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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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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.
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.