Funcom have announced the Xbox360 version of their MMORPG is roughly a year behind the PC, and they aren’t ruling out the possibility of a PS3 version.
The interesting part is Funcom’s ambition to let PC and Xbox360 gamers optionally play Age of Conan together with friends ”if they like to”.
”We want them to be able to play with their PC friends if they like to,” product director Jorgen Tharaldsen said. ”It’s not a forced thing but we would like that to happen. But obviously the control mechanism, the communication, all this is stuff we are solving on a daily basis. The patching, the install, the footprint, the payment, the servers, the customer service… it’s a challenge. But we will get there eventually.”
”When we started development of Conan there was no PS3, there was no online plans for PS3, there was no environment for it. Xbox and Microsoft had a very clear strategy, they had a very clear goal, what they wanted to do, and shared our belief of what you could do with the console. So we’ll see I guess.”
He did rule out a Wii version though given its technology limits and that they wanted to focus mainly on the PC version of the game. ”It’s hard to say now how this will pan out. We’ll know in a few months and then we’ll see.”
Should Funcom managed to put together some magic formula to get Xbox360 and PC gamers playing Age of Conan together then they would be the first to achieve it on such a scale.