Anarchy Online: Shadowlands Wrap Report

A city unlike any other in the entire galaxy, Jobe floats high in the air above the inhospitable surface of the planet Rubi-Ka. It was created by a rogue group of scientists who decided to leave their employment with the huge Omni-Tek Corporation in favor of a life of neutrality, and to construct a community where they could continue their advanced research free from outside control. It was only natural that this haven-like environment would nurture rapid progress, leading to numerous breakthroughs. Nanotechnology in particular flourished, enabling the discovery of a way to drill a dimensional hole, establishing a portal into a strange dimension filled with unusual lands, unfamiliar technology and the arcane knowledge of an ancient civilization. This mysterious area is the titular focus of developer and publisher Funcom's Anarchy Online: Shadowlands expansion pack released last fall.

More than doubling the game's size, it adds Jobe along with more than 20 new areas, called playfields. These are grouped into seven environmentally distinctive themes, starting with the verdant locales of Nascence and progressing to ever darker and more dangerous ones with names like Elysium, Penumbra, Inferno and ultimately Pandemonium that comprise a journey of discovery for players. This doesn't sound like Rubi-Ka for the simple reason that it's not. Instead of expanding the original world, Funcom essentially built a second one, filling it with new professions, specialization options, creatures, music and more, then connecting the two via the aforementioned gateway. Our connection with the company afforded us the opportunity to learn a great deal about Shadowlands during development, and now, to ask Game Director Marius Enge and predecessor Gaute Godager for their thoughts after three months of play.

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The Project Marius Enge: Shadowlands is our expansion pack to the award-winning massively multiplayer online RPG, Anarchy Online, often called AO, which is set in the far distant future, some 28 thousand years from now. It takes place on a planet called Rubi-Ka, which is, curiously, the center of all political bickering in the galaxy. Here, three different factions fight for control of the planet. The main reason is its manufacture of a base substance called Notum that can only be found there, and that is used in the production of Nano-Bots. It has been unknown so far why Notum was only found on Rubi-Ka.

Now, the past of this planet, and indeed humankind, is unraveling. Scientists from the floating city of Jobe have found / created a crack in reality into another dimension, a fragment of the once distant past, where Rubi-Ka was the center of an ancient civilization. These remnants, this dimension, is the Shadowlands.

The Shadowlands has 20-plus new play areas and many hundreds of new beings and monsters as well as treasures and items of all kind for the adventurers. It has lots of new features like two new professions, new music, a new faction system, improved AI, the floating city of Jobe and much more. This expansion is huge, and many have said it looks more like a sequel than an expansion.

The title, Shadowlands, defines a land in the Shadows, a place beyond the fringe of existence. It's surrounded by a lot of mystique and unknown dangers and hazards. It's truly a very scary and dangerous place to be in.

The Team Marius Enge: Funcom was established in 1993, and our head office is located in Oslo, Norway. We also have a customer service office in Durham, North Carolina, as well as an office in Zurich, Switzerland. During the last 10 years, we have released 22 games across various platforms. Our most recent successes include the multi-award winning titles The Longest Journey and Anarchy Online, both developed solely for PC. Previously we made games like Championship Motorcross featuring Ricky Carmichael, Speed Freaks, Casper, Pocahontas and many others.

These days, we have two key genres where we aim to excel, adventure games and massively multiplayer online games. We are currently developing a sequel to our hit The Longest Journey on multiple platforms, a new expansion for Anarchy Online as well as a brand new online world.

The development team for Shadowlands consisted of approximately 50 people, ranging from designers to programmers, graphic artists, world builders and music composers. Add customer service and marketing to that, and you get more. I would also like to point out the huge crowds of volunteers who helped us with testing and quality assurance feedback. All in all, thousands of external people aided us in the development process, although we did not use any outside contractors, which means all the content you see in Shadowlands was made by Funcom.

High-Level Goals Marius Enge: Many inspirations always go into the development of a new product or an expansion pack. First of all, we saw that we needed to upgrade the visual standard in Anarchy Online, especially since we wished to create the Shadowlands as a totally new and otherworldly experience.

On the gameplay side we wanted to focus on making the landscape have meaning and challenge at all steps along the way, making the playfields, or zones, play more like ordinary "levels" where you learn and master the challenges of the gameworld. This was done to ensure a greater degree of purpose and direction for the players. We felt that a more staged and designed gameplay experience would introduce a new level of fun for both new and existing players. It looks like we managed this rather well.

As for standing out from other online world expansion packs, well... we didn't look too much at what the others had done. We can only focus on ourselves, I think, and do our very best based on our internal knowledge. For Funcom, Shadowlands was very much about re-vitalizing the Anarchy Online world to make it refreshing for existing players, while also adding creative new content that would make it interesting for new ones.