falbalda
07.03.2008, 09:28
Exclusive Interview with Funcom on Crafting & Resource Gathering!
Author: Teljair
This is AOCMMO.com’s first interview with the Age of Conan developer team. The Interview is based on the Crafting & Resource Gathering systems in Age of Conan.
Questions by Andrew “Potus” Romer, Staff Writer AOCMMO.com
Answers written by Shannon “Pharamond” Drake with guidance from Morten Byom, Associate Producer for Funcom
This is AOCMMO.com’s first interview with the Age of Conan developer team. We chose to focus on an aspect of the game that, so far, has had little been said about it. However, what has been said about it has raised many concerns with the dedicated crafters throughout the community. This interview will, hopefully, clear up many questions that you may have about the crafting system and hopefully address some of the concerns that those dedicated crafters may have. Design info and guidance for this interview comes from Associate Producer Morten Byom, who is handling the crafting system, and the interview is put together by Shannon Drake (Pharamond), Creative Writer.
Crafting
AOCMMO: The current crafting system that you announced mid January came across as a very simple and user friendly model. It made many believe that the system would be very open to everyone and present little challenge to the crafter. The way I understand it is that it is a system very similar to WoW where you collect resources for an item and press a button and you have the item. Is this a fair impression of the current system?
Shannon Drake: Yes and no. There is not a “hammering the air bubbles out of your molten iron”-type crafting system in place. The challenge in the Age of Conan crafting system is not enduring hours of toil to get through it. So, yes, you do just press a button to get the item. Gasp! The forums are already burning!
But I’d like to add a caveat: That’s assuming you found all the raw materials and found the recipe and advanced far enough in the crafting quests to be able to make whatever it is you want.
The challenge in the Age of Conan crafting system comes from the really hard and most rewarding parts of being a crafter: Getting the right materials, coordinating with your guild on massive projects, finding the right people to make the components for higher-end items, finishing the quests to advance in the system, working the tradepost for the best deals and make the most money, finding rare resources and putting them to the best use, managing your inventory of components and raw materials, and the thousand other things that go into making something.
The final step in the process may be “press button, get sword,” but that’s glossing over all the work that got you to that point in the first place.
AOCMMO: Are you (meaning Funcom in general) happy with the system?
Shannon Drake: “Generally happy with what we have while always trying to do better” would sum up our approach there.
We feel we’ve created a system that works for just about everybody. From watching the design take shape, just about everyone will find it useful to have some basic familiarity with crafting, even if it’s just making yourself a few useful doodads here and there. It will certainly be possible to do without completely, but it will be handy, if you get my drift. For those who want to dig into the meat and potatoes of the system and want to raise whole cities from the earth, that will be possible, too. You can get your hands as dirty as you want.
AOCMMO: Are you looking to tweak or even overhaul the crafting system before or some time after launch?
Shannon Drake: Tweak, certainly. I wouldn’t anticipate any major overhauls before launch or right after (since I suspect we’ll be a bit busy then), but crafting is an important part of gameplay in Age of Conan, and crafting content, additions, tweaks, etc., will get just as much attention in the post-launch updates as everything else in the game. However, we’ve said all along that crafting is a supplement to the core gameplay in Age of Conan, so I wouldn’t look for a super hardcore-style crafting system anytime soon, since it would require wholesale renovation of several systems, sheaves of new content, and so on.
AOCMMO: What drove you to the decision to come up with the community poll for a change in the crafting system?
Shannon Drake: After the community event, people told us they wanted more. And while we’re not going to overhaul the system to be a Real Life Blacksmith Simulator, there are some things we can do to preserve the original intent of the system—making a fun system that lots of people would enjoy—while giving the community some degree of what they want.
Of course, weighed against that is what we can do to make a launch timeframe, what our design goals for the game are, and the very important fact that very few people have played our system (which is the same reason we don’t nerf things after class previews, no matter how many threads people make telling us to).
AOCMMO: Is there a way to distinguish the dedicated crafter from the casual crafter (one who uses crafting to supplement their adventuring only)? If so, how are the dedicated crafters distinguished?
Shannon Drake: I suspect you’ll find dedicated crafters will have a more diverse recipe book, a better pool of rare resources to draw from, better connections to other crafters who can provide useful components, etc.
Just from my own experience, just about everyone will find it advantageous to learn some basic level of crafting, but not everyone enjoys crafting (sorry, guys!) to the extent that they want to put the time into doing the quests, exploring to find recipes and rare resources, making the items, networking with other crafters for components they need, etc. You always have That Guy in your guild that can make everything, and it’s more important in Age of Conan where you’ll need him to build you the best armor or, say, contribute to building an entire city.
AOCMMO: Do items have varying degrees of quality or is each item created static and the same world wide?
Shannon Drake: The quality of the resource you put into the item will ultimately determine the quality of the item you get at the end.
AOCMMO: How much is crafting and adventuring intertwined? Are mob drops an important part of crafting? If so, how much of a part? What types of mobs drop crafting material/recipes? How much does mob difficulty improve the quality of the item?
Shannon Drake: It depends on the profession. Weaponsmiths probably won’t have as much use for mob drops (since they’ll largely be working with metal stuff) as, say, alchemists, who may need monster bits for their various potions and concoctions. The drop will scale with the difficulty of the mob, as is common in our loot system.
AOCMMO: When it comes to advancement, it was mentioned that maxing crafting level will only be a matter of hours. The phrase a matter of hours is fairly vague to me. Are we looking at 2 to 3 or the better part of a day for someone who focusing only on crafting?
Shannon Drake: It’s hard to say how long it will take people to master the crafting, as we’re currently in the process of tuning the quests and experience curve. The core quests themselves range from very simple to very complex and most of your time will be spent looking for the right resources and figuring out the answer to the possibly simple problem at the heart of the quest. For example, “Make me a sword” sounds simple, right? But do you have the right ore to make the blade? Do you have the right wood to make the hilt? Are they rare materials? If they are, where the hell are they? The challenge, again, is an intellectual, play-based challenge—“How well do you play the game?”--rather than simply being “How long can you put up with this until we give you another cookie?”
AOCMMO: When prestige classes were in the game it allowed players to have multiple crafting professions. How many professions will each player be able to have now?
Shannon Drake: Currently, players will be able to have 1 crafting class, but we are evaluating if we will allow them to have 2. Whatever the case, there will probably be mechanics in the game that allow the players to change crafting class if they want to do so.
Resource Gathering
AOCMMO: When it comes to resource gathering, are we going to need to spend mass amount of hours gathering resources for player cities and common gear (when I say common gear I am referring to gear everyone will be going for and most if not all will get there eventually)?
Shannon Drake: Player cities are incredibly resource intensive and upkeep and repairs for PVP-type cities will require a long-term commitment. It’s not going to be as simple as pressing a button and a city being completely done and perfect for all eternity.
This is partly what I was talking about in the first question. The system’s challenge isn’t “staring at a forge for four hours,” it’s figuring out how to build a city, which is no easy proposition, as you might imagine!
Common gear, obviously, will require less effort than an entire city. If you want basic stuff, it won’t take long at all, but if you want the uberest loot of all, it’s going to be a bit more work.
AOCMMO: Are more rare items/building (I am referring to items/buildings only a select few people will have) going to require a large amount of abundant resources or a small amount of rare resources?
Shannon Drake: All I can say to that is “Yes.”
AOCMMO: How do resources fit into your inventory system? Do we have a bunch of room or resources stack in high amounts or do we have to continuously travel back to town to deposit them?
Shannon Drake: There’s a Resources tab in your inventory where all your resources go and there’s plenty of space in there for whatever you’d want to carry. Given the sheer scale of what we’re dealing with (for example, if you wanted to go more realistic, medieval castles could take decades or centuries to build, and most people don’t want that level of realism!) and our goal of keeping players out and active in the world, this seemed like the best idea.
AOCMMO: I have heard most resources are gathered around the player city from nodes and that there will be various resources coming from other world sources. What are these sources?
Shannon Drake: Resources will be found in the resource and building playfields, which is where your city is located. You can also find crafting resources out in the wider world, but they won’t be nearly as abundant. And, Morten tells me, “There will be other ways of getting resources in large amounts, but that is something we should talk about when discussing PVP battles…” Cryptic!
AOCMMO: How large are the zones where we will be competing for resources and how abundant will they be?
Shannon Drake: The Resource and Gathering playfields are all fairly large, several square kilometers each, and there are three of those. There will also be an instancing cap on each version of it, to keep there from being a situation with thousands and thousands of people standing around waiting to chop down an elm tree. What that precise number might be, I can’t say at this time, as we’re currently testing it.
Quelle: http://www.aocmmo.com/Articles/Interviews/3
Author: Teljair
This is AOCMMO.com’s first interview with the Age of Conan developer team. The Interview is based on the Crafting & Resource Gathering systems in Age of Conan.
Questions by Andrew “Potus” Romer, Staff Writer AOCMMO.com
Answers written by Shannon “Pharamond” Drake with guidance from Morten Byom, Associate Producer for Funcom
This is AOCMMO.com’s first interview with the Age of Conan developer team. We chose to focus on an aspect of the game that, so far, has had little been said about it. However, what has been said about it has raised many concerns with the dedicated crafters throughout the community. This interview will, hopefully, clear up many questions that you may have about the crafting system and hopefully address some of the concerns that those dedicated crafters may have. Design info and guidance for this interview comes from Associate Producer Morten Byom, who is handling the crafting system, and the interview is put together by Shannon Drake (Pharamond), Creative Writer.
Crafting
AOCMMO: The current crafting system that you announced mid January came across as a very simple and user friendly model. It made many believe that the system would be very open to everyone and present little challenge to the crafter. The way I understand it is that it is a system very similar to WoW where you collect resources for an item and press a button and you have the item. Is this a fair impression of the current system?
Shannon Drake: Yes and no. There is not a “hammering the air bubbles out of your molten iron”-type crafting system in place. The challenge in the Age of Conan crafting system is not enduring hours of toil to get through it. So, yes, you do just press a button to get the item. Gasp! The forums are already burning!
But I’d like to add a caveat: That’s assuming you found all the raw materials and found the recipe and advanced far enough in the crafting quests to be able to make whatever it is you want.
The challenge in the Age of Conan crafting system comes from the really hard and most rewarding parts of being a crafter: Getting the right materials, coordinating with your guild on massive projects, finding the right people to make the components for higher-end items, finishing the quests to advance in the system, working the tradepost for the best deals and make the most money, finding rare resources and putting them to the best use, managing your inventory of components and raw materials, and the thousand other things that go into making something.
The final step in the process may be “press button, get sword,” but that’s glossing over all the work that got you to that point in the first place.
AOCMMO: Are you (meaning Funcom in general) happy with the system?
Shannon Drake: “Generally happy with what we have while always trying to do better” would sum up our approach there.
We feel we’ve created a system that works for just about everybody. From watching the design take shape, just about everyone will find it useful to have some basic familiarity with crafting, even if it’s just making yourself a few useful doodads here and there. It will certainly be possible to do without completely, but it will be handy, if you get my drift. For those who want to dig into the meat and potatoes of the system and want to raise whole cities from the earth, that will be possible, too. You can get your hands as dirty as you want.
AOCMMO: Are you looking to tweak or even overhaul the crafting system before or some time after launch?
Shannon Drake: Tweak, certainly. I wouldn’t anticipate any major overhauls before launch or right after (since I suspect we’ll be a bit busy then), but crafting is an important part of gameplay in Age of Conan, and crafting content, additions, tweaks, etc., will get just as much attention in the post-launch updates as everything else in the game. However, we’ve said all along that crafting is a supplement to the core gameplay in Age of Conan, so I wouldn’t look for a super hardcore-style crafting system anytime soon, since it would require wholesale renovation of several systems, sheaves of new content, and so on.
AOCMMO: What drove you to the decision to come up with the community poll for a change in the crafting system?
Shannon Drake: After the community event, people told us they wanted more. And while we’re not going to overhaul the system to be a Real Life Blacksmith Simulator, there are some things we can do to preserve the original intent of the system—making a fun system that lots of people would enjoy—while giving the community some degree of what they want.
Of course, weighed against that is what we can do to make a launch timeframe, what our design goals for the game are, and the very important fact that very few people have played our system (which is the same reason we don’t nerf things after class previews, no matter how many threads people make telling us to).
AOCMMO: Is there a way to distinguish the dedicated crafter from the casual crafter (one who uses crafting to supplement their adventuring only)? If so, how are the dedicated crafters distinguished?
Shannon Drake: I suspect you’ll find dedicated crafters will have a more diverse recipe book, a better pool of rare resources to draw from, better connections to other crafters who can provide useful components, etc.
Just from my own experience, just about everyone will find it advantageous to learn some basic level of crafting, but not everyone enjoys crafting (sorry, guys!) to the extent that they want to put the time into doing the quests, exploring to find recipes and rare resources, making the items, networking with other crafters for components they need, etc. You always have That Guy in your guild that can make everything, and it’s more important in Age of Conan where you’ll need him to build you the best armor or, say, contribute to building an entire city.
AOCMMO: Do items have varying degrees of quality or is each item created static and the same world wide?
Shannon Drake: The quality of the resource you put into the item will ultimately determine the quality of the item you get at the end.
AOCMMO: How much is crafting and adventuring intertwined? Are mob drops an important part of crafting? If so, how much of a part? What types of mobs drop crafting material/recipes? How much does mob difficulty improve the quality of the item?
Shannon Drake: It depends on the profession. Weaponsmiths probably won’t have as much use for mob drops (since they’ll largely be working with metal stuff) as, say, alchemists, who may need monster bits for their various potions and concoctions. The drop will scale with the difficulty of the mob, as is common in our loot system.
AOCMMO: When it comes to advancement, it was mentioned that maxing crafting level will only be a matter of hours. The phrase a matter of hours is fairly vague to me. Are we looking at 2 to 3 or the better part of a day for someone who focusing only on crafting?
Shannon Drake: It’s hard to say how long it will take people to master the crafting, as we’re currently in the process of tuning the quests and experience curve. The core quests themselves range from very simple to very complex and most of your time will be spent looking for the right resources and figuring out the answer to the possibly simple problem at the heart of the quest. For example, “Make me a sword” sounds simple, right? But do you have the right ore to make the blade? Do you have the right wood to make the hilt? Are they rare materials? If they are, where the hell are they? The challenge, again, is an intellectual, play-based challenge—“How well do you play the game?”--rather than simply being “How long can you put up with this until we give you another cookie?”
AOCMMO: When prestige classes were in the game it allowed players to have multiple crafting professions. How many professions will each player be able to have now?
Shannon Drake: Currently, players will be able to have 1 crafting class, but we are evaluating if we will allow them to have 2. Whatever the case, there will probably be mechanics in the game that allow the players to change crafting class if they want to do so.
Resource Gathering
AOCMMO: When it comes to resource gathering, are we going to need to spend mass amount of hours gathering resources for player cities and common gear (when I say common gear I am referring to gear everyone will be going for and most if not all will get there eventually)?
Shannon Drake: Player cities are incredibly resource intensive and upkeep and repairs for PVP-type cities will require a long-term commitment. It’s not going to be as simple as pressing a button and a city being completely done and perfect for all eternity.
This is partly what I was talking about in the first question. The system’s challenge isn’t “staring at a forge for four hours,” it’s figuring out how to build a city, which is no easy proposition, as you might imagine!
Common gear, obviously, will require less effort than an entire city. If you want basic stuff, it won’t take long at all, but if you want the uberest loot of all, it’s going to be a bit more work.
AOCMMO: Are more rare items/building (I am referring to items/buildings only a select few people will have) going to require a large amount of abundant resources or a small amount of rare resources?
Shannon Drake: All I can say to that is “Yes.”
AOCMMO: How do resources fit into your inventory system? Do we have a bunch of room or resources stack in high amounts or do we have to continuously travel back to town to deposit them?
Shannon Drake: There’s a Resources tab in your inventory where all your resources go and there’s plenty of space in there for whatever you’d want to carry. Given the sheer scale of what we’re dealing with (for example, if you wanted to go more realistic, medieval castles could take decades or centuries to build, and most people don’t want that level of realism!) and our goal of keeping players out and active in the world, this seemed like the best idea.
AOCMMO: I have heard most resources are gathered around the player city from nodes and that there will be various resources coming from other world sources. What are these sources?
Shannon Drake: Resources will be found in the resource and building playfields, which is where your city is located. You can also find crafting resources out in the wider world, but they won’t be nearly as abundant. And, Morten tells me, “There will be other ways of getting resources in large amounts, but that is something we should talk about when discussing PVP battles…” Cryptic!
AOCMMO: How large are the zones where we will be competing for resources and how abundant will they be?
Shannon Drake: The Resource and Gathering playfields are all fairly large, several square kilometers each, and there are three of those. There will also be an instancing cap on each version of it, to keep there from being a situation with thousands and thousands of people standing around waiting to chop down an elm tree. What that precise number might be, I can’t say at this time, as we’re currently testing it.
Quelle: http://www.aocmmo.com/Articles/Interviews/3