Age of Conan has experienced some remarkable success since going free-to-play. ZAM Editor-in-Chief Chris "Pwyff" Tom sat down with AoC's Craig Morrison to talk the past, present, and future of this MMO.

ZAM: Speaking of PvP, some players have been wishing for some new mini-game content or PvP activities to pursue; do you think PvP world bosses are a good start on that? Do you have any hints as to how the PvP world bosses will work?

Morrison: The idea of the PvP world bosses is to encourage conflict surrounding taking them down. Now of course there is an inherent risk there, in that the players could choose to 'game' the system, and simply co-operate to take down these bosses, but we are trying to come up with some mechanics that will counter that, and hopefully encourage players to actually fight over these encounters.

I think the safe option is always to just add new mini-games, but that only appeals to one, of many, different PVP preferences, so we wanted to have another go at making some content that might encourage some more competitive open world content. 

We will of course, also be adding at least one new mini-game this year as well, with a little luck more than one, but we will talk a little more about that next year. 

ZAM: The other feature addressed in your Development Update was your "Dreamworld Single Server Technology," which would enable cross-server mini-games, as well as a group/instance finder. While cross-server technology does wonders for speeding up the time it takes to find a group, more traditional MMORPG players like to reminisce fondly on the days of tightly knit communities where players would constantly run dungeons with the same crowd. What are your thoughts on cross-server technology? It's obvious that the AoC team approves of it, hence its eventual implementation, but is there a design philosophy behind it?

Morrison: This is actually something we are very excited about in the long term. For me the ability for people to find teams faster, or take part in PVP with the entire population is a good thing. I was used to having it with Anarchy Online when I was Game Director there. AO had two main large servers that were much bigger than traditional MMO servers, so we never had as much fragmentation, and that was something I missed when making the move to Age of Conan. In real terms the old fashioned 'server' set-up only existed historically due to various technical restraints and database limits. If you can go beyond those restraints there is nothing saying you can't make a perfectly good community a wider base. It doesn't do any harm to a game like EVE online for example, and while yes, EVE is a very different type of game, it also shares many elements.

Beyond that starting point, however, there are some really cool areas that this technology opens up for us, and that is in allowing players more control on where they play and with whom. Traditionally, those old restraints have meant that a player had to make a specific choice that they were bound to for as long as that character existed. I don't think that restriction is a necessity outside of those technical limitations, so once the technology moves beyond that limitation, then it opens the doors for a lot more customization, and we have some exciting plans there that we will talk more about next year.

On a technical level the process will take place in several stages. Early next year the technology infrastructure will go in, essentially pulling all the players together onto our new single server technology. Then we will start to roll out the features that this opens up over the course of next year. I wish we could talk more about this one right now, I am honestly quite excited about some of the possibilities, but we need to get the first technical stages done first. Players can rest assured though that there we are working on some cool options here.

ZAM: Well, I'm pretty much out of questions for now! Were there any last words you wanted to say before we go?

Morrison: Thanks for having us! 2011 has been a really good year for Age of Conan, and we hope to keep that going through 2012, with the move to free to play as well, there is no excuse for not checking out our progress for yourself! It's one thing for me to say how proud I am of what the team have accomplished, what makes it all worthwhile is players coming back and seeing it for themselves.

Christopher "Pwyff" Tom, Editor-in-Chief.