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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.
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?
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.
Actually all of that is going to be released for free in patches. If you are going to troll, you should make an effort, not just act an idiot.
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?
Look, Fanboi, he's not acting like an idiot, he's being facetious. All of those things were promised at launch, still have not been delivered, and Funcom is now announcing an expansion. AoC was a fun game, for the first 20 levels....then everything was rehash. Basically the same combos and approaches to situations. Endgame content is/was non-existant.
For me, there was no single thing that was dealbreaking....it was the plethora of little annoyances. Corpses can see you and stop you from stealthing....critters 30 levels lower than you can break your stealth. Having to log out/in to register that you really and truly did leave a group and want to join another. Lockups occasionally when zoning. Skill/Stats don't really seem to matter. Consistent lag spikes, regardless of ISP. Mount/dismount issues. Horrible MOB pathing. Piss poor town and merchant placement (you have to climb up on a table to interact with some merchants). "Group" mobs require a full group with Soldier and PoM that are a number of levels higher than the mob to be successful. Aggro ranges are unpredictable and illogical. Untold Animation issues. Femme Assassins have overall lower DPS than identical males. Stealth attacks failing if you have not drawn your dagger beforehand. Combos/Skills/feats not performing in the manner the description indicates. Combos lagging/dropping frames/dropping sequence. And these are just the ones that were affecting my toons on a regular basis. Most of these were brought to the attention of the devs in earlier beta stages....the forums are filled with 'features' discovered after launch. (and, yes, I am aware that, now, three months later they have lovingly fixed about a quarter of the things listed above)
I've beta'd and played most MMO's since I was in the original EQ beta. AoC was a very client/server stable launch compared to most....but that does not excuse the half assed product they delivered to production.
After paying for the horrific experience that was the Anarchy Online launch, I said I'd never give Funcom any more money. AoC seduced me. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shame on me. My experiences with AoC in beta and release confirmed beyond a doubt that Funcom is a second rate company obsessed with misleading the public about their product and delivering broken goods to the marketplace.
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.
My experiences with AoC in beta and release confirmed beyond a doubt that Funcom is a second rate company obsessed with misleading the public about their product and delivering broken goods to the marketplace.
In other words, they're the Microsoft of the MMO market?
*ducks*
bork bork bork!
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.
AoC is far from the worst MMO I've ever played. Honestly, the content and feel of the first twenty levels were amazing. They blew their wad making that a fantastic experience.
You keep yammering about casual gamers and teamplay experiences... Now that I have a career and family, I consider myself a casual gamer....but I managed to get up close enough to the endgame to see the lack of engaging content. I'm happy to see that we agree on their poor approach to teamplay. Group quests and mobs were not level appropriate. I watched a group my level (50) with two 70+'s (tank/priest) get wiped by group mobs that were green to our group.
So, for the majority of people playing the game, it's pretty much fine.
Shrug... We'll see what their numbers look like in another six months. Out of the 15-20 players I knew going in....none are still there. Most are either back in EQ2, WoW, EVE, or the WAR beta. I'd say the casual/hardcore ratio is about 50/50 in that group. The hardcore guys hated the lack of endgame and the jacked PvP system. The casual guys hated their limited gaming time being wasted.
With regards to AO having a "bad MMO launch", I can only assume you weren't there and didn't waste $65 on it. AO launch was largely unplayable. 1 FPS in major cities. One or two decent equipment choices per slot for each class....just with a different level to match your level. Wild bugs resulting in unplayable (read locked in world geometry) circumstances that would take any number of hours of online wait time before a GM would fix it. Missions being the exact same experience over and over....nothing more than grinding in an instance. It wasn't a bad launch, it was a three month running catastrophe... I understand after a year or 18 months they had most of it worked out. This time, it looks like other than having a impressively stable launch platform, that Funcom has followed the same gameplan, with a 12 month live dev cycle to get the game to a fully enjoyable state.
You are aware that they had to start giving Anarchy Online away and offer free play just to maintain their playerbase, right?
You keep defending it and expounding about how it is a good game and "nothing really destroyed the game for anyone"....but you quit playing as well. Actions > Words.
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.
Casual players are what the game is targeted for. If you're a casual player, like you say, then how is your time wasted? Did you get to lvl 80? If you didn't, and you think that questing around solo is fine because it's casual and doesn't eat up your time, and you're interested in getting to max lvl to participate in the weekly raid or whatever is popular now a days. How is your time wasted then? The lower levels were fine, the mid range is being improved upon swiftly, revamping every dungeon in the game, and several are already in the revamped state, so everyone playing casually should see the content upgrade around them swiftly.
For me, that's just not good enough. I play MMOs to play with people. Not to sit in front of my screen and grind or do dull quests.
In 6 months? Most likely no noticable reduction in player count. They've got a full development team throwing out updates, summer is over and people are back on the job. 6 months is a long time when you're live, content is thrown out regularly and people are kept happy by new things and the prospect of future goodies.
I was there at AO launch and I've been there ever since. I still play AO. AO's launch was awful. Did I ever say anything different?
And no, they did not have to start giving away AO to maintain the playerbase, like with more or less every other game it's free to try it, they just found a way to make money on free trials.
Why am I defending the game? Well, mostly because I'm bored, and because whenever you read stuff like these comments, it's only the negative voice heard. If there's an article about WoW and how well it's doing, you get a hundred guys posting "WoW sucks". There's never anyone speaking for the level ground, or the pros to the cons. Perspective isn't popular on the internet, and your rather hostile post just adds to that.
Why did I quit AoC? I quit because it was a singleplayer game in disguise and because the character system is so primitive compared to the games I normally enjoy. Everything about the game said "don't team with people, it'll only slow you down/make you inefficient" and that's just not why I play online games. I enjoy cooperating with people and having goals to work towards. Seeing that you could reach max level in a few weeks and that there was no real point to getting max level, other than being able to use epic gear and fight in raids designed by someone from the EQ1 devteam kept in cryostorage... so, singleplayer online game with no real goals other than just playing the game? I'm out.
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.