Recently delayed from its initial October 2007 release to March of 2008, Funcom's Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures highlights a different approach towards MMO combat. Instead of just one single attack button, the game uses multiple keys to control the direction and angle of a player's attack.

It may sound a little overwhelming, but once past the initial learning curve, I found myself far more entertained than I expected. With the keys arranged in a logical manner on the keyboard--WSAD users will have no problems adjusting--and a handy on-screen display indicating which angle and direction would be best to attack from, I was ripping enemies to shreds and gaining experience in no time.

After my enjoyable time with the game, I questioned content designer Jason Stone on a variety of subjects, including Funcom's approach to the traditional MMO grind, how the game distinguishes itself from World of Warcraft, nudity, and the upcoming Xbox 360 version.

Shack: How does a traditional quest in Age of Conan differ from, say, World of Warcraft?

Jason Stone: I think that the big difference in the quests in Age of Conan is not necessarily in the content. I mean, you're still going to result in having quests where you have to go get an item. The big difference is we have the global storyline, and then basically each region has its own storyline and each quest in a region generally builds on the region's storyline.

So you might be killing something, but you're killing something because this is the story of the area that you're in and that is related to the overall story of the world. As often as possible, all of those things are then tired directly to stories or characters or experiences come from the writings of Robert E. Howard.

Shack: How long will it take to level up?

Jason Stone: The general path for advancement is gonna take people around ten days of play. We really tried to build Conan so that we had the content necessary to keep the people who have a lot more time to play interested while making it approachable for people who don't have a lot of time to play, maybe four or five hours a week.

We anticipate for the more casual gamer, two and a half to three months to max out a single character.

Shack: What's the level cap?

Jason Stone: The level cap is 80. That's our max level.

Shack: For those that devote themselves endlessly to the game, what's to keep them playing after they hit that point?

Jason Stone: PvP is one of the things we think is extremely important to bringing the proper representation of Hyborian world to life, because Conan's world is a brutal world.

We're putting in raids, we're putting in dungeons, and we have in-game encounters, but my personal opinion is that the siege PvP is what's gonna keep me wanting to play this game for an extended period of time.

Shack: How do you plan to resolve the typical MMO grind?

Jason Stone: I think a big part of MMOs these days, after the transition from Everquest to World of Warcraft, is that now players want a lot more direction concerning hunting. They like those quests that guide them to different areas of the world.

In general, people don't like to just grind. They don't want to just sit there and kill things.

I think another big and important part of that, at least for me when it comes to MMOs, has been making the actual act of playing. For me, the best thing about Conan is, with the action combat system, when I'm killing guys, I'm actually having fun. I don't feel like I'm just like "la-di-da-di-da"--

Shack: Clicking the same button over and over again.

Jason Stone: Exactly. Because I feel more involved, I feel more engaged by the act of playing, I don't get bored as quickly.

Shack: What are your plans for new content?

Jason Stone: We have a release schedule. We already have plans for the next big expansion we'd like to do, new races, new whole countries, stuff like that. In addition to that, every month we plan on adding additional things to the base game.

Shack: As far as the expansion packs go, yearly releases?

Jason Stone: I don't know. I don't think we've put the expansions into a production schedule. We're waiting to see how the base game is received, we have only started designs and have ideas about what we'd like to make.

Shack: Switching gears, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the Xbox 360 version.

Jason Stone: For a long time now, we've had concurrent development in the sense that we do have a working Xbox 360 version. The big things that we're waiting to solve are with Microsoft. Are we having hybrid servers? Do people choose to go on these hybrid servers? Can you choose one or the other? Do we have voice chat on the PC version and the Xbox 360 version? Do we have the people on the Xbox use a keyboard?

There's all these decisions that have to be made with Microsoft that we don't have the answer to yet. It will follow the PC version, but the game has always been designed to be console friendly. Game pads are being used for combat testing, control testing.

Shack: You just wiped out about half of my questions. Has Microsoft been helpful? Approachable?

Jason Stone: I've been in the industry for quite a while, I started in 2000, so I've been in for almost eight years now. I've been at Funcom for the past three years.

I think Funcom's relationship with its partners--Nvidia, Eidos, Microsoft, and of course, Paradox and Conan Properties--have been some of the best relationships I've ever seen in the industry as far as interaction goes. It really feels to me--I'm just a designer, I don't work directly with the code of the Xbox 360 version and stuff like that--but the fact that they've trusted me to do things with this and talk with people, I've been really impressed by it.

Read on for more about the Xbox 360 version, including control and subscription details, word on the upcoming open beta, nudity, and the reasons behind the delay.