we have a good team here who are very knowledgeable in MMOs. Using the archetype system made it slightly easier that what it normally would be, because we had a base on which to build all the classes from which we could then differentiate from one another. But at the same time it's actually harder to make the classes unique at the same time rather than getting that balance perfect. It's important to make the different classes unique from each other and still fun to play. The Dark Templar, for example, even though he's still a soldier and a tank, plays much differently to a guardian because he's a life tapping class that heals himself depending on the damage that he's dealing. The templar is more of a block of steel that you're trying to whittle down.

GS AU: Another common complaint of MMOs is grind. How will you go about making sure that monotony is out of the game?

AG: We have a relatively fast leveling speed--it's not slow, and it's more in the WoW type speed. We do give out a significant amount of XP via quests. So pure grinding with monsters isn't the most efficient way to level up. If you get a quest which takes a certain amount of time, you'll get the same amount of XP if you were just pure grinding at 100 percent efficiency for the same amount of time. You won't be sitting there just doing mindless grinds--you'll be doing interesting quests.

GS AU: While we're on the topic of other MMOs, a fairly common occurrence is people getting bored and not being able to make it past level 20, for example. How are you planning to keep players interested in Age of Conan in those crucial first few levels?

Multiple enemies at once will be the norm in this game.


AG: Getting people through the first few levels is actually pretty hard--you need to make it exciting enough, and we've tried to do that by immersing you in the type of combat we're trying to do with Conan right from the start. SO instead of fighting one monster at a time over and over again, you're fighting multiple monsters and doing area damage, so you're feeling powerful right from the beginning. You're encountering multiple enemies coming at you at the same time, which you haven't seen in other games like this, but you're overpowering them because you are a hero in this world.

GS AU: So the aim is to make it visceral?

AG: Exactly. This is a physical world that you're entering, that you're always going to be outnumbered, but at the end of the day you'll probably be victorious with a bunch of bodies strewn around you.

GS AU: Andrew Griffin, thanks for your time.