Age of Conan - Craig Morrison Interview @ Zam

AoC's new Director/Producer talks about 'missing the mark', and the improvements made since launching the game.

ZAM: Moving to game-play discussion, players comment on the forums that exploiting end-game content is rampant amongst top guilds and Funcom has done little to monitor and/or track this. All of this occurs despite other players claiming that they have spent hours attempting to report the exploiting.

Is this true, and is Funcom doing anything to look into these exploits?

Craig: I think there will always be those who try and push, poke and prod the system to try and exploit. It happens in every game and ours is no different. We work hard to catch and address exploits wherever they occur and do so in each and every game-update as well as the hard work of a dedicated customer service team. It's a never ending game of 'cat and mouse' though. There will always be those trying and we always have to adapt and try and prevent them from doing so! It's certainly not true that we haven't done anything to monitor it or deal with it. A lot of resource is spent ensuring that exploits are tracked down and resolved.

I realize that these questions sound negative in nature, but the real goal behind this article to set down Funcom's official stance on AoC, and move on to the future of the game. Ignoring the past, however, has hindered the AoC team a lot because players are arguing that 'sugar coating' the game means you haven't learned from your mistakes. I really just wanted to get the negative rumors out of the way so that people can see that you're acknowledging the negative aspects of AoC. Most would agree that a company that acknowledges criticism is one that has a much larger potential for growth as opposed to a company that simply develops patches and releases sunny 'letters to the community.'

I think that anyone who has been following the game will have seen that we have put in a lot of time and effort into ensuring we are speaking with the community, and I think if you read all our recent interviews you will not see anyone shying away from answering the tough questions and addressing where we felt the game didn't quite deliver, what it got right and what it didn't. I'm not into 'sugar coating' things, and I don't think anyone here is doing that; it's certainly not hindering our development now. We have been hard at work on the issues that the players did bring up after the launch, addressing them and resolving them.

The game though is a good game, and always has been at its core. Yes, there were kinks, some serious, to iron out after the launch, but we are proud of what the game brings to the market, and we have been the first to acknowledge the flaws and make sure they get resolved.

A lot has already been done since launch. The game now runs and performs pretty smoothly and the 'out of memory' technical issues that some experienced at launch were dealt with as the first priority and have been resolved. We filled in the major gaps in the quest content with new quest and content additions. We also re-vamped almost all the launch dungeons to improve the experience there as well. The PVP leveling that didn't make the launch was added and was expanded with a full PVP consequence systems as well that has started to address the needs for PVP and to provide more goals and objectives for PVPers. Lastly, the fact that players felt item and character progression wasn't strong enough is being addressed in the upcoming update cycle. So overall I think when you assess the additions and improvements to the game since the summer, objectively you see a pretty good picture in terms of the games current position.

The latest AoC Newsletter details some of these additions.