Hi, I’m Daedren. You might remember me from other articles such as “The effectiveness of raiding in only a tubesock” and “Erling Ellingson: Age of Conan Dev by day, Transvestite Cyborg by night?”. It’s me, alright, and I’m here, playing the role of the unbearer of bad news. I’m not bearing it, because it’s not even news. This little tidbit of info-mation is that Age of Conan sucks. It’s not the Gigli of the MMO industry, thank God, but that’s only because Ben Affleck turned down his role for voiceovers for King Conan. No, I’m likening Age of Conan to be more of the Alexander of the MMO Industry: Huge expectations, huge budget; huge letdown, gracious cleavage.
This article isn’t for people thinking about maybe playing Age of Conan. It’s not for those still playing Age of Conan – which, admittedly, there still are. It’s not even for the large majority of people who played the game, let it take you home, and then never called you back. This is solely targeted at a select group of people: the people at Funcom who helped make this piece of shit, and other people at other game companies who are also making a MMO. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself “Why the hell would Funcom devs read this wordy, highly opinionated article that’s basically beating a dead horse, albeit more thoroughly and hopefully more eloquently than the past beaters?” The answer to that is I’m going to personally e-mail it to every one of them.
Funcom, now lovingly deemed “Failcom” by a good portion of the planet now, dropped an estimated $60M US pesos to produce what ended up being, for the most part, a huge disapointment to nearly everyone that played it. But hey, don’t take it from me, let’s take it from the burly, helmet clad raiders of Funcom themselves:
Erling Ellingson confirms that “subscriber base” is now 415,000 out of the original 800,000
My carefree use of the quotes here are for a reason. The term “subscriber base” seems to need an explanation.
Subscriber base is a fairly loose term which roughly means “People that might still be playing”. You see, they fail to mention that in this 415,000 they’re including anyone that still had their subscription active at the time of the report (15 August 2008). That means if you were unfortunate enough to subscribe for 3 or 6 months at the time you bought the game, you’re included in this number. No one actually knows how many active players they have as they’ve not released any server metrics, with damn good reason.
That means that half of the people that bought Age of Conan jumped ship within the first month of the release. And, if player estimates are correct, the actual player base is more realistically somewhere around 150K or 200K players. 3 months after release. Hell, Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest 1 are pulling those numbers today. Perhaps if Erling was actually honest and forward about the game and its flaws, instead of talking it up like it’s the bees knees, his statements would gain a bit more credibility.
Next, we need to present the financial woes of Funcom and more importantly the CEO of the company:
Funcom CEO sells a pissload of his stocks, punches a baby
One really cool thing about Funcom is that all the execs have really cool viking sounding names like Olav and Gaute (pronounced like Gout). While this might be useful picking up American girls at a bar or scaring the shit out of someone by screaming their name at them, it seemingly means piss all when it comes to making a successful MMO.
Funcom stock dropped to all-time lows recently and the CEO is starting to liquidate. Next thing we know the lead Community Managers will be busted for kiddie porn and their corporate headquarters will mysteriously “catch on fire” – darn, and things were going so swell.
The Analysis
So, what the hell went wrong? Age of Conan does have a few redeeming qualities, that usually come with a price. Let’s list these redeeming qualities, along with it’s price:
Redeeming Quality Price
Nice graphics Shitty client
You see boobies Shitty client
Heads do fly off Shitty client
Good starting area Delusion that the rest of the game will be like that
That takes us to cause of death #1: Poor client performance. Stability was actually better at release than it is now. Very few aren’t victim of the memory leak bug – causing blue screens and CTD’s quite frequently. Nothing like a few CTD’s in a night to keep that immersion level going. The client itself is clearly lacking polish, something World of Warcraft did so splendidly. All the high res graphics and tits in the world don’t mean anything if you can’t keep your customer in the game and seeing these things.
Moving on: promised features. You’ve heard it all before: stuff was on the box that either wasn’t there on release, or, functioning like Jenna Jamesons naughty parts: present but highly suspect.
Feature on the Box Status
DirectX 10 Support Rumored to exist somewhere
Drunken Brawling Needs more polish, like Gaute's Ferrari
Massive 150/150 PVP battles Shitty client feature kicks in well before 300
Siege Battles, Keep Takes Buggy and boring. If only there was an...
An actual PVP System Missing, presumed dead
I’ll stop right there. In all honestly, no one gives a shit what is on the box of a game: who reads that anyway? However, a certain professional level is at least expected from a game company when they promote their product. Where do we draw the line? If the next MMO that hits the market says the box will give you a blowjob once you hit level 30 on your in game character, it had better well live up to its name, no matter how uncomfortable and disturbing that sounds.
Cause of death #2: Missing basic game features
Blah, blah, blah. This is all repeat shit from everywhere else. I’m effectively beating the proverbial horse here. It’s time to move on to a more lucid analysis:
THE GAME IS NOT FUN
I suppose this makes all of theser “Causes of Death” a bit redundant. Objectively speaking, though, why is the game not fun? It’s hard to put a finger on the exact reason, much like it’s hard to explain why eating a plate of dog poo is not fun, other than it’s a plate of shit. Let’s start with this small, chaotic list:
- Instanced zones
- Lack of content past level 20
- Uninnovative questing system (kill 50 what?)
- Poor class balance in PVP
- No PVP System whatsoever
- A simple Rock / Paper / Scissors PVP design
- Horrifically boring dungeon encounters
- Lack of meaningful or interesting end game content
- Itemization that seems like it was designed by a learning impaired doorknob
- Extremely hard to customize your character or look different than anyone else
- Travel system consists of trying to find new ways to kill yourself as quickly as possible
- An economy that is completely broken
- Crafting that is nothing more than a pointless time-sink
- Identical guild cities everywhere that are, you guess it, nothing more than a pointless time-sink
- Lack of creative vision when designing combat system
- Complete lack of ingenuity regarding the spellcaster magic system
- Failure to fix bugs in a timely fashion
- Fixing bugs usually introduces more bugs into the game, which are then ignored for long periods of time
- Focusing on stupid shit like spell names and sound effects when basic features of the game are not yet implemented
- Legendary in-game customer support inspired by Verant and SOE
- Constantly surprising players by showing how little they know about their own game
- Inclusion of game breaking bugs (like gem duping or epic item farming) and then fixing them, oh, a couple weeks later
I know I missed a few. What it boils down to is that Age of Conan just doesn’t provide a unique or meaningful game experience. Characters can level to max level somewhat quickly, yay!, only to be presented with the option of doing absolutely nothing interesting other than leveling yet another character to max level. A certain kudos is in place to Funcom for even failing at the basic treadmill system; for most people, that carrot on the end of the stick (being making another character to keep waiting for the real carrot) didn’t go over to well.
That leads us into cause of death #3: Poor core game design makes the game not fun, nor addicting
Making a MMO that doesn’t encourage players to play more, come back, or feel drawn to the game is like selling crack that doesn’t get people high. I suppose some crackheads might say “but hey, I’m still smoking crack!” – but really, it’s just a sugar cube that you paid 20$ for. In that sense, Age of Conan is a MMORPG without the first “M” or the “RPG”. It’s not Massively, because you’re forced to be separated from the rest of your people either by the horribad instancing or poor zone design. It’s not RPG because you don’t feel like you are, indeed, roleplaying, due to the games limitations. At the end of the day, all we’re really looking at is a “Multiplayer Online *something*” – or, in other words, a glorified chat room with mediocre Showtime-esque nudity that is prone to memory leaks.
I’ve by far passed the normal sane limit word count and thrown any credibility away as not saying whatever the hell is on my mind, so I need to hit one last point. There is one area, I must say, that Funcom has truly outdone itself:
Funcom Devs and Public Relations guys, we salute you!
For being complete tools.
Not all of them, of course. In fact, I bet its safe to say the majority of the Age of Conan team was just doing what they were told. Kind of like the Nazis were doing what they were told when they started cooking people. Intentional Godwin aside, most people of the dev team didn’t have a big picture look at the game, so they can’t be much to blame. However, Funcom has blessed us with a few memorable souls, and by memorable I mean complete assclowns and/or utter douchebags. First, we focus on the man himself. The one, the only, the…
Gaute Godager
This guy had some potential. Though his first name sounds like unsightly gout, his last name had the chance of being epic. It could have been “Go, Danger!” or, more sinisterly, “Go, dagger!”. Now we’re just left with not giving a shit what his name is because he’s not only the “Game Director”, meaning he’s the one ultimately responsible for the state of this game, but also because his PR skills hover somewhere between “ghastly” and “humorously deranged”.
Perhaps his most famous quote is this:
“I enjoy playing WOW, I enjoy playing Lord of the Rings Online. But you know… I’m going to be a bit cheeky now, but if you’ve been to McDonalds for four or five years, and had your burger and your coke, sometimes it’s great to just have a great steak and a glass of good wine,” he said.You’re exactly right, Gout. You were a bit cheeky. However, your analogy is a bit flawed. I’ll fix it for you:
“I enjoy playing WOW, I enjoy playing Lord of the Rings Online. But you know… I’m going to be a bit cheeky now, but if you’ve been to McDonalds for four or five years, and had your burger and your coke, sometimes it’s great to go into a restaurant, give them 50 bucks, stick around for 3 hours hoping you get food, before finally passing out with a bottle of MadDog 20/20 in your hand and still fucking hungry,” he said.You, sir, are no steak and wine. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. You could be a rancid Salisbury Steak TV dinner, along with a glass of wine that came out of a box, but even that’s pushing it.
Last up, but certainly not least, is the great Erling Ellingson. This guy was pretty much unheard of before a few weeks ago, when he decided to show up at a couple conferences and do some interviews. Instead of handling these interviews like a normal, sane person, he decided to go another route. The route of lies, delusion and outright idiocy.
Don’t believe me? Watch this video with Jon Wood of mmorpg.com – at your own risk. This guy squirms so much when talking you can tell he’s bullshitting even with the sound muted. Here are some highlights:
“The game turned around 100% just before launch. Miracle patch…” “The 1-20 part of the game was intended to be very detailed… When WoW launched, high end content was sparse. We have lots of stuff for players end game…” “The PVP fugitive system, it’s all new stuff that we’re adding in. It’s not stuff that was supposed to be in before launch…” “We’re incredibly happy with the launch of Age of Conan, it was an incredibly successful launch… “(proceeds to self fellatiate) “It’s really few things [that didn’t make it into launch]. It’s not really big features. “The asinine comment about PVP not being a major feature earns a collective cockpunch to Erling on behalf of every player that played AoC hoping for a PVP oriented game. It was its main selling point, and it’s the reason that most people wanted to play the game. Hell, even Erling himself states “This might surprise you, but most people that play AoC play on PVP servers” – no, that doesn’t surprise us. What does surprise us that this “PVP Oriented MMO” doesn’t even have a PVP system. Oh, and when you roll out this magical “PVP Fugitive Patch”, you’ll be taking away yet one more slightly redeeming quality that AoC once had: PVP Freedom.
Now, it’s time for desert. The icing of the cake is brought to you by the collective tools at Funcom who thought that announcing an expansion for Age of Conan was a good idea. Apparently they’re busy listening to Erling rant on about how the game is pure awesome-sauce rather than actually playing their game. Scarily enough, there is now a team of developers working on an expansion to Age of Conan, rather than fixing the fundamental problems the game has. Make it X rated and you might get a substantial player base back.
Conclusion
In summary, the main causes of the death Age of Conan were this:
1. Poor client design and performance
2. Lack of basic features included in the game
3. Unaddictive gameplay, lack of thought put into game design: the game simply isn’t fun.
Worst of all, we have a company and the makers of this game telling us that it is good. These same people will be put on the next MMO. Hell, Gaute might even get the nod to direct Funcom’s next MMO – assuming the company still exists. “Gee, Gaute, you did so well on Age of Conan, here is another 50 Million, go make us another blockbuster like it!” Get your head out of your asses, Funcom: the people that made the decisions on where this game was going need to never be allowed on another MMO project again. But hey, it’s your money, it’s your funeral.
Many people might be thinking “Man, why so fucking hostile?” – and I sympathize with that. I’m not pissed at these guys I’m making fun of, I’m more disappointed. The MMO industry is just peppered with mediocrity now and it’s almost becoming industry standard. Objective journalism is nigh-unheard of at mainstream MMO websites because they don’t want to piss anyone off. Lastly, while what I’ve written here is my opinion, it’s really the collective thoughts from nearly every veteran MMO player that had the misfortune of playing Age of Conan.
Future MMO developers: use this as a lesson learned; things not to do. Above all, do not patronize your players like they don’t know what the hell is going on. Funcom: the game is beyond saving, but try to save some face by actually admitting the games problems, and not tap dancing around the issues like a drunk circus bear. Honesty, though missing from your corporate vocabulary, goes a long way in player retention.
That’s all. Daedren out.
You need to get with the Zero Tolerance guy. =)
Very nicely done review.. of Failcom ;P
sincerly.
AoC ain’t totally unfun.. but I have to say you point out at the right stuff when talking about inexistant PvP system.
Can’t wait for Mythic’s release.
Er, pardon the last comment. I meant Zero Punctuation. Not Zero Tolerance. =)
Win! Just plain, pure win! LMAO! I remember everyone saying this would be a WoW killer…yeah right! LOL! Awesome job on the article!
Funny read.
I was actually considering re-subscribing to AoC after upgrading my video card last week, so that I could see if it had made any progress from the incredibly boring game I played at launch.
And then I saw that they were developing an expansion for it.
I have no problem with expansions to MMO’s, I’m kind of an addict when it comes to them. But given the widely accepted state of AoC, an expansion (in my mind) should be the furthest thing from Funcom’s mind. You don’t try and install newer, larger sails on your ship when it’s sinking, you plug the effing holes first.
I understand that the people who make decisions on what to do next in games are pretty far removed from their playerbase. But, do they not understand that every step they make is going to be analyzed by every member of their playerbase and more (potential players)? If the people that are playing the game are screaming ‘This game isn’t fun/is broken/needs moar X!’, at what point would it seem like a good idea to tell them essentially ‘We’ve started working on the new content you will need to pay for, not the issues you have been clamoring over.’
Meh. I don’t get it.
Sorry for the long comment, it was just fresh on my mind when I read your post :)
Aye, exactly my thoughts.
The actual real world number of people still actively playing the game is now less than 30,000 people. The majority of people are playing on PvP servers. The PvE servers are seeing wholesale abandonment of the playerbase.
Most guilds have folded and even the larger guilds that were formed from groups of leftover players from other guilds are folding. The biggest guild on my server (just over 100 people made up of other defunct guilds) is now down to just 7 people actively playing. We still have two raiding guilds left on our server but they are having a severe manpower issues and are now unable to raid the larger instances.
It’s obvious we are seeing a snowball effect here. Those people that are left have less desire to log in since there are less people each week to group up for instances.
The game client itself was utter crap. It had a beautiful graphics engine but would crash every 1-2 hours or so. In my guild when we ran a raid we would have to time it between boss kills and make sure we restarted our game client before a major event otherwise people would crash out in the middle of boss fights and cause a wipe. We lost many hardcore raiders because of this.
I presume AoC will survive but it will be in a much diminished form. I can not foresee any major updates to content being released for AoC. It simply won’t be financially viable as the playerbase will be far too small to support expansions/updates.
It is very sad as the game had such promise before it was released.
Nice. You cover the bases very well. I could nit-pick, but overall you are spot on.
I love what you said about the travel system. If you have a horse and were traveling long distances, you can ride zone to zone but then have to talk to a guy, loading screen. Mount again, ride, talk to a guy. Its like the opposite of what a Massive game should be.
My first beta experience outside of tortage, I jumped into the water and tried to swim to a awesome looking landscape, only to run into the invisible wall, go back and find a boat guy.
I’d like the combat if it was twice as fast. alas…. it still needs much work.
/s totally.
/e goes to Sunwell with his guild.
@Hecta
Ok, I hate to do this, but can you please provide your source of data?
I hate when people throw out numbers as fact, and your statement makes it seem like this is the “REAL” numbers.
How about you meant to state “I believe AoC has 300k” or “My opinion is…”
Also, how do YOU know more play PvP (even though I “believe” you are correct)
Anyways, there is no FACT of 300k, and is 400+k according to REAL data.
Now, don’t take me for a fanboy…far from it. But, statements like that is just hogwash without proof.
Thanks
Jesus dude. Brilliant. I love it, and probably representative of what 50% of AOC players felt, if not more.
Fantastic, fantastic review. The bittersweet-sarcastic salsa makes the dish incomparably tasteful.
Thank you!
I wrote a State of AOC Assessment back on July 4th (http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=1399230&postcount=1), and told them that their product would bomb if the game wasn’t “right” within 90 days of retail release.
PVP players are a fickle bunch, and if you cater to them for a customer base you better launch your game with the features as advertised. If you don’t, you have to deliver within 90 days or they bail on the game en mass.
No one’s going to worry about AOC anymore, it had its chance and they blew it.
I just want to say that i did enjoy AoC, and that the game has some cool features that appealed to me.
This review was absolutely… amazing. I played AoC for over 3 months and in the end, the OP is right, there is nothing to do. It bores people a lot sooner than it bored me, but i guess i have a thicker skin than some others.
Everything outlined in the article is pretty much spot on. The company definitely did damage their reputation by allowing some fools make even bigger fools of themselves. The next game FailCom releases i will not be participating in.
@ Opendge: Firstly, he’s saying it’s 30k, second, the “REAL” data of 400k+ is already exposed in the article you are posting on. It’s more like 150k at the very most, I wouldn’t be surprised to find AoC dead after WAR and WotLK are released.
@ Daedren: Your article was fucking amazing. If you got Yahtzee to say it all out loud it would be sheer win.
I just so happen to have read this and be a now former designer for Age of Conan. That being said, I appreciate your approach for someone who is wanting to sound like a Howard Stern of video game blogging, and I am not saying the game doesn’t have its problems.
I think of course had you actually written this as a true Post Mortem for designers/devs to read it would have been written much more objectively and structured with a lot more real information and less seething “I hate Funcom because I feel like they bent me over” attitude.
Being an American and having lived over in Norway for three years though I can tell you that the people of Funcom have very good intentions and work very hard. None of the dev’s are rich with nice fancy cars or houses they are all normal working folk even at the upper end of the food chain like Gaute.
In regards to expansion talks you need to remember that most teams for MMO’s are split post launch and those working on the expansion are not those working on putting in things like the PVP system.
I actually worked heavily on combat and PvP but once I moved back to the US a year ago to get married, I could not drive development on it remotely. So to some extent I am to blame for putting my personal life before the game, sorry.
If you look at Anarchy Online and it’s launch and you look at how far that game has come disregarding subscriber numbers and you can see Funcom’s dedication to their products and improving them. The road might be bumpy but at least you can count on them standing behind their games and working to improve your experience, even if its a little bit at a time and at times in an order of perceived priority you might not agree with.
Absolutely loved the analysis , everything was spot on. The game disappointed in so many ways it’s not even funny.
Those 2 guys lying to everyone in their face sounds about right and the current amount of players still playing is certainly not what they claim it to be, why else would people on every server complain about having about 200 people online at prime time.
My guild went from 280 people to 7 within 3 weeks time and this happened to a lot of guilds.
I don’t think you mailing it to them will change anything though , they’ll continue to live in their happy safe bubble of dreams in which the game is a huge success.
Daedren, i just can /clap to u :)
Very nicely review
I wish I knew these things before I spent my money on the game. Oh well live and learn. I was one of the many that jumped ship the first month. It was more like the first week for me.
One of the biggest things for me was that the UI was horrible. Everything was a damn box and looked the same. I bet it’s still the same way now. Also the auction house was just really really bad. It’s comparable to many of the Chinese made mmo’s that have auction houses.
Even though most will deny it, everyone bought the game for the boobies. Don’t lie to yourself. I did, you did, everyone did. But that wore off pretty fast : /.
Very good assessment of the game and Funcom in general, if only they’d listen.
@Hecta-
30,000 players? Where exactly did you pull that number from? If it was that low the game would be cancelled. Hell even Eq1 has more players than that.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the article whole-heartedly, and I’m not going to defend FC or AoC in the least.. but let’s not make up numbers, or repeat them just because we read someone else say them on some forum. If there is some way to back up that claim please provide it because I’d love to quote it as well.
The only think that was wrong about AoC was that it was too fast to level to 80. The should have built in more time to add content and features.
NO GAME SHIPS COMPLETE OR BUG FREE. It’s ridiculous to have such high expectations.
That video is, like, textbook (as far as videos go) for teaching a class on interrogation. The funcom dude wipes his hand every time he tells another lie.
At least his tells are metaphorical.
You read my mind.
Excellent artical, Funcom deserved every word.
PS: I’m only sad that Conan’s name was used for all this
I played it for a monthish. Realized I hadn’t even thought about logging in in two weeks, canceled.
And that was before half that shit happened. People were just bitching about how 50-80 had no content.
This is a hilariously written and very true post. WELL done.
-The vitriol over the unimpressiveness of AoC seems misplaced. I don’t understand how you were sucked in to believing that “fast combat” was a good thing. If it only takes a few swings to fell and enemy, it’s not a significant challenge. How could you not recognize the over-hyped rhetoric of “you’ll be a bad-ass” (the same thing WAR is doing) and not recognize that if every player is a bad-ass NO ONE is a bad-ass. A quick read of the features and a skeptical eye should have filtered this game as “meant for those who don’t normally play online games”.
Nice post Daniel; you’ve fleshed out the themes that Mike and I have posted in several of our AoC posts these past few weeks.
Think this game will be a good deal better a month or two down the road. Despite all the problems, there is something rather addictive about AOC, at least if like myself you’re a fan of combat that doesn’t involve a ton of pointing and clicking.
Likewise, I find PVP in this game to actually be fun – lack of content or not. WOW fails miserably in this aspect, between forced factions and the farce known as battlegrounds, never mind items > skill. WAR….just another WOW ripoff with RVR, completely not worth bothering with if you don’t want more of the same.
And really the fact that most of the WOW/WAR players have left is a blessing, these are the players that wanted to turn AOC into yet another pointless mass market clone. If Funcom keeps to a core vision and ignores those fools, fixes the bugs the game has a good future.
Couldnt agree more. AoC is probably the worst piece of shit ever released on the MMO market and its a fucking shame the people at failcom were allowed to work on this game.
This post, is full of win. You hit the nail on the head with this steaming pile of goat poo of a game. In all my years of playing MMO’s, I have never seen such a horrible game.
I salute you.
This game is done. Another colossal failure. 800k+ down to 400k+ in under 3 months, ’nuff said. Current sub number is alot smaller than 400k now too, and dwindling.
I think 30k is probably about right.
“Lastly, while what I’ve written here is my opinion, it’s really the collective thoughts from nearly every veteran MMO player that had the misfortune of playing Age of Conan.”
Hit the NAIL ON THE HEAD. There’s nothing here I don’t agree with, fully.
MMO developers, you’d best take note. All the generalist graphs and other junk showing you how treadmill-games make boatloads of cash is alienating you from your true calling: Making games for people like yourself.
We’re not stupid, and if your game sucks, or if it’s obviously designed to milk money instead of providing a SERVICE to those who PAY for your games, you WILL fail. The era of mediocrity is coming to an end, and you will change, or your companies will fold beneath your feet.
NAILED IT.
Top to bottom, and even like the good lord said, “there is a time to laugh, a time to cry, and a time to nerd-rage” but tbh I think the “whiteknuckle” tone perfectly captured the average AoC vet’s mood on “cancellation day” after saying goodbye to the friends he/she made and all the insane purple loot they farmed off of beguiled demons while Failcom admitted to knowing, but not fixing it for almost 2 weeks.
Thanks for expressing my feelings completely.
game with great potential but the combination of bugs ,cheats and lack of meaningful resolution of problems in addition to a useless GM system has changed funcom to a niche player.
i suspect the game was not ready for release but was released to beat warhammer to the market. if the whole game was like the 0-20 experience it could have been a winner.
this article rants a little but it covers the ground well.
@Openedge1:
I believe Hecta’s comments regarding the PvP preference stem from Erling’s remarks to the effect that most of AoC’s player base was on the PvP servers. As for the 30,000 player count… no idea there.
I am lifelong Conan fan, and as much as I wanted to love AoC, I have to agree with Daedren’s article. I’m still playing and hoping, but not really expecting much these days. Unless Eidos steps in and does something heavy-handed, Funcom seems determined to follow its downright strange road of design and business decisions for AoC.
I wouldn’t doubt that many are hanging around just for the perverse spectacle of watching a hugely hyped game go down in flames. As one player put it: “There is an endgame in AoC. It’s called the forums.”
Age of Conan is a social experiment to see how long people persist with a bad product/service…
Its being purposely run into the ground with bad patches/bugs dupes as people aren’t leaving fast enough…
As someone who’s been playing MMO’s since Ultima Online, I have to agree with most of what you said.
Funcom made some really bad decisions with their basic game design– particularly in instancing everything and having no real structure for PvP. But beyond these fundamental problems, the game just doesn’t work.
An MMORPG causing regular crashes to the desktop after it’s been out for months is just unacceptable. I’m amazed that they released this game in the state it’s in– and doubly amazed that they talk it up as if it’s perfection in a box.
I agree with this article 100%, but comparing the atrocities commited by the nazis to a videogame dev team is fuking stupid.
*ANYONE* who played Anarchy Online during its first year could have easily told you what to expect from Funcom … AO was so bad that Funcom couldn’t even increase its player base when they started giving the game away for free. The flamewars on the forums involved more balanced PvP than the game. Forum comments got so bad that Funcom had to pull a total forum wipe before AO’s European launch in a misguided effort at presenting an untarnished reputation).
It started reminding me so much of the Shadowbane launch I was wondering if they hired any of the the chimp coders from defunct Wolfpack.
I unsubscribed as well the other day.
There are things I still love about AoC. The immersiveness of the world is fantastic. The graphics are gorgeous. The amount of work the art department put into the game is stunning. They have neat little details like small cats on walls with animations of them licking themselve, stretching, etc. The initial level design did a nice job with placing ladders to climb in out of the way places, and allowing people to turn around and see this crazy huge view underneath them. These are spiffy Explorer rewards.
Even the work of the original quest text writers did a good job on dialogue, given the dumbass design requirement from higher up that said all races, all classes must be given the same opportunity to work on the quests and not lock yourself out of any. (Maybe cos they just couldn’t create enough unique quests in time.)
But that’s all AoC is. A brilliant art gallery. Nice to look at, nothing to do once you’ve toured it once.
The GAME part of the MMOG is missing. And all the shitty pre-game design and post-patch flaws are covered well in the above article.
Most people are not going to pay a high price for nice art, hence the flocks leaving in droves, taking their friends with them.
And even the admirers won’t pay a recurrent fee when they’re done with what they came to do, and have nothing to keep them and lots of reasons (see article) to push them away.