When I got the chance to ask Jorgen Tharaldsen, the man in charge of the massive Age of Conan MMO (massively massive), I went straight to the heart of importance: sex, God, and why it was developed for the Xbox 360 and not the PS3. Check it out!

Zungre: I’ve seen a lot of the violence in the game, but what are the sexual aspects of Age of Conan? Can you get married or do you just go around getting freaky…

Tharaldsen: Yeah you can, of course you can get married. We haven’t put a system to it, but there is no sexual aspect to the game.

Zungre: There is none?

Tharaldsen: No, there is no sexual aspect to the game. And that’s the thing. And a lot of people will say “Conan, it’s a mature game.” You can get undressed, you know, you can see your nipples. You can be completely naked. And there are certain quests, like you speak to a brothel mama, you rescue a prostitute, stuff like that, but you can’t actually have sex in the game, and we’ve been very careful in avoiding any of that.

When we [originally] said there would be no nipples in the US, there was, like, an uproar. “What?! No nipples in the US! It’s a major crisis!” We had, like, comics being made about it and thousands of forum posts.

Nipples are in… and by that I mean they are out.

And there was a leak that we were reportedly having mini sex games like in God of War in the game and the Internet went crazy. “Whoa, will this mean rape?” and will this mean this and that. People just went off and we’ve never had it.

Zungre: Are there any type of religious aspects to the game? Can you worship Crom?

Tharaldsen: Definitely, all of that. All the different cultures have their own gods, and you’ll see all the cities and all the cultures being made with that in mind. You can see how [our created character] is a Stygian guy. You know that Stygians worship Set, the snake god. And you can see [how he has Set and pictures of snakes in his clothing].

The red lights in the hotel room make Jorgen look like he was born of fire and brimstone.

And you can get the avatars of the gods. There’s some demi-gods you can interact with. And, of course, there’s demons. Like [our created character] could shape into his demon form.

[The gods] aren’t coming down, with the finger from the sky, kind of Monte Pythonist approach, but they’re really there. Close. And people worship them.

Zungre: Did you learn anything from the release of the Conan game that came out last October? It was kind of greeted very luke-warmly. Did you learn anything from that?

Tharaldsen: No, not really. (Zungre laugh!) No, we didn’t learn anything valuable. I think we have chosen a very different focus for our game. And we spent a great many years on building an MMO world, where they built a single player world. So we have gone for a very different approach.

There you could play Conan, where in our game Conan is a more distant character as a king. So, we have had a very different focus for our game.

Don’t worry — Age of Conan’s “different focus” still involves lots of violence.

Zungre: What about the interaction with the people on Xbox Live? Do you have any hopes for that?

Tharaldsen: Yes, but first we’re coming with a complete community focus. And we’re going to reveal that once we’re done with the PC version, simply because we are faced with a large set of challenges which single player games simply aren’t met with in the same way. What about Achievement Points for a game that never ends? That kind of stuff, you know. How do people chat, how do they interact outside the game? Can PC gamers and Xbox gamers play together? Yes, we would like them to. We’ll see how it eventually winds up and what Microsoft wants as well. So we’re guinea pigging our way into this. It’s an interesting challenge.

Zungre: Why did you make the decision to go Microsoft (Windows and Xbox) instead of Sony?

Tharaldsen: Because it’s a very similar code. Xbox and PC are very similar in terms of the code base. And at the time when we started the development of Conan there was only one company with an online strategy, and that was Microsoft.

Zungre: Because this was five years ago.

Tharaldsen: Yes, exactly. They’ve done a fantastic job at bringing online to the consoles, and it was simply easier for us. A Wii version would have been impossible. Playstation 3 would mean putting it up as a completely different game with its own code base. There’s quite a lot of code run in this game. It’s a lot larger than any of the normal single player games.

Video and Pics from the event soon! I held the Conan Sword!

Tags: age_of_conan, avatars, brothel, Conan, demi_gods, demons, developer, different_cultures, fanboy, god_of_war, jorgen-tharaldsen, mature_game, nipples, pictures_of_snakes, prostitute, robert-e-howard, sex-minigame, sexual_aspect, sex_games, sex_god, snake_god, uproar

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7 Comments » Crom on April 15, 2008 7:16 pm Alright, that’s it!!! I’m not buying this game. Why is it that people are okay with blood n guts, shooting up poeple, using drugs, selling drugs and other bad things in games… But when it comes to sex and nudity, everyone’s like that is soooo bad and naughty!!!! You can’t have sex and nudity in games, but you can show explicit carnage!!! WTF???? I hate people!!!!!!!!!!!!! shamon on April 16, 2008 12:44 am Nice interview really want to play this game the last one was a weak god of war clone,but this is a mmo game. Hamad on April 16, 2008 1:47 am Yay for nipples, Nay for no sex. Jonathan Zungre on April 16, 2008 1:56 am It does look cool. The mounts you can fight on look amazing! war rhino, war mammoth. so cool. madpuppy on April 16, 2008 4:30 pm hey “crom” there is plenty of porn on the internet, why are you so concerned about adding sex to a vg? what would be the purpose getting your rocks off to digital animation? (click to thrust, blah) frankly, it is unnecessary in most games, if the game was called “sexual escapades in the age of Conan” Ok,I could see your point. Jonathan Zungre on April 16, 2008 5:07 pm Landis, i love how when you edited this, you changed “(i laugh)” to ” (Zungre laugh!”). haha. makes sense though. Zungre Laugh! Zungre kill for meat! Zungre smash! Dan Landis on April 17, 2008 8:10 am Landis do what Landis can to help fully express the persona of the Zungre. RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.