Massively goes to Dragon*Con: Funcom Q&A Part 3

Q: What are you doing to get new players and bring old players back?
A: We know there's issues with the game. If there's bugs, we're fixing them. To continue, we've got the five dungeons that are coming out before Christmas hopefully. People who played Anarchy (Online), we've been supporting that game since 2001 and we're going to keep supporting it into the future. Age of Conan is no different for us. As a game company, our philosophy is, we make a game, and we stick with it until we've got it where we want it to be, and that never happens. MMOs just keep going. We're in for the long haul.

Q: Any plans on making unique fatalities for all classes, and perhaps even team fatalities?
A: Team fatalities have been discussed, but it's so far into the future. There should be unique fatalities all throughout the game. We really put a lot of effort into that. We spent almost two years getting those fatalities just right.

Q: What are the plans for the roleplaying servers?
A: We just got done with finalizing the RP ruleset. We're still reviewing them. We wanna take time to look at it and make sure that we did something that a lot of other roleplayers really wanted to follow. We took feedback from a lot of the top roleplaying guilds and made sure that what we wanted to put out there as guidelines were actually something they wanted. We'll probably be pushing them out sometime later next week. These are rules that the GMs will follow.

Q: Are you going to increase customer support for this?
A: The thing about an RP ruleset is it has to be community-enforced. We will make sure there's coverage, but at the same time, it's a guideline for the community. If the community that's on that server doesn't pull together and enforce it, in some way, shape, or form, and I don't know how many RPs we have in here, I don't want to offend anybody too much, but at some point, you gotta get a thick skin. You know that people are gonna get in there, and they're gonna try and mess with you. Sometimes you just gotta ignore 'em, because if you always wait for a GM to take action, that almost becomes a crutch at times. The community has to take action. If they're just gonna grief, then yes, we will step in when it gets to an extreme point, but it has to be to the point where it is affecting the play for the majority of the players. But we will take action if they are causing problems on RP servers. But you can't expect us to police every single name.

Q: What are you doing about allowing people to make mods?
A: That's down to a list of priorities. The GUI team are working to optimize it and within reason, I think, I don't think we'll go as far as World of Warcraft, where they have a lot of these plugins for the GUI to try to control it. But we will, in the long term, be looking to make the GUI more moddable and more attractive.

We've started to add puzzles and stuff in the game. We're revamping all of the dungeons from the ground up. Adding puzzles, making them meaningful, making the boss encounters fun. Thief-specific things, I'm not sure what the plans from the combat team are for sure there. But I do know that puzzles will be appearing in the game more and more. If there's one thing you never have to motivate designers to do, it's find new ways to kill players.

Q: Is drunken brawling going to come back?
A: Maybe. It was cut simply because it wasn't fun enough. There have been various discussions on how to make it come back because it's really in touch with the whole Conan theme. But it's not going to come in the short term. It needs an overhaul. We talked about it, and after we implemented it, we said "This isn't as cool as we were hoping it would be, and players are going to be really annoyed if we release it the way it is."

Thank you to the presenters from Funcom for the presentation!