Development
In 2005, THQ acquired the rights to produce a series of video games featuring Conan the Barbarian and the world of Hyboria. This news came to the attention of Nihilistic Software who had just completed the action game Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. The video game developer was looking to develop an action game similar to God of War for its next project and saw the world of Conan as a good setting. The team quickly built a prototype to demonstrate its concept to THQ and received approval for the project. The video game publisher officially announced the game to the industry on February 26, 2007.
Nihilistic decided to use the features of other action games for Conan. While God of War was its inspiration for the camera system, Ninja Gaiden was a great influence on the combat engine. The team wanted to emulate the complexity of Ninja Gaiden's combat system, with many attacking options and an equal emphasis on being alert to the actions of enemies. Nihilistic also wanted the game to appeal to button mashing players as well as those who want to control their character with finesse. In addition, it designed the game to increase the frequency and difficulty of encounters as players advance through the levels.
Conan was developed to be released on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Although the architectures of the two consoles were very different, Nihilistic designed its product to perform equally on both of them, using force feedback and motion sensing to enhance the playing experience. Conan was originally scheduled for an early 2008 release, but was brought forward to the second half of 2007 because of THQ's poor performance in that fiscal year. After the game was released in Europe, Nihilistic made demos of the game available for downloading over Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
Read more about this topic: Conan (2007 Video Game)
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