Slashdot Mirror
Age of Conan Expansion Coming In 2009
At the recent Leipzig Games Conference, Funcom developers announced that the first expansion to Age of Conan is planned for a 2009 release. Details about the expansion are sparse, but a significant amount of new areas appear to be in development for that and a free upcoming content patch. Massively points out a video which showcases some of the new content. 1Up has a piece of concept art for the expansion.
AoC only made a splash because it came out when WoW-TBC was old, WoW-WotLK wasn't out yet. And WAR wasn't out yet.
What a great niche Funcom can have. Release really horrible buggy incomplete games. But release them at time when nothing else is "fresh".
I think we found the missing "????" before "profit".
Currently LOTRO appears to be the best fantasy themed MMO out there if you're looking for content. They went live in 2007 and had _7_ major content dumps called 'books' while a major expansion is launching this fall. I'd say that sets the industry standard.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Most people who I know play it are not satisfied with the content, so instead of announcing an expansion they should focus on finishing what is already out. With this announcement, I bet a lot of people are going to decide not to resubscribe and just wait for the expansion.
Don't they need to finish the game first?
This expansion AoC has the following important features:
- DX10
- An endgame
- A PvP system
- Anything else previously promised for the release of the game that still isn't properly implemented
I mean, what a joke. They haven't got AoC to a release-quality state yet, and so many promised things still aren't done. They're already working on an expansion?
Can you say "flagrant cash grab"?
It was later. At launch, everything was fine. The problem was scaling, and you can't entirely blame them. See Blizzard looked at EQ's peak numbers and figured "well we can't do any better than that." Made sense. EQ was the first real big MMO, and there was now competition. None of the other MMOs before WoW had beaten EQs peak. So Blizzard figured they'd do no better. Well, they were wrong. Suddenly people bought up every available copy and they had more and more players coming in. THAT was when the problems started. Their hardware simply couldn't handle the load. Once they got that straightened out, it has gone pretty well since.
While their beginning was not without problems, it was a lot smoother than AoC. Goes double since what WoW had mostly was technical problems. The game itself was sound. Good design, lots of stuff to do, etc. That's one of the reasons why they started having the problem of too many people playing. Their game was done so well that people started rushing to it. They not only got lots of players from other MMOs, they got people who didn't do MMOs before.
Most people who play it will also read some kind of news, if nothing else, then while waiting for the annoyingly slow "scanning local files" and will know that there's plenty of development on the current game. But then, people, like you I guess, will think like you posted, that because one thing is being worked on, then another cannot be worked on. "they're working on dx10 port" "oh no, then they won't be working on fixing this bug". A huge development team like the one working on AoC, the full dev team is still working on it, will be able to work on many factors of the game at once, and including DX10 support does not in any way stop the content designers from making/fixing stuff. It seems strange, but for some reason a lot of people seem unable to realise that a team can work on more than one aspect of a production at once. Do these people never leave their own homes?
With luck, they'll have Hyrkania, Khitai and Lemuria. More likely though, they'll only finish the borders of Hyrkania, at best.
"People are easily amused by quotes." - Some guy with a cool-sounding name.
I am both a former WoW and AOC player. I got to level 71 in AOC before I finally called it quits; most of my friends quit a week or two before I did.
The game had a lot of potential, and the hype led me to buy it before I had read the reviews. But the potential to be good is not the same as *actually* being good.
AOC was riddled with bugs and was largely incomplete. Almost every aspect of the game had something wrong with it -- there were zones that were entirely broken (e.g., the Pyramid), character talents that didn't work, and hardware compatibility issues. The crafting, gathering, and siege systems were also largely non-functional, and I'm not sure if gear stats actually did anything.
There were other, more fundamental problems with the game, for me. For example, the zoning system (and load screens) really detracted from the "grandiose" feel. The look of the earlier levels felt fresh & innovative, but the end game was dreary and ill-conceived -- just about every zone from the Field of the Dead onward involved snowy, ice-covered mountains populated by angry humans, serpents, cavemen, and bears.
AOC lacked a certain "magical" feel that WoW had engendered in me. Leveling in WoW was about starting in a tiny corner of a huge world, and over time, coming to realize just how enormous the game world was -- how many different types of landscapes, enemies, and hidden "gems" there were. AOC, on the other hand, felt small -- by level 50, I had visited every outdoor zone, and apart from the aforementioned creature types, there just wasn't that much variety. Sure, it may be true to Howard's lore, but it felt boring nonetheless.
The zones and character design did little to encourage any "emotion" while playing -- while WoW's Duskwood felt "creepy" and Ashenvale felt "alive", AOC simply just ... was. Play-wise, I was never concerned about being ganked by a human player or accidentally running into a mob that was too potent (for my level-appropriate zone) because I was almost always able to run away, even when attacked by characters 10 levels higher. Against same-level mobs, I almost never ran out of mana, and found myself grinding enemies in groups of 6 at a time. The most amusement that I had stemmed from figuring out how many critters I could pull at once without dying.
While it may have been a "smooth" launch for an MMO, it availed itself to be an unpolished, largely unfinished game. I don't like the idea of paying to beta-test other people's software, and found the game to be fairly disappointing.
I won't be partaking in AOC's "ongoing beta", and I doubt that their expansion will be any better. But I may consider WoW's next expansion -- if anything, my experience with AOC has taught me just how well Blizzard play-tests its games.
Age of Conan is bleeding customers. I am a lifer from Lotro who tried it out at launch for 3 months, I know many a gamer for Lotro who tried it and then we all came back, one by one as our subscriptions ran out.
Dark and Light managed to launch without being able to run on Ati cards, that is probably the only reason why Age of Conan won't actually earn the title of worsed MMORPG launch in history.
There were so many things wrong with AoC, but most telling perhaps in relation to this article is that they must by now KNOW they have screwed up and are loosing customers and yet announce happily that any new content will have to be payed for.
How about first actually introducing the content promised on the box?
Gaute has his head so far up his ass for the entire development that he still lives in a world where Everquest is the biggest MMORPG and WoW is just a pipedream by some canadian company famous for making clone games. 5 years ago the development started and if you look at AoC it ain't hard to believe that nobody in the dev team has taken any note of what happened in the genre since then.
The game itself is not that bad, it just shouldn't have launched post-WoW.
No fast travel, in 2008.
Worse, one area was a warzone, you constantly were asked to travel through a warzone with hordes of grey enemies around you, BYE BYE immersion, at least a game like Lotro tries to keep the roads clear so you don't have to wonder why you as a hero ignore the barbarians at the gate.
That was fundementally the flaw with the entire game, it just wasn't designed. Things didn't "click".
And then they went about fixing the game and what little potential the game has was ruined.
One of the innovative things about the game was that for once the healing class wasn't a squishy standing in the back. Tempest of Seth was a lethal killer perhaps the most efficient killer in history of MMORPG's.
All heals were whole group HoT's. A ToS would power up her heals with damage, regain mana with damage and heals cost less mana with damage. ToS also had an aura attack that attacked hit all enemies arround for 30 secs and could be kept up near constantly. So ToS benefitted from engaging large hordes of enemies, get a HoT of and then DoTing them to death.
Lethal. So it was nerfed. Reasonable at first sight, IF you saw priests as the classic priests from other games. Players purely in the service of other players. There were complaints and ToS was nerfed and made a lot less fun to play.
The effect? Well perhaps it helps to explain that ToS was limited to one race, each race AFTER the common area tutorial zone had their own zones. So? Suddenly, one race/zone had a real shortage of healers. Healers are always a limited class and even when ToS was powerful they were only a small group. With the nerf, even fewer people wanted to play a healer and voila, back to the old days of me being press-ganged into healing for melee while standing in the back.
No thanks. The game failed to learn from MMORPG's that came before and then copied the worsed elements from them after launch in bugged patches.
AoC (Anarchy online Continued)
Age of Conan, Adventures in customer support.
The secret world is another Funcom developed MMORPG and I am holding my heart for that one. It is being done by the guy from The Longest Journey and Gaute so far hasn't got anything to do with it, but so far Funcom has had two fails, will the 3rd really have a change of being a win?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Cause Hello Kitty Online be zee mistress of the grind? I mean have you even tried the beta?
that this announcement is just a damn lie? There's no way they get out an expansion next year. NO WAY. They're just trying desperately to cling to their user base by promising content that's nowhere near ready. They're just staving off the bleeding.
I'm still not playing until they add the "Insult Comic Dog" class...
Aoc will die along side DAoC once War releases.
~DF
I am a massive fan of the AoC. Its my first MMO and I really enjoy it - especially seeming I'm a huge Conan freak. My biggest issue with this is that there is a massive memory leak in the client at the moment which means you need to relog every 30mins to 1.5 hours. Shouldn't they be fixing this before they start talking about expansions?
I chalk this negative effect up to MMO culture, the "this game sucks my old game was better, the next game is going to be awesome". I was in closed beta of Lord of the Rings Online, and still have an active account, all people did was complain and say how they couldn't wait for Conan. Now those people moan about how Conan bites and they can't wait for WAR... If you ignore the media hype for all these games, you tend not to form expectations of what it should be, and I think in many cases the fan boy culture of these type of games hypes the hype conjuring an experience that while awesome is impossible to implement I've played a whole lot of MMO's and none of them have had stellar starts. Conan needs some polish but once they get some time to do so It'll be a great game. heck my wife even likes it which is a first.