Age of Conan Interview

Eurogamer has an interview with executive producer Craig Morrison about the launch of the Savage Coast of Turan adventure pack, the state of Age of Conan three years later, and whether the launch of the new Conan movie may help revitalize it among other things. An excerpt:

Eurogamer: Can Conan the Barbarian (the film) save Age of Conan?

Craig Morrison: First of all I’m not sure we need saving! We wouldn’t still be running the game with the size of team and the operation that we have if the game wasn’t perfectly viable, profitable and doing well. We still have a sizeable team working on the game, we are still adding new content – we’ve added as much new content this year already as any of our other competitors and we’re only going to do more for the rest of the year.

We invested a lot of money in upgrading the technology for Age of Conan last year. We had a gap at the end of last year after the [Rise of the Godslayer] expansion launched, up to January this year; we weren’t really pushing out as many updates because we were focusing on upgrading the Dreamworld technology that underpins the game: the server technology, the infrastructure, the stability and the performance of the rendering engine, and making things more accessible for a wider variety of hardware.

We really feel that 2011 is an opportunity to grow and get customers back with the attention from the movie and the new content and changes. We are in a position to take advantage this year. We’ve never seen it as saving the game but as an opportunity to push the game.

It’s well known there was an awful lot of people that tried Age of Conan at launch that probably haven’t tried it since. It makes sense for us to invest so they can see how far it has come in the three years since it launched. It’s definitely an opportunity.