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Age of Conan Dev Talks Problems, Future Plans
Jørgen Tharaldsen, Funcom's product director, recently spoke about some of the problems with Age of Conan and how they are planning to make the game better. "I think it's okay to say that we simply didn't deliver as good as we should have on all the launch features." He goes on to talk about how they're working on improvements to the PvP system, tradeskills, and class balance. Tharaldsen also spoke with Strategy Informer about the development of the Xbox 360 version of the game, which he said was "not our key priority as there are a massive amount of PC gamers already playing the game, and we rightly have the focus on them."
The only thing they got right over WoW on launch was their server capacity. It was a very stable experience with no lag. This is because of their very nice instancing architecture. It works really really well. While WoW may set the standard for polish and finish on games, AoC definitely did a great job on server capacity. Hats off to your ops team.
However, Funcom managed to screw up almost every other aspect of the game, from UI layout to weapon speed, at launch. Itemization at low levels, lack of quests in middle levels, guild housing that just plain didn't work, and so on. Females had a lower weapon speed than males, because it took more time to animate the jugglies. I have a very hard time believing there was any QA done on the game despite the long beta period.
"...there are a massive amount of PC gamers already playing the game, and we rightly have the focus on them".
As stated, Funcom is choosing to work on improving the product already delivered to PC gamers, people he notes are already playing the game, rather than dropping what they admit is a less than perfect product simply to whore out a console port to be a large, mediocre fish in a small pond. Any company willing to improve the lot of their existing customer base over turning a quick buck at the same customer's expense is to be applauded in my opinion. Frankly, I'm surprised that you could be so snide about a company taking action that speaks to values other than devotion to the all-mighty dollar.
Funcom lies like the truth tastes bad. If you purchase the game it says it features DirectX 10 and 64 bit enhancements and in game drunken brawling as well as dual core optimizations. All of those features are missing.
With the PC version, you get to compete with hundreds of other MMO's, including World of Warcarft. With a 360 version, all you would have to compete with would be a crappy Final Fantasy MMO.
Thats exactly the problem. Console MMOs end up being a watered down crap attempt at making some console game into an MMO so you're competing with every other console MMO out there.
There are a lot of different PC MMOs out there. They're generally much better and not just some watered down crappy console game made into an MMO. They're also not all the same. World of Warcraft doesn't compete with Eve Online or a lot of the other MMOs out there. They're very different games from different genres targeting people with different needs & interests.
Also, the Xbox 360 has sold 20 million units? of those, how many are connected to the internet? A tiny number compared to how many hundreds of millions of PCs are on the internet. The PC has been helping people communicate with one another online for years. Theres enough PC users around for AoC to becomes 10 times the size of WoW.
At launch WoW's capacity was fine. For about a month everything was good. Their problem was they didn't think it would grow as big as it did, and certainly not as fast as it did. That isn't to say they dealt with it well once it became a problem, but it wasn't a launch problem, it was a problem a bit later when people really discovered it.
The difference, of course, is that as you noted WoW is fun, AoC really isn't. So with WoW they didn't realize that there were so many people who'd like to play MMOs but hadn't encountered a good one. Thus sales took off and crushed their infrastructure. Their initial sales were nothing compared to what was to come. It has basically been nothing but growth. With AoC it was the opposite. They figured they'd steal tons of WoW players, and so were prepared on the infrastructure. However the game isn't good, so it has had trouble keeping people. Thus they may well have seen their peak on launch, and it'll only go down from here until it stabilizes.
My personal favorite was a patch note to the effect that:
Coins taken from the bank will now be added to the coins in your inventory instead of replacing them.
I mean even with drunken, meth-addict monkeys doing testing how does THAT make it into the live game????
I gave up.
He, funcom? You want to know how to get people back into the game? Everyone who actually went out and bought the game, give them 2 free months. I'll come back if you do that and not before.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
keyboard.
What's the point of being in a fantasy world with millions of other people if you can't communicate effectively with any of them?
And yes, I know there are keyboard attachments of various kinds for the consoles, but have any of them ever really taken off? They defeat the purpose of the console.
... and any new MMORPG is wearing milk-bone underwear.
It takes 2-3 years to get a product designed, written, art and models done, network code debugged, levels and scripting designed, UI and plugin code writtent, infrastructure installed, and anti-cheat security implemented. It's a lot of crap, and takes a LOT of money.
The competition has 3+ years of polish and debugging.
Is your new game really going to justify all the expense above? Is your new game going to be polished? Because a fanboi can claim "oh, it's a new game, of course there are bugs." So... uh, why play it when you can play an older, polished one without as many bugs?
New games have to deliver polished, bug-free code, and it has to be fun to play.
AoC did not deliver those things... Instead they got a lot of the requirements right such as cool models and art for the 1-20 range, but dropped the ball heavily on content, bugs, and "fun factor".
If there was no competition, they would've done fine (like they did with a horrible Anarchy Online launch with tons of bugs, unplayable lag, etc). They do not have the same privilege to screw the pooch like they did with AO.
I'm not sure AoC can recover, but they do have many parts of a potentially excellent game.
Consumers rightfully should not buy craptastic ship-now-patch-sometime online games. Yes, you can patch it as you go, but AoC demonstrates that shipping crap and trying to patch it into something good doesn't get rid of the consumer disillusionment of opening a shiny new box of crap.
Age of Conan is a dead man walking. World of Warcraft is solid and polished, although getting a bit... drab if you've been playing it for a while. While I haven't played it; most people I've talked to thought Lord of the Rings Online is a pretty good game. Aside from that you still have EQ2, Eve, and FF Online. So what exactly is this game going to give us that these other games don't? Alright... boobies.
Anyway, it's easy to see that you're going to have to go for some sort of niche and as it just so happens World of Warcraft is dropping the ball big time in PvP. Warhammer is all over this, and I think this is why that game will survive. Age of Conan? Just having a game online isn't going to cut it anymore. You've got to offer something better or different, and Age of Conan offers neither.
You really only get one chance to impress gamers. If you lose that initial wave of players, it's almost impossible to get them back. Reports indicate AoC has lost nearly half their initial players.
So, no matter what they do to the game, it's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It's still going down.
EQ - Will run on just about anything with a 3d card. Huge world with many expansions already live. Death penalties require real dedication...not the best for the casual player.
EQ2 - Very fun game since they did their revamp. Friendly to casual players, but is a more complex game than WoW.
Eve - Amazing scope for an MMO. Hard to establish yourself unless you have friends already in game.
FFOnline - Do not start unless you have a good group that will be levelling with you, or already know a guild starting new alts.
WoW - The defacto standard for casual gaming on less than bleeding edge systems. The expansion in November should boost populations.
Warhammer Online - New MMO, still has some bugs. Only of interest to the PvP or RvR crowd. Possibly the best PvP MMO implementation yet.
LotRO - Beautiful world, but you get sick of killing boars at level 1...level 5....level 10...level 15...ad infinum. Very limited in variation due to restrictions of canon.
Also, the Xbox 360 has sold 20 million units? of those, how many are connected to the internet? A tiny number compared to how many hundreds of millions of PCs are on the internet. The PC has been helping people communicate with one another online for years. Theres enough PC users around for AoC to becomes 10 times the size of WoW.
Well, there's an inherent flaw in your logic. While, yes, AoC could potentially become that large on the PC, it won't. The reason? Well, just because a PC is connected to the internet doesn't mean there's a gamer sitting behind that keyboard. With a console, your odds of landing a hardcore gamer are significantly higher.
Furthermore, the prevalence of MMOs on PCs causes problems. In general, many people don't play more than one MMO at a time, and if you're competing against WoW, Guild Wars, EQ, etc., your market size shrinks considerably. Consoles are essentially MMO free. If you make a killer MMO work great on a console, there's a serious untapped market to be had.
That there is the problem. Console MMOs suck, because everyone refuses to build from the ground up for them. If you design a game with solely consoles in mind, you don't (always) get "watered-down crap". Sometimes, you get a fantastic game with a sweet concept (best example: EndWar). Trash consoles all you want, but they are getting some really cool innovation, and innovation sells (whether that be on PC or console).
Finally, there is one HUGE incentive for developers to switch to consoles; piracy. Say what you want about it, but piracy is a cancer on the PC market. Is your game actually going to do well, or is it gonna get pirated to hell and back? Will you even make a return on that investment? Consoles have significantly lower piracy, and that makes them a safer bet.
Mark my words; console MMOs will be huge. Someone will hit it big sometime, and it will rock the gaming market. It'll be that console generation's Halo; it'll prove (once again) that consoles are viable not just for genre x, but genre y too. You just have to work with them.
I am a player who still longs for Star Wars Galaxies pre-'doc buff', tried Everquest 2, a bit of WoW, varioues Free-to-Play and is currently a lifer in Lord of the Rings Online. I tried AoC for 3 months, or rather, I bought 3 months, tried it for two.
The game was started BEFORE WoW came out. Remember that WoW by now is a very old game indeed. MMORPG's ain't all that old to begin with and AoC was pretty much started in the early days.
The best explenation I have come up with for AoC is that the dev's locked themselves up five years ago and never came out. The game just didn't learn from the developments that happened. Not from WoW, but also not from the SWG NGE, Dark&Light, SOE's constant misses, Lotro smooth launch etc etc, Vanguards dismall failure.
AoC launched with almost year 2000 like values. The screenshots look pretty but the interface is... well crap. Crap tastic. So crap that crap doesn't even begin to describe it. It doesn't do anything for game, it ain't just ugle, is unwieldy, makes the game hard to control and doesn't give the players the options they have come to expect.
The odd thing is that the map display is very useful, precisly indicating where each quest area is. Clearly someone at AoC went into the development dungeon 5 years ago having looked at the MMO's and their pisspoor maps of that age and came up with a clearly superior solution. But with no outside contact for all those years, they didn't learn that uses would expect a better UI in all areas in 2008.
Other problems like the famous female attack speed, (females attack slower because their animation is longer) show that the game really had no testing. Did NO dev notice that female toons needed longer to kill enemies?
While the game is pretty, most dungeons looked like the first amateur levels designed for the first Doom game. Nothing but HUGE square corridors filled with enemies, all the same. No setup, no scripts, settings, no atmosphere.
And then the real killer. The game was bugged, resource hungry, memory leaking, with a lousy interface but hey, that never stopped an MMO before.
No, what killed the game was Funcom. They denied all problems. Female attack speed quickly identified? If you mean two months after launch, yeah sure, that is quick. NOT.
Problems were ignored, things that didn't need fixing nerfed and solutions introduced that just took all the fun out of the game. The "grey elite" has to be one of most ill advised nerfs in the history of gaming. To stop gold sellers (Funcom came up with a far better way to kill them, no more players and all in game items being WAY to expensive in real money, 1500 euro for a horse) they made enemies below your level HIT HARDER. They also made every enemy in group content an elite. This meant that a game that is OUTSIDE about you slaughtering waves of enemies suddenly becomes a 6 players on 1 enemy type game. No fun. The messy finishing moves disappeared and every dungeon just became a long boring crawl. Because of the way healing works in the game none of the elites was a challenge, just of staying awake.
And now, the server merges. So much for all the fanboys claiming that there are still plenty of players and nobody has left. Server merges are the death of any MMORPG. If you number slightly decrease people just move on their own, you only need to merge servers if their is an exodus and you can no longer afford to keep redundant servers running. It is basically saying, the people left and we ain't going to get them back.
No, AoC is the third failure of Funcom and this makes me sad, because The Longest Journey developer is working on his own MMORPG and it is also being done by Funcom. Luckily not by the goat who has been shown the door but still. Funcom has had its three strikes (they had a cancelled MMO between Anarchy Online and AoC) a fourth is hardly likely to be different is it?
Hint to anyone working on a MMORPG. PLAY OTHER MMORPG's and LEARN FROM THEM! You don't have to make a WoW clone, but understand WHY people play WoW.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.