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Age of Conan's "Kinda" Launch and Massive Pre-Orders
While some are already enjoying the joys of Age of Conan via the early launch, many more will soon be enjoying the fruits of Funcom's labor. An amazing 700,000 copies of the game are being shipped to retailers for day one sales and in some locations pre-orders will not be filled due to server limitations. Between this and the new Warhammer game on the way, should Blizzard be worried, or will Wrath of the Lich King continue to hold their competitive edge?
I think there is definitely room for something new; a lot of people have been talking about WoW's mass market appeal and it's true that it has a great mass market appeal. It's definitely brought the cult of MMORPG to a much wider audience. I wonder how many people though, have really thought through the implications of that?
The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.
What it also did was pull a huge number of non-MMO players into the mix...Players who've picked up the basic skills, and maxed out a half dozen characters, and are now bored to tears with WoW's pointless and repetitive endgame grindfest. For all that it's different from what came before, it's still pretty typical, and lessons learned in WoW will transfer quickly to other MMOs.
Basically, they created the ultimate MMO gateway drug. Now a lot of new products are hitting the market, and I think WoW will see a lot of defections as players who've hit the upper limit and gotten everything it's possible to get in the game, start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Just based on the fact that it's a PvP oriented game, I know I'm not really going to be interested in it. Same goes for Warhammer. As someone who has much more fun in PvE play, I appreciate games where I can expect that there won't be huge changes made based on PvP concerns.
As good as World of Warcraft is for some people, a lot of people I know that used to play it just had enough of it. You play the same game for years, you tend to get bored of it, new content or not.
World of Warcraft won't be going anywhere for at least another couple years, but I'd expect at least either AoC or Warhammer to get into the millions of users and take a chunk out of WoW's userbase.
Conan will crush it's enemies, see WoW driven before it, and to hear the lamentations of its (very few) women.
My fellow Americans, let's restore the death penalty for child rapists. Let's do it . . . for the children.
And it's a decent game, very buggy (although it was beta) and ran very choppy on my reasonably good machine (4GB ram, 8800GTS 320MB, Core2 Duo).
For others it ran well.
The PvP is pretty good -- think of it as a type of "Guild Wars" game. The classes are EXTREMELY imbalanced, where the ones that can 'stun' can stun you for a half hour. You can get DoTs that last a long time, and all you do is cast it, and run away -- eventually the other guy dies.
World of Warcraft will not be unseated or even touched by this game. It's going to be a rush to try it out, and you'll see everybody go back to WoW. WoW is simple to play (not a lot to figure out, it gets more advanced as you level), it takes a very little power machine, the classes are VERY balanced, and every instance and dungeon is well thought out. It's not to say that the game is that great either -- but the social aspect of WoW is a lot nicer than AoC will ever offer, and it's why they have 9 million subscribers. Because it's easy to group, easy to socialize, and easy to play.
AoC is a good game for those looking for a 'hardcore' experience, or Guild Wars on steroids. I don't know about WAR, but I'm patiently waiting for beta access (fingers crossed!) to see how it plays out.
Right now though, I am sticking to WoW.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I got in on the early release. Managed to get to Lv 9.
I was not impressed. The combat system is cool for about an hour or 2 then it's somewhat annoying. Mages are overpowered in that you cast one spell and the enemy dies.
Also everyone has Hide (AKA Stealth) yeah...everyone. There are some limitations but the ability is still there.
I think it needs a bit more tweaking, but again I'm not to thrilled with it.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
WoW fills an enormous niche. A game like Conan, no matter how great, will likely find it isn't even competing in the same market.
WoW runs on crap hardware. When something like 95% of your customer base is a "casual" player, that's an important (of not the important) feature. The shitty $400 Laptop or $300 PC you bought from WalMart will probably give you a satisfactory experience playing WoW, and it's likely that the vast, vast majority of WoW's customer's are running on low-end machines. Conan doesn't even have a shot at those customers. They can't even run the game if they wanted to.
If you want to de-throne WoW, you've got to build a well marketed, feature and content rich MMO that runs on today's low-end machines. Otherwise you are selling to a much smaller market than Blizzard.
This is nothing new for Blizzard, either. All their games have always been targeted at low-end (mainstream) machines. And they always sell like crazy. This isn't a coincidence.
I bet your WoW toon is a Troll, too.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Seems like someone other than Blizzard would see the wisdom in supporting OpenGL and this expanding market
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Many of the complaints about the client, animations, and performance have been resolved in just the last few weeks of the beta. The difference in performance is astounding.
There are many players using mid-range to even lower range systems that are getting very decent performance with the client. As with any MMO of course there are bugs, and as with any MMO they will be corrected in time.
If you haven't actually played the game in the last week of beta or as part of the early access then whatever opinion you have about it is most likely based on very flawed and incorrect information.
I know this was a factor for myself, atleast in the late 20's early 30's age category.
I played EQ for 7+ years from early beta, I played EQ2 for abit too, but ended up playing DAoC for abit before moving to WoW. I spend years, thousands of hours, played in the lead horde guild for that time, and got completely burnt out just before the first expansion pack came along.. with multi characters all at level 60....
Once I quit, I have not started a new game, and do not plan to, and I am sure I am not the only one... Those of us who started playing in our late teens early 20's, have probably had enough, especially those of us who finally have families or significant others who demand our attentions, and real life things like going out, playing sports (I mountain Bike) and hobbies (I woodwork), I would just not have time for a game, hell I barely play my Wii or Xbox (original) anymore, I just do not have the time.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
OK, I downloaded the trial of World of Warcraft a few days ago to see what all the fuss is about. The game seems to work as thus:
1. You see a mob walking around.
2. You right click on it, you fire a few arrows at it, it runs towards you, you automatically fight it.
3. It dies, you get some xp.
4. Do it a few more times and level.
5. Goto 1.
I got up to level 6, and that seems to be all the game really has. You get more powerful with each level, and better equipment, and can fight more dangerous things, but the game's still exactly the same. Instead of clicking on a level 1 boar, you click on a level 6 scorpion or something. Does it actually get more fun when you get to the really high levels? The combat system is awful, worse than Golden Axe which is like twenty years old. All this modern technology and it's like playing an old text-based MUD: "you hit the boar for 10 points of damage, the boar hits you for 5 points of damage etc."
It's very slow walking around, and there isn't much of interest to look at. There are a couple of small villages, some dirt tracks, and not much else.
Quests seem to be either:
1. Kill ten things, bring its drops back.
2. Carry something from one place to another.
Apparently this is the greatest ever MMO, ten million players, bigger than Jesus etc. and I was completely underwhelmed. The graphics are pretty uninspiring, the world is a bland orange with no real features or vegetation: you sort of expect roadrunner to go past at any moment. NPCs just stand around doing nothing other than giving you quests, other players don't even talk to you, it's like playing a single player game.
I tried Everquest 2, which is pretty much exactly the same game but with better graphics and a worse interface. Are all MMOs like this? If so I really don't see why they carry so much interest.
...I don't think Blizzard has anything to worry about (1.7Mhz P4, 512MB RAM, 32MB Geforce 2 -- 20-30 FPS). WoW plays wonderfully on integrated video -- it's one of the few games that does.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Robert E. Howard's "Hyborian Age" is the perfect setting if done correctly. It certainly puts to shame all of the weak "high fantasy" out there. It's just a shame that it's being relegated to an MMO which may or may not even catch on with the population.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I don't think it likely either of these will dethrone WoW. First, the system requirements for both seem to be missing the "midrange computer from two years ago" that is the normal target for mainstream games. As such, they're only hitting the relatively small "extreme gamer" market. Next, there is no support for the Mac, which cuts out 14% of the total US market and much more of the game buying market. Third, losing a small portion of the market because of requirements can lose you much bigger portions of the market because these are networked games. If just one person in a group of friends has a Mac or a lower end PC, the entire group may well decide to stick with WoW or some other game that they can all play (especially if that one player is the cute co-ed gamer in the dorm).
Really, there is nothing wrong with either of these games, but they just aren't targeted at the same demographic as WoW, or if they are they are very poorly targeted. Some day someone will come out with a WoW-killer but I don't think either of these are even viable candidates.
Additionally, you must be using a fairly narrow definition for "mods". I played a number of incredibly clever maps for both Starcraft and Warcraft 3 - while not total conversions like Valve allows for, I would certainly define some of the upper tier maps as "mods".
Not to say Blizzard isn't evil.. they nerfed my priest!
What will kill WoW, in the MMORPG market, is a game where much the content is generated three ways: carefully designed by the developers, randomly generated by the game, and created by the players themselves.
Imagine a game where you can design you own swords and armor, or build your own houses. Players can build their own cities, running markets and shops (perhaps the shopkeep can be one of their 'alts', or their player when they are not online) -- even set up their own questgivers (perhaps you need some number of rare items to build your own magic device). Toss in the random spawning of troll villages in the boonies, or brigands on well travelled roads, and combine that with an epic main storyline created by the game designers with the usual castles and quests.
Until we get a game with more dynamic content -- mainly, random and user generated -- I can't really see anything displacing WoW. That game just does to many things right, and not one of its competitors appears to be building on that.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.