Age of Conan Director Craig Morrison, Part One: Why Can’t MMOs Just be Fun?

By Steven Crews | May 15, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews | Tags: Age of Conan, Craig Morrison

The MMO Gamer: That’s interesting… How do you appeal to the “hardest of the hardcore” without giving them that edge for putting in the extra effort?

Craig Morrison: I think even they don’t necessarily want it that way. They still like to be challenged.

I think the hardcore, the players who really like crunching the numbers and getting down to the core of what they can be, they actually get a great deal of pleasure from sometimes increasing their power by 1%.

I’ve known guys that raided in games like EverQuest and WoW for months to get an item that was one point better than the one they have. I don’t… you know, it’s one point. You’re not even going to notice it in the normal variation of a random number-generation based game.

But it’s one point more. You know, “I have the best.”

So I do think the hardcore really drive themselves. I think it’s the group underneath the hardcore that aren’t truly casual, but are in between, they’re the ones that really like to feel more out of their items.

Yes, it’ll be a difficult thing to balance. But, I think we’ve done a reasonably good job, and the proof will be in the playing.

The MMO Gamer: I’m afraid I’m already fresh out of direct Conan questions. So, is there anything that you, personally, would like to discuss? Something that people such as myself don’t generally bring up during these interviews?

Craig Morrison: [Laughs] I think one of the things people don’t usually ask, and don’t pay too much attention to is what focus we put as designers into looking at how the games are developed, and how we actually look at our players, and how we interact with our teams.

Because we’re all gamers, really. And I actually like to work it into the interviews, I find a way.

I want to talk about this, because I want people to understand the methodology that we take to looking at this content.

The MMO Gamer: By all means, let’s talk about it.

Craig Morrison: It’s a really good topic, because I think, to me, design is actually relatively straightforward.

I honestly believe that if you make the content fun and interesting, everything else falls into place.

It’s very easy in design to get stuck into what people believe is right, and what people have told you is the right thing to do. You know, “You can’t do that in MMOs!”

You have to put lockouts in dungeons, and you have to prevent the player from doing this, you have to prevent the player from doing that.

The MMO Gamer: Right.

Craig Morrison: You know, I think in normal MMO-and anyone who’s worked on an MMO will probably tell you the same thing: You spend 90% of your time on the last 10% of any design, preventing players from doing stuff. [Laughs]

Because players main disposition is to break things.

And I think that rather than looking at things like that, I prefer to ask the designers to embrace the thought of putting their minds into the minds of a player, rather than seeing it as a challenge almost like, “We must police them, we must force them to play the way that we want them to play!”

I hate that. I know hate’s a very strong word, but I really do. I really, really dislike that approach to design.

The MMO Gamer: It seems to be a very common one.

Craig Morrison: It does. I mean it presumes, I think it presumes the designer is smarter than the player.

The MMO Gamer: Most of them seem to think that they are.

Craig Morrison: Many of them do, and personally I really disagree with it.

I’ve always asked my designers to look at the game and, “You have to look at how our players are playing our games.”

And, they might not play it in the way we want them to play it, or that we thought they would play it. They might look at it totally differently and I think that good designers can look at it and go, “Ok, they’ve reacted differently. They are not doing what I thought they’d do. Why?”

I think the predisposition in the industry has generally been to go, “I’ll stop them from doing that! I’m going to draw a line here and, no they won’t! I’ll do everything in my power to roadblock them!”

The MMO Gamer: And then somebody will find a way to do it anyway.

Craig Morrison: And someone will find a way to do it anyway!

What I prefer to do is to ask my designers to go, “WHY are they doing that? What at the fundamental level are they trying to achieve that you didn’t want them to achieve?”

A lot of times I’ve had this debate with several other MMO developers, and they say, “Well, they want to find the quickest way, they want to do it the fastest. They want to circumvent and take the path of least resistance, and we can’t possibly have them do that!”

And I would say sometimes, why not? If they want quick, if they want that experience to be faster, in that way, let’s make it faster, but at the same time let’s make it fun.

Because if it’s fun, they won’t mind repeating it. A lot of them take the path of least resistance because they see it as a chore.

The MMO Gamer: Right.

Craig Morrison: The encounter is boring. I don’t want to kill these 200 goblins here because it’s mind-numbingly boring, but at the same time I want that reward.

So if I find an exploit that lets me get that reward without killing the goblins, I can ask, why are they exploiting?

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