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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.
As if WoW was any better when it launched.
Not really, but then most people remember everything in rosecolored hindsight. AoC is a mediocre MMO, but then all MMOs have been mediocre, at best, when they launched. The main problem with this one being how much further it takes WoW's annoying obsession with being Singleplayer Online. Stability is fine, performance is fine, some crap bugs with the more advanced stuff but they're mostly fixed as far as patch notes go. But it's still just an Online Singleplayer, and I quit before I even made it to lvl 80. Maybe the next game will have reasons to play with a team of players instead of running around alone. With WoW's success in this area though, I don't hold much hope. *goes back to Anarchy Online*
Having seen 1st hand the release of every major MMORPG since EQ1 I have no qualms in saying it was much better at release. There's no rosey colored hindsight required for AoC.
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.