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Age of Conan Servers To Merge, Funcom Sees Layoffs
Two ominous signs have come recently for Age of Conan fans; developer Funcom went through a round of layoffs, and they announced plans to merge some of the game's servers in order to maintain a "healthy" population. Despite this, Funcom has maintained that development will continue for both the PC version and the upcoming Xbox 360 version of the game, confident that Age of Conan won't follow Tabula Rasa into oblivion. A writer at Vox ex Machina doesn't share that view, pointing to several of the game's flaws as reasons why it didn't maintain the popularity it enjoyed at launch.
Wrath of the Lich King has some neat moments, but it's killed when you start to come across the same "Kill X of Y" quests of the last four years. The game is very imbalanced right now as well. Warlocks are nearly debilitated in damage and survivability, and elemental shamans are hurting. Retribution paladins and arcane mages are dominating the landscape because of their ridiculous burst damage.
In PvE, Blizzard created redundant buffs between classes so that there is no longer a special reason to bring a certain class. This hurts certain classes in specific encounters. For instance, you mention Malycgos--during the encounter, there is an area-of-effect vortex attack in which only instant heals can be cast. This screws restoration shamans and holy paladins because the priest spell Circle of Healing saves the group.
What's going to happens is a lot of people are going to hit level 80 and realize there's nothing to do but the same things they did in Burning Crusade--mindlessly grind a dungeon every night or stand around battlemasters waiting in a PvP queue. There isn't actually anything new here once you've played through the 10 levels of Northrend. Sure, you could grind achievements, but that brings me to Warhammer (which they were blatantly ripped off from).
Warhammer is still doing well and is coming out with a major content patch to include two of the previously cut classes for free. Contrast this to Blizzard who promised Death Knights (and other hero classes) over four years ago and just now got around to it. I have a feeling the WoW playerbase will get restless again in a few months when they've hit the level and content caps and figure out that it's still the same game with repetitive PvE and wildly imbalanced PvP that mostly takes place in little instanced duels. Warhammer is the most fun I've had in an MMO in years. Defending a keep for half an hour is a real rush. At least Mythic is quick to respond to feedback and make changes. Blizzard can take at least six months before addressing obvious class problems that everybody discusses on their official forums. Sometimes it takes years...
Before you mention Wintergrasp as an example of a new direction for WoW, it's on a two and a half hour timer, and the vehicles are buggy. It's essentially the Spirit Towers from Burning Crusade. Like I said, there's little that is actually new here.
Every single game released before it was ready has underperformed or outright failed.
The best games ever released had a specific mandate of "don't release until it's ready", that's in terms of fun and sales performance, and has also increased the reputation of the developers/publishers as folks who make good games.
So why then, going on a decade since this simple formula was first proven, do execs still insist on rushing out unfinished impending failures?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
If you had played it, you would realize how spot on it actually is. I remember one patch they released to "improve performance" that was supposed to reduce the geometry of trees slightly. We all logged in and all the tree's had 2 branches, and no leaves. A few days later, they changed it back, but it illustrates the mans point quite well.
The game was just not ready, any way you look at it. Even worse, their attempts to fix it have been laughable.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?