There's a concept known as l'espirit d'escalier, which describes those wonderful comebacks and phrases you think of the moment you walk out onto the steps after an encounter that didn't quite go as well as it might have.
This writer learned this wonderful phrase a few months ago after an early morning BBC news programme presenter caught me out entirely by asking condescendingly
whether our topic of discussion - videogames, unsurprisingly - was "all just a fad". By the time I'd made it out of the studio, I had ten wonderful, sparkling comebacks in my head - none of which had made it as far as my gaping, astonished mouth while we were on air, of course.
In that spirit, then, an apology is owed regarding
this interview with three of Funcom's staff working on the upcoming Age of Conan massively multiplayer game. Somewhere over the North Sea between their appropriately wintry development headquarters in Oslo and the marginally less freezing London, we realised that we'd completely failed to ask Ole Herbjornsen (associate producer), Joel Bylos (quest designer) and Erling Ellingsen (product manager) the obvious question; namely, what is best in life?
Sorry. Given the presumed Viking descent of the Norwegians on the team, we can only assume that there's a certain genetic sympathy for Conan's own unreconstructed perspective on the finest things in life, but now we'll never know for sure. We did, however, remember to ask them plenty about the game, so that's alright then.Eurogamer:One of the most notable things about Conan is the attempt to make this into a mature game - you've commented previously about wanting to break away from the traditional view of MMOGs as cartoony and family friendly. The level of violence and the degree of sexuality are obvious moves in that direction - but what other things have you done that make this mature? Violence and sex seem
mature if you're a thirteen year old boy; are there things you've done to actually make this appeal to adults, as opposed to kids who want to play "adult" things?Ole Herbjornsen: When we write the story and the quests, they have a much more mature theme than you're probably used to in most MMOs, or other types of game for that matter. The locations and the art direction also lend themselves to a more realistic perspective - more gritty, more sinister. Hopefully we've managed to realise Robert E Howard's vision of the world, and in a mature way. Joel Bylos: There are definitely a lot of the design elements in the quests - and of course, that spills over into world design and so forth - which are more mature. A lot of people look at games and think of children; but we have quests where the player really has to think in an adult way. I have one quest where the player has to sentence people to execution - they have to talk to these people and weigh their crimes, and then decide whether they live or die. It's
not an easy choice - there's no simple situation where someone killed another man, so he's a murderer and you kill him. It's very much a case of people who have done something bad, but are also good people in other ways. The player has to make a decision, and the outcome of that will affect the reward they get.Eurogamer:You've implemented a
conversation system in Conan which is more like an adventure game than an MMOG - is that an indication that moral choices will play a major role in the game? How does that relate to the violence of the world, and how much impact will it have on people's individual experiences as they play?Joel Bylos: First of all, we have a very talented
