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Age of Conan, One Year On
One year after its rocky launch, Age of Conan has stabilized and seen a growth in its player base, reports FunCom. What's more, they say, is that players seem to be playing for longer periods of time as well. Game Director Craig Morrison said in his May letter that work on the next major update, 1.05, is nearing completion, and provided some more details about the new features. This is the same patch which, due to the sweeping stat and equipment changes, will allow players who have a character at level 50 or higher to create a brand new character already at level 50. Reader Kheldon points out a two-part interview with Morrison in which he discusses the laundry list of changes they've made in the past year to improve the game, as well as some broader thoughts about storytelling in the MMO genre. FunCom also released some early details yesterday on two new, free-to-play MMOs they're working on, one of which is browser-based and one of which is Java-based.
I tried it the first month, then cancelled. I know they've done a lot of upgrades since then, but I don't think they will ever replace World of Warcraft for most people, including me.
It's interesting that he says player retention improved a lot when they added PvP. I wouldn't have thought that would be a major selling point. I haven't played AoC so I'm not sure what's going on with it. Is it a case of PvP giving players at max level something to do where there previously wasn't anything/much?
Coming up next: the Pope's guide to good sex and the Dalai Lama's tips on cooking meat.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Jack Black as Conan the Barbarian?! Oh, hell no.
Crucial issue.
Pretty sad that by the end of the interview they are talking about 4 year old WoW content.
I can say that it is by far the best mmorpg I've ever played.
Well, let me step back:) It is by far the mmorpg with the most potential I've every played.
Currently gear gives you at max, a 25% increase in power overall. The latest patch will push that to closer to 50%. This will give most "wow'ish", or older "EQ1'ish" players a more familiar feeling concerning item power.
This has been one of the harder selling points of AoC since its launch: namely, there seems to be very little you can do to improve you character. Once you reach max level, and even if you raid and dungeon crawl for all the best gear, you are, quite literally, not much more powerful than a naked max level character.
Funcom decided to make the game skill based, focused on pvp, and gear was to be secondary. However, what they found was most players preferred an even mix. Hence, Funcom chose to do 2 things:
1. PVP levels. You can reach up to pvp level 5, which unlocks new gear upgrades along the way. PVP level 5 is VERY hard to get (assuming you don't cheat grr). And I come from EQ1, so saying "hard to get" means a lot here.
2. Patch 1.05 will increase the benefits of gear, as well as give and overhaul to the under used crafting system.
Now, back to the original point: AoC being the mmorpg with the most potential.
It has all the traditional things that an mmorpg has, plus a very real feeling in terms of maturity. That aside, what sets it apart is a feeling of control when in pvp combat.
The thing most overlooked by new players, is the shielding and directional attacks of combos. You see, not only do you have cc (crowd control) and other standard mmorpg moves, you can also choose to direct attacks to certain areas of a person (top left right down, etc..).
The defender can move his shields to block those attacks, and in addition to active blocking, sacrificing endurance/stamina to block more damage.
Thats pvp. In the pve world, the game is fantastic, and getting better each patch. While I do think that raids are a bit too simplistic right now, the general pve is equal to any mmorpg or better, and the graphics are light years ahead of wow or other like mmorpgs.
i played hte first 2 or 3 months
this game is really really bad, it only has a player base because of tits and stupid kids who like to sit in huge groups at the entrances to low level zones and kill lowbies over and over and over
what killed it for me after defending its shittastic launch was that every subsequent patch introduced more problems than it fixed, like 10k ping spikes and CTDs where there were none.
class balance is a total joke etc.
the only thing i miss and think should have been put in to other games is the horse-sprint
i only know one person who still plays, and they're a huge EVE fan too.
Age of Conan, One Year On
will be one year more than his age now.
As much as I applaud Funcom for their work with Age of Conan, I still think they should make a next generation Anarchy Online game instead. The original AO has such a unique, rich world, that is only limited by its EverQuest 1-era graphics and engine.
They make AO2, and I am there.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
If I wanted to play a PC MMO, I'd choose WoW or any of a dozen other better MMO's. You've pissed away the opportunity to be a stand-out on a console to be just another also-ran on the PC.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Funcom had a pre-release and allowed players to pay $10 or so to download the game and start a week early. A few hours of playing the laggy, buggy mess and I uninstalled. Fortunately then I was able to return the box for a refund.
If you read the negative comments here, you can easily spot the trend: "had high hopes, preordered the game, played for a month, it *sucked*, and even though I haven't touched it for a year I'm sure it still sucks (because I'll be damned if I give Funcom any money to try it again)".
At launch the game wasn't finished and complaints were grounded in reality. But the fact that Funcom has worked hard on the game for a year, fixing problems, adding content, rethinking bad design decisions and actually ended up with a polished, *genuinely good* MMORPG has gone completely unnoticed.
AOC's main problem isn't the game, but its public perception that was throughly ruined by the game's post-launch half-bakedness. If you ask newcomers who've just signed up to AOC about how they feel about it, they're usually having fun and are very much puzzled about the hate it's getting.
Funcom is facing a heck of a task battling people's existing prejudices in order to try and convince its 600,000 lost customers that they have indeed made the game playable and fun.
This is the same patch which, due to the sweeping stat and equipment changes, will allow players who have a character at level 50 or higher to create a brand new character already at level 50.
I don't know about everyone else, but the last thing I'm looking for in a party is someone who just started playing his character yesterday, doesn't know how to play his new class and didn't buy half his spells because "he didn't think they looked useful." Lord knows there's been a lot of incompetent death knights in WoW, though mercifully time passing has culled a lot of the chaff by now.
I played it at launch, and stuck through many of the patch cycles hoping it would get better.
It looks *great*, and the first 20 levels (through Tortage) are indeed good fun, but after that it went downhill very quickly.
Each patch fixed one problem and introduced half a dozen new problems. PvP was horribly unbalanced - it was common to be one-or-two-shotted by players several levels *below* you without you being able to do anything about it at all. Players could evade PvP by simply running into water. Major changes were introduced to classes, changes that should have been decided upon well before launch. Elite "grey" mobs would kill you in seconds (this was one of the "improvements" they added). The whole thing seriously felt it was launched a good six months early and we were just paying to beta-test it for them. I didn't play of the siege matches, but all reports at the time were that it was horribly broken (as was crafting). People would engage in PvP just to get killed so they could respawn at a graveyard the other side of the zone, using PvP simply as a convenient method for travel.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that all of those issues were fixed. It's a shame, as I went into it expecting great things and thought that the Conan universe had enormous potential for a great game, but Funcom completely wrecked it. If you look at the stock value graph for the time after launch, you can almost see the little spikes where big patches were added, and then see the value drop as people realised how much they had broken at the same time, until it took a nose-dive into penny stocks as players quit en masse.
Had potential, fun for twenty levels, sucked after that when all the terrible problems became evident. Have they managed to turn it into a decent game yet?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
People, please do not try to compare World of Warcraft to any other MMO. Why? MMO's have an interesting social variable that acts as a feedback loop. Warcraft's popularity is partly due to is popularity. Yes the game has to be good, but once you gain a certain momentum people stay with the game because their friends stay with the game. You need a sufficiently large portion of friends to leave for another game before you will, even if you like another game better. This is why you sometimes see a mass exodus from games that don't gain momentum. Guilds tend to ban together and move to another MMO as a whole. Most MMO's have monthly fees which limits most peoples budgets to one game. Humans are instinctively loyal pack animals. We ban together in teams to increase our power. If you think about it hard enough, you can probably find at least one other MMO that you would have played if everyone in your guild switched with you. And don't forget World of Warcraft at release time. Remember the guilds that powered through Molten Core and then had nothing to do but stand around Ironforge looking cool? Many of them would have gladly jumped ship to another MMO, but options were more limited back then. Some even canceled accounts to save money and just waited for an expansion. Age of Conan might still survive, but getting WoW-type popularity means getting people to quit playing WoW, which means leaving friends and abandoning charters you've spent years on. It's a tall order.
I have to call bs to this. Each company has an IP. Each one is trying to build a fun game around there own world. Each one has created an MMORPG. If they created and FPS, then fine...but they didn't. AoC is a direct competitor to WoW. It really doesn't matter what world they are trying to recreate. One is going to be more fun than the other and draw more people. It is pretty clear most people find WoW more entertaining. Comparing them is completely justified.
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All of these problems sounds like they fixed the easy issues. They didn't tackle the horrible network code / load distribution that they're using. There's the way WoW does it, which is throw everyone on the big server and have a bunch of child servers to handle PvP combat and things like that based on locality. There's the way WAR does it, which is "oh look funny lag" where you subdivide into lots of little servers (each of which handles a separate area) plus a separate connection for things like chat. Then there's the bloody awful solution that Age of Conan does, which is to just drop people on a given server based on the order in which they logged in. Then have each server handle a subset of the characters running through the world. When a player on Server A wants to interact with a player on Server B in the same zone, you have a problem. If they can't fix that, all of these bandaids and content updates can't solve the fundamental issues.
BS, I played it without ever giving them a CC.
When I think about AOC, I get angry, and think about LIARS and LAZY BASTARDS. These guys can't code a quit button, or a math formula to save his life. And AOC itself is a linear theme park with a bad end. Theres a reason people that has not played the game will tell you "I'll be damned if I give Funcom any money to try it again". And is not what our friend piggydoggy suggest.
AOC is the only MMO I have deleted from my harddisk, and I have played all, even the really bad ones.
-Woof woof woof!
Funcom should be ashamed! http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2419/3545512919_9560089dba_b.jpg
you have no place here, with that kind of language. go back to digg.
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Been playing since Beta, and was also frustrated by the initial crashes and lags. However, I stuck with it, and it's been very much worth it. I currently have 3 toons going--a 65 DT, 45ish HoX and a 30-something Ranger. I play on a PvE server, but still interact a lot with my guild. Major bugs to grouping and much of the lagginess seems fixed.
I tried the DX10 but wound up sticking with 9 for now; the graphics are still fantastic and drop-dead gorgeous.
I would urge anyone who dropped this game after the first 3 months to give it another go--it's improved for the better and I can't wait to see whatever else Funcom has in store for us.
Also--re Hellgate London--that was my favorite game before Conan, but that game died for me the second that they started whispering that they would go offline At Any Second...for months. Why level characters when you may never get to finish the game?
Funcom really turned around a rocky launch into something fun, big, and great.