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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.
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.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
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*
I'm pretty sure WoW had both functional base stats and an entertaining leveling experience past 20.
Some people may disagree that leveling is entertaining, but even given that, it had a functional and complete experience.
From the Alliance side you had foreshadowing of what would amount to be the uncovering of Onyxia, a rather large dragon, who had ensnared the minds of the leaders of the human capital city of Stormwind. Over a rather... "long" quest chain covering quite a bit of the in-game world, the player was then able to become attuned with the area surrounding Onyxia's Lair, and eventually defeat her in combat.
AoC had (has?) neither functional base stats nor any really functional/remotely entertaining leveling experience past... 20.
Soooo..... you were saying?
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.
WoW had hour long server queues, several days worth of server downtime, lag, instability, exploits left and right. I have seen just as many MMO launches and AoC is in the upper part when it comes to the stability part. There have been no server queues, there have been no extreme server downtimes outside what was scheduled for patching and the client doesn't crash every 5 minutes. What is wrong with AoC is mainly that it's a singleplayer game set online and that it's target audience is the casual player. It's been live now for almost 3 months and the majority of the problems are apparently fixed. What remains is the redesign of teamcontent. Extremely disappointing from my point of view that the team experience is what was left out of the game, but then, the casual player has no time for team-work.