With Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures passing its one-month milestone, game director Gaute Godager has one of the most successful launches in MMO history under his belt - but the work is only beginning. A month of frantic patching has produced a more stable, playable, enjoyable game, but the weeks and months to come will make or break Conan, as Funcom strives to ensure that players are happy, entertained - and paying their subscriptions.

In the past fortnight, the team revealed some of its plans for the coming months, in the form of new content and systems for the game. Despite our heartfelt affection for Age of Conan Gold, there's no question that Funcom still has much work to do aoc gold, and many criticisms to answer - so we tracked down Gaute in his northern fastness (well, phoned his Oslo office) to talk about the launch, future plans, and the issues setting the game's forums alight at the moment.

Eurogamer: You've had somewhere over a million sales of the game in its first month - did you expect that level of success?

Gaute Godager: We've actually had over a million sell-ins, which means that that's the number of copies that have gone to shops. That's a bit different from sell-through. We expect those to go out in the first four to six weeks - but we don't really know exactly how many copies have sold through to customers.

Eurogamer: Even allowing for that, you're still by far the biggest MMO launch since World of Warcraft - you must be pleased.

Gaute Godager: Yeah, we're delighted - and we're a bit taken aback and surprised at how well it went aoc gold, in terms of the number of users that we got. We're also very happy that we were able to have a launch that is.... Well, it's a great deal smoother than [Funcom's previous MMO] Anarchy Online was, put it that way! I think we have something that could be a great success.

Eurogamer: Have you had any teething trouble, given the large number of players at launch?

What we weren't able to ramp up was customer service... We had a sales projection, and we went with that in terms of hiring customer service staff - and then we sold a lot more. We were caught out by our own success there. We're really doing absolutely everything we can to deal with that issue as fast as we can.