Eurogamer gets an indepth look at what is going on with Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, with the new director of the project, Craig Morrison, and where the game is going now. The article features some excellent information about where resources are being focused on at the moment, some new information on changes about the game, his own promotion and the player combat aspect of the game.

Eurogamer: One of the first things you announced after taking over is that you wanted to overhaul the crafting system. What exactly are you planning to do with it?

Craig Morrison: The update that comes with the PVP consequence system has a lot of new content for crafting in the game. The way that the crafting designers have been looking at it is, obviously, to add more recipes - to do the basic thing of adding more new items that the player can acquire and build through tradeskills.

But also, we want to improve the interweaving of the tradeskills - the way they interact with each other so that players have to combine tradeskills to make the absolute best items in the game. We're also starting to see some of the tradeskill recipes drop in the gameworld, allowing players to create items, armour and weapons that are more meaningful for them, and give the tradeskills a bit of purpose.

It ties into the itemisation issue as a whole. When we had limited itemisation, the difference between a tradeskill armour, a dropped-loot armour and a raid armour wasn't large enough to make the players make a choice - to see a tradeskill item and think "this is worth it for me". That's what we want to bring back. It's about trying to put purpose back into the tradeskill system,giving players goals so that they can look at the end result and say, yes, I want to do that.

Mishtram via eurogamer.net »