Slashdot Mirror
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.
Honestly, I'm far more concerned with the fate of The Longest Journey, one of their other franchises.
The original was one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. The sequel was okay, but left too many unanswered questions. The original left the door open, of course, but it also told a complete story with a real ending.
I generally don't track most gaming news like a hawk, but I do recall reading at one point that the plan was to continue the series with something like Dreamfall: Chapters, or some such. A sort of episodic continuation. I hope these layoffs don't affect other projects at Funcom.
Still, given the time between when I first heard that bit of news and now, Funcom seems to be following the Valve method of episodic delivery rather than the much better Telltale method. Valve has been able to get away with it because they have a long and successful track record and a huge player base. The Longest Journey, as great as it was, does not have quite as big a following...
Don't blow it, Funcom!
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
Age of Conan got as big an initial boost as it did because of it's timing and hype mostly. WoW had entered a period of nothing new for quite some time. Blizzard was busy working on The Wrath of the Lich King so little was happening in the game. Their previous expansion had been out for quite a while and some people were getting bored. So the WoW players that were looking for The Next Big Thing(tm) hopped on board with AoC.
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.
So these WoW players who were used to such a good experience found that AoC lacked that. Once the newness wore off they got quickly fed up and migrated back to WoW. This has only been increased by the release of the Wrath of the Lich King which brings a ton of new content in to the game.
What many MMO companies don't seem to understand is that WoW has really raised the bar. Used to be that MMOs pretty much sucked in many ways. Thus when you released a new one, it could have a lot of problems and people would still be interested. Not anymore. WoW is solid and brings a lot to the table, and has a ton of subscribers because of it. If you are going to take WoW on, you need to be strong out of the gate. They days of Everquest are gone, where basically you could just release a game that didn't punish players and people would play it (EQ was notoriously hard on it's players). Now you have to compete with a game that is polished, customizable (via LUA scripts), easy to get started in and quite a bit of fun to many people.
To the extent lesser quality games can compete, it'll be in areas that WoW doesn't do. For example Warhammer Online may have a good chance since it focuses on PvP in a way and on a scale that WoW doesn't. However if you game is basically meant to be a direct target at WoW's market, as AoC seemed to be, well then you'd better be damn good, or you are likely to get swept aside.
I know a number of people who play WoW and try AoC. As of now over 90% of them have canceled their AoC accounts and the couple who haven't don't play it much, they just haven't decided to quit yet. None of them left WoW for AoC for good, or have even made AoC their primary game.
I played the game for less than a month at launch before quitting, but came back with my wife for a couple of months recently before cancelling once again. My wife and I had a really great time playing together, actually.
A huge part of our enjoyment was thanks to our awesome guild. The 18+ subscribership (due to the game being rated M) is a real boon. At 30 and 25 my wife and I were the youngest in our guild and were made very welcome as we participated in conversations about our guildies' jobs, children, and even grandchildren.
If you've got someone to play with I highly recommend checking this game out for at least a couple of months. The game is pretty stable (but not entirely) and is undoubtedly the most attractive MMO there's ever been. The scenery alone makes the world a true pleasure to inhabit; as a Canadian I felt especially at home in the tundra.
Back when it first launched, like so many others, my wife and I gave AoC a try. When we canceled our accounts about a week later we gave them a whole list of very simple technical issues that the game had that made it basically impossible to play. Things like, getting to close to a wall and your character would "hook" on the wall and get stuck. Or the complete inability to switch characters without logging all the way out.
All these companies trying to compete with Blizzard are missing the one thing Blizzard has done well. Refinements. Oh WoW as a game isn't perfect, but what it is, is imminently playable (in a UI perspective) from the moment you open it up.
Did you actually go to the ruins? Where enemies kept get stuck in their fall animation, unattackable leaving no mobs for your quest? How about the insane bats whose AI and animation was so buggered you wondered how it often got out of alpha?
What about the invisible bits of landscaping you could get stuck on. The slow loading. The missing bank and auction house.
The game was a disaster. Really, some classes you started right from lvl 1 one shotting every enemy, others struggeled with enemies below their level. Nerfs happened all over changing entire classes. Balance must be done BEFORE release because if a class plays in a certain way you are just going to upset those who choose that class to play in a certain way.
Frankly, AoC was to old. It started development before WoW came out and to Goat seems to have been living in a cave ever since. The UI was a total disaster. Lotro is already bad with its non-customziable UI in this Post-WoW world but AoC set a new low. Not only was it ugly, it didn't even give players basic tools. Did you ever figure out what the equivelant of /inspect was in AoC? To lazy to look it up but even as a linux user a I balked at that commandline. That it has to be done from the commandline at all showed just how out of touch the developers were.
No, AoC is better left forgotten a bigger pile of shit then Anarchy Online or indeed Vanguard. Vanguard at least tried. AoC dev's just couldn't be bothered to make the game fun. The fast travel options were insane! Walk EVERYWHERE, one corner of the world to the other OR die and choose your own respawn point.
The only thing I worry that with Funcom in the situation it is in, The Secret World, the MMORPG by the team that made The Longest Journey might be axed as well. Lets not forget that this is a completely seperate team and the Goat has nothing to do with TSW yet it might suffer for this guys incompetence.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First, I'm not surprised what happened to AoC. They decided to push out the game early because of WAR and WOW and paid the consequences. A lot of the stuff in game was half assed, just so they could have the checkbox ticked on their list. Other parts were amazing but overall a disappointment.
Second, in reading the comments I see all these comparisons to other MMOs as to why AoC failed but one is conspicuously missing: Warhammer Online.
Maybe its an anomaly, but most of the people I come into contact with that played AoC also had bought WAR. While its true many people seem to be playing WAR less due to the plethora of new games that just came out (WOW's expansion, Left4Dead, Fallout3, and FarCry2...) but I'm already people come back, even from WOW.
Some people have made comments on how hard it is to compete with WOW due to the polish. All I'll say is I'm surprised with Mythic. They're working their butts off to deliver new content and fix problems. The latest patch fixed a number of issues, all of them I know have been complained about.
It got really dull, really fast.
I also found that the entire world was just full of idiot gankers. People who found it hilarious to kill me after i've just worked my way through 20 minutes of fighting down a hallway to get to a specific person for a quest.
The most annoying thing is, at the time i quit, there was no incentive to kill anyone as there was no pvp reward system in place. PVP experience? Didn't exist. PVP Renown gear? Didn't exist.
But it was just a big massive free for all. You couldn't team with anyone because the moment you got close to a person they would attack you out of fear that you would attack them first.
It also didn't make any sense that you could attack people of your own race. That was just stupid. I would be speaking to an npc completing a quest and by the time my conversation was over i would be down to half health due to some joker stabbing me in the back constantly.
Eventually you couldn't go anywhere without a chaperone as you'd get killed by other players again and again and again even though there's no reward or incentive for them.
Even getting into a guild wasn't much fun. If you wanted to do a quest with your guild it would take you 15 minutes to run to the only travel path on the entire map. Then travel through several different maps to get to them. Consequently everyone is sat around for at least half an hour waiting for you.
There was no structure with this game. I had diabolically bad lag that eventually made it unplayable yet i was talking to a friend through skype with no issues at all.
So i quit, told Funcom why and moved onto Warhammer Online.
It's such a refreshing change. It's tight, the gfx are great and the Realm vs Realm is actually fun for a change with a real incentive to fight other players. Now if they can only sort out the tradeskills so you can make something worth using it would be excellent!
I wonder if all these cancellations are ever going to bring about an anti-MMO backlash. Every game out there seems to launch with a flood of issues, bugs, class imbalance and missing content. And to make things worse it really stinks to be stuck with a copy of a game that is completely unplayable when the servers have been shut down.
A looming threat I see to MMOs beyond WoW are the Chinese and Korean MMOs, like the one I currently see advertised on this site. They tend to all be somewhat generic, offer little more than intensive grind and don't quite have the production values of the big names. But they have two important distinctions; they offer an Asian perspective on the fantasy theme and, more importantly, they're practically free to play. To some extent, they've taken the Guild Wars model and have added micro-payments.
I think City of Heroes is a good example of what a successful MMO given the competition. They've been around for over 4 years now and they seem to have a fairly stable player base. They've got a unique theme, first of all. Additionally, instead of trying to do everything they focused on a core set of gameplay elements. I haven't played the game in a few years now, but I still think they had the most entertaining combat system of any MMO I've played, by far. It's the closest I've seen come to an action game where I feel like I'm actually engaged in the fight as opposed to just sitting there waiting for one of us to go down.
Developers need to stop trying to recreate World of Warcraft with only cosmetic differences. Secondly, they need to seriously consider whether or not it's actually worthwhile investing all that time and money into a game that will likely fail in the end. Of course they all have high hopes early in development, because of unrealistic expectations and overly ambitious goals. My hope is that we start seeing more single-player and limited multiplayer RPGs. And I'd also like to see a stronger shift away from the tired old fantasy theme.