We interview Funcom's Creative Director about the three MMOs in his care.

ZAM: Do you think that you’re going to get any benefits from – some people use the phrase “being close to the pain” – in terms of having development, customer support and billing all in the same building?

Absolutely, I think so. First of all, I think there’s the benefit to customer service and QA people who want to get into the development side of things - the tools are there and they’ll have the ability to learn things from the developers. So there’s that path there for them, which I think is really positive.

And then, in addition, I think that the developers are going to get screamed at about the major issues all the time, which is fantastic to be honest. People always say it’s the first rule of Agile - voice communication is more important than anything else, talking to people is more important than any other form of communication, and it’s 100% correct. If you’re in the same office as someone and can walk over and yell at them, they’re more likely to get that issue you’re yelling about fixed much sooner. So I think it’ll definitely help – it’ll definitely remove some of the most annoying bugs, I assume, so it’ll help in that sense for sure.

ZAM: With this change to having one single development team, there’s obviously going to be more knowledge sharing about how to use the tools you have to get the best out of them and so on. But how about engine technology – are we going to see technology enhancements in TSW trickle down to Age of Conan and Anarchy Online?

More so Age of Conan. Anarchy Online is its own strange fourteen year old beast, in code development at least. For AO we actually have a couple of the core guys that have been working on it for a long time because, frankly, nobody else would be able to handle the code and the tools for a long time, so we need those core guys to be there. So AO’s a slightly different proposition.

Certainly Age of Conan will benefit from stuff trickling down - I think you’ll see that. I’ve already stated my intentions to do a quality of life patch for Age of Conan, where we get some of the major things – they aren’t huge, but as a day-to-day thing they’re great. Things like just being able to push V in The Secret World to auto-loot every bag around you, Age of Conan doesn’t have that functionality now and it really should because it’s a few lines of code that can be easily moved over. So I want to do a lot of those small quality of life things in a quality of life patch for Age of Conan, and they shouldn’t be much work on our end either to get over.

I think you’ll see after that it’ll be more of a focus on the bigger features. There’re a lot of ideas about features that I think have double value that will work in both games - of course with completely different art, atmosphere and settings, but they’ll still work for both games - as something that players will want to see. An example I gave was a PvP arena system with ranking and stuff; that can work in both games if we have the time to do it, so it’s those sorts of things that I think you’ll definitely see becoming cross-value features.

ZAM: Are the games still going to have a lead designer/game director for each title, or will the entire team flex?

As I mentioned, Anarchy has a few people who are more or less dedicated to Anarchy. Age of Conan and TSW, the thing is most of the guys who are on the joint team have worked on both, so will probably do a lot more hopping between the two. That said, people are passionate about different things. We have AO people who are super passionate about AO, we have TSW people who are super passionate about TSW, and we have Age of Conan people who are super passionate about Age of Conan. So I think the developers themselves will be fighting for what’s best for their games, without necessarily being the owners for that game.

I don’t think we’ll have a particular person as Lead Designer. We have a lead designer on the team, and he’s a guy that I’ve worked with for many years. His name is Romain Amiel, he’s a French developer, and we worked on Age of Conan together, since the day we both started at Funcom. And then when I moved to The Secret World, part of my demands for moving was that I requested he come with me. So here’s a guy that I trust a lot, and we’ve been working together for a long time, and he knows both games very well. He was on the expansion for Age of Conan and he’s been the Lead Gameplay Designer on The Secret World, so he’s the lead designer on the joint team, and he will switch between the games.

ZAM: How are you going to ensure that each game retains its unique feel and distinctive world, instead becoming an amorphous meta-game?

I think that’s not going to be too hard at all. First of all, I think the developers know the difference between the games. I think it’s not very likely that somebody’s going to make Age of Conan feel like The Secret World in any way, shape or form. The systems in the game are completely different; the atmosphere of the worlds is completely different. That’s part of my job as Creative Director, making sure that they don’t lose their feeling. And of course Anarchy Online is science-fiction with elements of fantasy. So it’ll be pretty simple to make sure we keep them on the right track.

ZAM: Will the entire team switch from one title to another? Or will small groups form, grow, deliver and disband as they put parcels of content together?

This isn’t 100% - it depends on the full team make up, because there’re still a few key people who haven’t actually said yes to moving yet, so there’re a couple of people I’m waiting on.

But what I’ll probably do is there’s content and there’re features. Features will be shared across at least Age of Conan and The Secret World. Hopefully AO will get some love as well, but AO is not directly transferable to put code straight into, where it can with AoC and TSW. But in any case I’ll probably give certain designers the leadership role on a feature, and then they’ll take that feature and they’ll make sure it works in both games.

And so it depends, like Issue #7 is pretty much a pure content patch for The Secret World, for example. Most of it is content, there’s not a lot of code in that patch, which means the coders can be working on a feature. The same with Tokyo; Tokyo doesn’t require a lot of new code, because Tokyo is a new zone in The Secret World, so the coders will be working on a different feature, and there’ll be a small number of content designers working with them on that feature.

ZAM: You mentioned that you’re seen as the ideas man. How are you going to avoid getting swallowed up in the scheduling conflicts and resourcing limitations? I get this feeling that there’s a danger of you becoming a super-sized project manager, rather than the creative controller.

I have the Executive Producer, Scott Junior, who’s been the producer on The Secret World. He’ll also be running the joint team, so I have a producer who’s very well experienced as well. Luckily he’ll take off a lot of that load – that’s kind of his job.

My job is making plans and ideas and putting them out there, and then having him say no or yes based on the resources we have. So it’s a conversation he and I will have every day, I’m sure. But he’ll lighten that load – I won’t end up being a product manager. I don’t do any of the day-to-day management of anybody, in the sense that I don’t have to check when people arrive at work; I’m not involved in sick days or any of that sort of stuff.

I make plans like the Issue 7 - I wrote the entire storyline, I wrote what I think we should have in the issue, what the DLC should contain, what should be free content. I presented that to the team, and then Scott will go around and get estimates on how long people think things will take, and then that will come back to me and it’s like ‘we can do it’, or ‘we have to cut certain parts of it’, or ‘we have to think about this in a different way’. I do get to do most of the creative stuff; I don’t have to worry about the management side of things. 

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