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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.
I wish he had mentioned this at the beginning of his article so I wouldn't have wasted my time reading it.
You've got a many, many good points there.
This is the most important one for game designers to absorb:
What many MMO companies don't seem to understand is that WoW has really raised the bar.
With these as a close seconds:
WoW really is a slick game. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but polished and quite a bit of fun.
Now you have to compete with a game that is polished ...
I think a lot of the companies know that WoW has raised the bar. I know that they haven't quite come to grasps with exactly how high that bar has been raised and how high customer expectations are, especially if customer is or was a WoW player.
I think they fail to understand the level of polish and functionality that experienced players have come to expect, especially regarding the user interface and related systems. If there is something in the user interface or related systems that is clunky and unwieldy to use the players will know it, and they'll let you know about it by complaining. You have to pay attention when they inform you of these shortcomings and address them.
Failure to address these sort of complaints will quickly snowball into great dissatisfaction, especially if there are many such things in the user interface that elicit such complaints.
Your gameplay can be great fun but no matter how fun it is if the user interface and related systems are as unwieldy as trying to type a novel while wearing mittens it will leave players frustrated, and frustrated players will eventually leave.
Any MMO hoping to succeed these days has to have a well thought out, well working, polished user interface (encompassing player controls, system and control configuration setup, chat system, and mail system if you have one) or it will immediately disappoint players who are used to better. Forget the actual gameplay itself. If your user interface falls far short of what is expected then your gameplay, no matter how fun, simply won't make up for it.
Turing word: inferior
In a sentence: If your user interface is inferior then your game is inferior.
Well, what they quickly found out was that AoC isn't a very well done game. WoW really is a slick game. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but polished and quite a bit of fun. This is why they have so many players.
While I don't play WoW right now, I have played a bit in the past (but only to the mid-thirties). I will agree with you wholeheartedly that it is not a perfect game (again, only made it to the mid-thirties), but that it is probably the single slickest game made that is also on such a grand scale.
I didn't realize this, however, until I played on some free servers in an attempt to accelerate my leveling just to see what some of the game's later areas were like. Maybe I was playing on a particularly bad "fast leveling" server, but I could tell that such an interruption to the game's delicate balance really wrecked everything.
I'd be at level one, with zero experience accumulated, and it'd be awesome to kill that first wolf or boar (or whatever woodland critter that I'd be fucking frightened to see in my backyard) and shoot up eight levels and collect sixty gold.
However, this immediately nullifies the usefulness of all quests in the area, so you're stuck with traveling already. And then as soon as you get to enemies who will shell out experience, you realize that all of your attacks are missing and you're getting pounded, because you skipped eight levels' worth of weapon/defense proficiency growth. Since you nullified the usefulness of all of your earlier quests, you're stuck grinding. Immediately.
Basically, I'm just trying to say that WoW's slickness comes from the developers' strict attention to balance -- even the player economy in WoW is a pretty beautiful thing.
I've been trying to find another MMORPG to play so that I don't have to be another "WoW junkie," but I don't know how successful I'll be. I haven't tried AoC, and after RTFAs, I won't. I'm currently playing Lord of the Rings Online, but I can't help but think that it's nothing more than WoW wrapped in Middle-Earth. And the player base is vastly smaller, so finding people to group with can be a chore.
I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Guild Wars 2, however, because the original Guild Wars is such a phenomenal game...once you get past the fact that games with no monthly fee attract a lot of idiots, and idiots don't handle the character customization that GW gives you very well...