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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.
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.