Massively Interviews Product Developer Tharaldsen

Massively previewed Age of Conan at the recent Eidos/Funcom press event and scored an interview with Funcom's Product Developer Jørgen Tharaldsen. Massively also took several gameplay videos of the game in action while Tharaldsen answered questions about mature content, classes, magic and more:

Massively: So first of all, one of the big questions is, we know that this is more adult-oriented, so I expect that you're probably going to get that AO rating?

Jørgen Tharaldsen: No. We're going for Mature rating because with the AO rating we're going to be locked out of retail chains pretty much all over the world. And Conan was never an AO universe per se; it's not that gross. We're not really speculating that kind of violence, it's more like an inherent nature of living that kind of life that Conan did. So we've done everything in our power to push the barriers in terms of how far we can stretch it for the ratings boards to be within what's reasonable. If anything, when you read the comics and novels, they're a lot more brutal than what we are doing. We're going to the ratings boards right now. So actually you have seven different ratings boards to go to in the Western World, and they allow us to place certain parameters of what we'd like the game to be, and then we can twist like the horror value, the fatality value ...

Massively: So then it'll be localized by region?

Jørgen Tharaldsen: It will be server-side. Through your IP we can control what kind of content you'll see, so let's say you come from Germany, you might not see all the fatality moves, but we hope you will see all of them, we'll know soon when we hear back from the ratings boards, whereas in the US you might not see nipples. But you probably will see nipples in Norway, for instance...

Read the rest at Massively.

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