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?

Comments

WoW's peaked.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[SatanicPuppy]

Too much leisure time is one thing, but most people blow some time on pursuits that are purely pleasure, and WoW is no better or worse than most of those. I used to play WoW; I played a lot during a period where I was freelancing and doing contract work. Played a lot less when I started in on a full time job. Less still when my first kid came along.

If I can find time to play WoW, have a full time job, a kid, and a social life, what's the problem? People always treat it like there is some character flaw in playing an MMO, but they ignore the fact that the person'd be playing some other game, reading a trashy novel, or slacking in front of the TV.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[MBGMorden]

Totally agree. People need to learn to let others live the way they want to. To too many people someone spending 3 hours bored out of their mind at a local bar is somehow fundamentally better than that same person having fun for 3 hours in an MMORPG. Sure YOU might prefer one or the other, but why worry about others who happen to take pleasure from different activities than yourself?

Re:WoW's peaked.

[MBGMorden]

Why is it that 2 trips to the movies, lasting MAYBE 6 hours tops, is treated as worth $14.95, but a game needs to be played "several hours per day every day" to meet the same value? We'll assume 30 hours per week as a nice approximation of "several hours per day every day". What you're then saying is that an entertainment venue is too expensive to you until it gets below $0.50 per hour. Just how broke are you?

Understand that I'm not questioning whether or not you want to play the game in the first place - that's a fine and legitimate reason. But you've taken a different stand that it's not worth it to people who DO want to play a limited amount of time.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[Ephemeriis]

Unless you are playing quite often, it's simply not worth the subscription fee. That is assuming it's worth the price to begin with, which may be debatable given the continuous expansion packs that eventually become necessity. That's how I see it at least. If I had no life and could play it for several hours a day almost every single day, then the subscription price might be justified (assuming the combat wasn't of the boring click-n-wait variety). But since that isn't the case, it's essentially just a waste of money. Obviously, to the folks who do pay the subscription fee and do play the game, it is worth the fee. Regardless of how much/little they play.

There are folks out there who pay multiple hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine or a cigar. There are folks spending $100+ a month just for cable television. What's wrong with spending $15 a month on WoW, even if you only play for an hour or two?

Worth is highly subjective.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[Fozzyuw]

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.

I think this really sums up WoW right now. It's not that AoC is "better" than WoW, it's that WoW is killing itself with a nearly 2-year release between expansions and game progression.

MMOers want to continue to progress their character(s). 2 years is FAR too long to give people really something to progress with besides horizontal progression with a couple new dungeons thrown in once in a while.

Having Beta tested AoC, I think it's an ok game, but I do not see anything in there that I think is "better" than WoW. Except that it's "new". That means new classes, new lands to explore, new quests to do, more levels to grind. That's what people are really going to be leaving WoW for. Progression. If WotLK came out today, AoC wouldn't be so "big" in the news right now, nor would people be "leaving in droves" to play something else.

I'm sure most of the people who will leave for AoC will be back for WotLK. Until then, I think it's great to eat up the new stuff as well as it being particularly fun to be apart of an MMO launch. Given that a lot of new people start MMOing with WoW, this will be their first major chance to play an MMO from launch. I'm just waiting for the servers to crash at the stress and all the kiddies to come out in droves to forums and start flaming funcom for being worthless programmers. hehe It happens in ever MMO launch.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the real world? Nah. Too much grind.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[cHiphead]

I agree, once I started playing Real Life (TM), suddenly I was getting paid real money to work and do repetitive actions for hours at a time, and with that money I could afford women and drink, and I went forth and drank and hath women.

But watch out how fast you level, now I'm married with a kid + 1 on the way, and I suddenly find myself needing to work exponentially more hours to have any of the glorious monies, and have started thinking about paying money to play games again cuz its cheaper than drinking. ;)

Cheers.

Re:WoW's peaked.

[MBGMorden]

And if you go to a see a major rock band, you can expect to pay several hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. Why these major price differences?

How about: supply and demand? and cost of the product? Maybe I'm just seeing different bands, but I've been to quite a few concerts and NEVER paid more than $75 for a ticket. That's beside the point though except to establish an even higher upper limit of what entertainment can be worth.

As to supply and demand, that only applies to physical goods. For services, particularly access services such as cable, satellite tv, or membership to a gym, you're looking simply at demand. We're talking about an access issue here. There is no "supply and demand" on a monthly access fee to a game. The price is simply set at what people are willing to pay.

Lets compare WoW to other video games, because that actually makes sense. It only makes sense to compare it to video games in the same genre. IE, MMORPG's. All of those charge a monthly access fee because they have to facilitate running their servers to power the infrastructure. About the only similiar game that DOESN'T follow a similar pricing model is Guild Wars.

For the price of WoW+expansions you could buy buy a new game every couple months. If you are only playing a few hours here and there this is probably better value. If nothing else, at the end of a year you've got half a dozen different games to play whenever you get the itch. Only if you're into those type of games instead. You have to think though: how much play time do you get out of those games? I get between 6 and 15 hours out of most games these days. 40 hours for some huge RPG. At $60 a pop, that's 4 months of WoW time in which one can play a lot longer if they wish.

Plus, if you are only playing a game like WoW sporadically, its almost impossible to accomplish things, you are perpetually miles behind your friends, you are left out of the social element, its hard to get into a worthwhile guild or group when you do login... so now you are paying $15/month for a much poorer experience than the game has to offer. That's a personal opinion, and you are free to rationalize that WoW might not be worth playing if you don't play it a lot. Many people do play pretty sporadically though and are just fine. In my guild, pretty much hang out and have fun. Our raiding these days has been whittled down to 1 ZA run per week (that is sometimes canceled) on Tuesday nights, and various 5 mans/heroics whenever guildies feel like it. Sure we're not going to go whup up on anything in the Sunwell, but we have a lot of fun together playing.

My basic point is not that "WoW is OMG teh awesomeness and every1 should play it!", it's that "it's too expensive" is a pretty poor excuse unless you're living in a straw hut. Saying "I don't like the game so I'm not willing to pay for it" is one thing. Saying that "I'm not playing it because it costs too much" is something else.

On top of that, relativism kicks in. The people gettin the most out of the game, playing 60 hours a week, are paying 0.6 cents per hour. And sees FAR more of the game for that price. Me, on the other hand, averaging 10 hours a month, was paying 1.50 per hour for a much reduced experience... I was paying 25x times as much per hour as the hard core player to futz around in crappy neglected parts of the game struggling to find groups to go into crappy instances, while he explored the end game content that was actually interesting. That's a tough pill to swallow. That's the same with ANY unlimited access venue though. The guy who goes to the gym for 4 hours every day compared to you going twice per week is paying less per hour than you. The guy who eats 6 plates of food at the local buffet compared to your 1 is playing much less for his food than you. The guy who downloads 250gb of files per month compared to you downloading 15gb is paying much less for his bandwidth than you. It only makes a difference if you let it bother you. If you discount what other people are doing, and simply justify it to yourself whether or not you wish to partake in the service to begin with, then it works out much better.

PvP games

[shawnmchorse]

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.

Re:PvP games

[Ephemeriis]

People are looing for the next wow killer. People are always looking for the next -whatever- killer. Folks were waiting for the EQ killer, folks were waiting for the DAoC killer, and now folks are waiting for the WoW killer. It seems to me that a lot of people just don't really understand how MMOGs work...

They're all very similar. They'll have different settings, different themes, different gameplay dynamics... But in the end it's all the same kind of stuff. Kill critters to get better gear and more experience, so you can kill bigger critters to get better gear and more experience, so you can kill the biggest critters to get better gear and more experience... It's all grinding, all of it. It doesn't matter what game or how they try to hide it - all MMOGs boil down to grinding eventually.

What really makes or breaks a MMOG is the community. The setting/gameplay/quests/whatever will keep people interested for a while... But once you've hit the level cap with a character or two and you're at the point where you're raiding 'til your eyes bleed, what keeps you coming back is the people around you. Either friends that you enjoy playing with or competition to be the best. Take away the community and you just aren't going to have a game that is worth playing.

There will certainly be some folks who leave WoW (and all the other MMOGs out there) to play these new games. And they'll race through the content to see everything that's there. And they'll raid and get some nice gear and level up some alts. But unless there's a reason to keep playing they'll quickly get bored and go play something newer and shinier as soon as it is available.

Conan will...

[Mr. Beatdown]

Conan will crush it's enemies, see WoW driven before it, and to hear the lamentations of its (very few) women.

Re:Conan will...

[Capt James McCarthy]

Conan will crush it's enemies, see WoW driven before it, and to hear the lamentations of both its women.

Fixed.

Re:Conan will...

[WankersRevenge]

hahahaha ... great quote ... My wife and I just watched Conan the other day. She rolled her eyes when I popped it into the dvd player, but after the first ten minutes she was hooked. At the end of the movie, she said she was surprised that she liked it. Besides the T&A elements and the horrific lines ("Two or three years ago, there were just another snake cult, but now, they're everywhere") and Arnold's wooden stares, it's a great fantasy flick with a great soundtrack. I mean, how many Hollywood fantasy films hold a philosophical question at the heart (what is the riddle of steel). And James Earl Jones was a kick ass villain, using his charisma as a weapon. Check it out again if you have some time to kill.

I played AoC's beta...

[HerculesMO]

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.

My take...

[Drakin020]

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.

Re:My take...

[XanC]

Everyone should have some basic idea about how not to be seen. All I know is not to stand up. Is that the trick is this game?

Conan hardly competes....

[ivan256]

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.

Re:REMEMBER BNETD!

[loafula]

I bet your WoW toon is a Troll, too.

AoC has come a long way in just the last two weeks

[Anonymous Coward]

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 think WoW will be many peoples last MMO game...

[bleh-of-the-huns]

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.

Considering I can play WoW on a 6-yr-old laptop...

[mdm-adph]

...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.

Re:Yes, probably a problem for Blizzard

[Achoi77]

I believe most likely that Blizzard isn't going to make any sweeping additions untill they see a proven formula that works. Once they see something that works, then they will jump in, begin development, pump millions to polish it up and resume the top spot.

I pretty sure Blizzard still has their trump card hidden in preparation for the next wave. The 'world pvp' in WoW is a joke, Blizzard is currently just dropping little breadcrumbs in their pvp space to prevent people from defecting too quickly. But right now they still have technical hurdles they have to overcome (how do you have thousands of people in a zone without excessive lag, all the while not causing the servers to die in a fiery mess?), but they have plenty of time, and a good amount of property, and a large enough consumer pool to deliver a desirable product - when the time is right. It's just not at this moment - which sucks for us consumers.

Once WAR comes out and Blizzard sees that they are beginning to lose subscribers, they will release their new world pvp setting beyond just Northrend. Right now they are just waiting for to someone to press the big red button first.

System Requirements Indicate WoW will Remain King

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.