Ah enfin…
Non, Hyborian Codex est toujours en suspens, sommeillant dans un coin de ma bibliothèque poussiéreuse. Néanmoins, de temps en temps, Conan se rappelle à moi. Dans notre cas, et après cette poussive introduction, c’est une interview de Craig Morrison qui a attiré mon attention.
Oh rien de bien fou, rassurez-vous. Les vétérans d’Hyboria apprécieront cependant à juste valeur la déclaration du Game Director:
MMORPGITALIA: Age of Conan is a game based on Guild vs. Guild, but from the PvP perspective there are no incentives to move war to another guild. Battlekeeps are like cathedrals in the desert. Will we never see the introduction of some form of territorial conquest for resources who will make the players fight in the border kingdoms? In Anarchy Online there was the good idea of the Notum Towers, why nothing of similar here? Why do not give to the players a more deep reason for to do PvP 24/7 ?
Craig Morrison: At a top level the game was simply not designed for it. The flow of the playfields and the quest and monster distribution means that the layout of the world doesn’t really support it, neither does the way that the game handles combat and objectives.
The game’s original design was really optimised to ensure that the PVE experience was smooth and flowed well. The original designers never intended for there to be open world PVP objectives of any kind when they designed the playfields – everything was intended to take place in the Border Kingdoms and mini-games so that the PVE play would not be interrupted. It was kind of one of the core tenants they build the game on. Since we can’t really change the entire way that the game is structured in that way, was one of the original design decisions that we also have to observe with the game pretty much.
That doesn’t mean that we would never consider it, but it does mean that it is very, very, hard to retro-fit something like that into the existing game. It could be done, but we would have to assess whether it would work for the PVE servers, whether we needed separate rule-sets if we did decide to do it, and how much resource that would potentially take. We have thought about it before, but there has never really been a design suggestion that would work smoothly and integrate well.
En bref, et en français, il reconnaît ce que tout le monde savait déjà : Conan n’a jamais été prévu pour être un serveur JcJ mais un serveur de type JcE (avec des zones JcJ néanmoins). Bref, rien de nouveaux si vous lisez Hyborian Codex, mais ça fait plaisir à lire.
