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Age of Conan Expansion Coming In 2009
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:28 AM
from the moving-right-along dept.
from the moving-right-along dept.
At the recent Leipzig Games Conference, Funcom developers announced that the first expansion to Age of Conan is planned for a 2009 release. Details about the expansion are sparse, but a significant amount of new areas appear to be in development for that and a free upcoming content patch. Massively points out a video which showcases some of the new content. 1Up has a piece of concept art for the expansion.
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It needs to be the end of 2009 (Score:2)
What a great niche Funcom can have. Release really horrible buggy incomplete games. But release them at time when nothing else is "fresh".
I think we found the missing "????" before "profit".
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Re:It needs to be the end of 2009 (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It needs to be the end of 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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How about the rest of the advertised content--you know, the big pvp siege battles and all the other shit they typed?
The game is great 1-20, Khopshef province is fun, then the game winds down more and more until you get to level 50.
What makes you think AoC was marketed to the casual player? Lack of content is not "casual player" material. It's "shit game" material. AoC was marketed as having epic siege battles (which laughably STILL don't work and there's no indication they will in the near future). Again
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How about the rest of the advertised content--you know, the big pvp siege battles and all the other shit they typed?
Yeah really, that shit wasn't implemented till month 2, and was crashing the servers up to the point I left, around the start of month 4.
They were also furiously swinging the nerf bat, and ignoring classes that needed to be brought up to balance. (Necromancer, Dark Templar)
It was an AoE grinding game from 70 - 80 basically.
Casters basically blasted through the levels solo or even faster in 2 man groups. Tempest of Set and Priest of Mithra in particular. Necromancers pre-uber nerf were also levelling at awes
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Re:It needs to be the end of 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure WoW had both functional base stats and an entertaining leveling experience past 20.
Some people may disagree that leveling is entertaining, but even given that, it had a functional and complete experience.
From the Alliance side you had foreshadowing of what would amount to be the uncovering of Onyxia, a rather large dragon, who had ensnared the minds of the leaders of the human capital city of Stormwind. Over a rather... "long" quest chain covering quite a bit of the in-game world, the player was then able to become attuned with the area surrounding Onyxia's Lair, and eventually defeat her in combat.
AoC had (has?) neither functional base stats nor any really functional/remotely entertaining leveling experience past... 20.
Soooo..... you were saying?
Parent
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WoW was capped at 60 at launch, so I'm not sure how you had a 70, but whatever.
And single player? Yeah, it's so terrible that I don't have to group with people who insist that I help with their quest first and then leave. Or who just simply suck.
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That's one of the things i like about EVE online, people are almost driven together. Especially when traveling/living in dangerous areas.
Very often the populations of a few systems will band together to fight off raiders or to track down and kill a pirate. This sort of event usually spawns a new alliance and friends. Of course a new big alliance will attract a bigger enemy and then things get epic.
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Take off the rose colored glasses yourself; 20 levels of awesome gameplay doesn't make up for core stats simply doing *nothing* when the game launched.
Everyone who played the game that I've talked to stated that the first 20 levels were some of the most amazing 20 levels they've had in an MMO. Then they hit 21, and the game literally died. You had armor with stats that did nothing, you had broken abilities, absolutely no semblance of class balance, and the game was considered by many to be "an unfinished be
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Your three bitches about the WoW launch are :
- servers were down regularly (Too true, they weren't prepared for the playerbase they created. MUDs, EQ, UO, and Meridian69 never had anything close to the rush that WoW experienced.)
- queues (Same as above. But the flaw in your argument is that AoC had queues as well. I was on a mid/high pop server and the first two weeks saw me hitting a queue most evenings.)
- the capability for solo play (I solo'd my fixer in AO. I've soloed in WoW. But until BC, t
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AoC doesn't have queues anymore because tons of people quit that shit game. I'm not trolling. Entire guilds have vanished--there's no endgame, at all. Sieges don't work and the pvp patch STILL hasn't been implemented. The GMs are laughably retarded and unprofessional, and Funcom has pretty much just lied all the way to the bank. This game was a con.
This game is so bad of a joke that I reckon SWG was far better.
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You detest solo play. Since a couple of games out there (EQ, AO, EVE come to mind) cater specifically to team gameplay, they are the only decent MMO games on the market.
The prime example of the most team oriented gameplay for any MMORPG we may ever see if Final Fantasy XI.
The only game so far where waiting for 3 - 6 hours to find a group of the ideal composition before you could even think about getting XP (Beastmaster aside) was the norm.
It actually got fairly obnoxious after awhile like you'd imagine it would.
XP penalties upon death up to the point of delevelling was great fun though. Never got enough of standing at the entrance to Valkurm Dunes and watch noobs delevel f
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"The after 20 experience was no different for me than the pre-20 experience."
You are the first person I've ever met or talked to who has said that, and that's out of no small number of people.
I'd also disagree concerning WoW at launch being dullsville. I was absolutely hooked, and that was at 29 on a trial account. But as you said earlier, that's entirely subjective. (My account is also canceled; active right now but canceled - it takes money that I need to be saving right now.)
You're right; the MMO genre i
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AoC has been much more stable than WoW. There was a guild called Firetree Sucks on my WoW server, since the damn thing died, lagged out, or otherwise caused problems on a daily basis. AoC has a bit of that as well, but is overall much more stable.
The only thing that changes after level 20 in AoC is that you lose voice acting on your quests. I just hit level 60, and haven't run out of quests to do, and have been enjoying myself immensely. There are less quests than WoW, but overall the quests are of higher q
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Considering that that in WoW, high level zones up to max level were fleshed out with quests and content at launch (as opposed to AoC): Yes, WoW was better when it launched.
WoW's problem wasn't launch (Score:4, Insightful)
It was later. At launch, everything was fine. The problem was scaling, and you can't entirely blame them. See Blizzard looked at EQ's peak numbers and figured "well we can't do any better than that." Made sense. EQ was the first real big MMO, and there was now competition. None of the other MMOs before WoW had beaten EQs peak. So Blizzard figured they'd do no better. Well, they were wrong. Suddenly people bought up every available copy and they had more and more players coming in. THAT was when the problems started. Their hardware simply couldn't handle the load. Once they got that straightened out, it has gone pretty well since.
While their beginning was not without problems, it was a lot smoother than AoC. Goes double since what WoW had mostly was technical problems. The game itself was sound. Good design, lots of stuff to do, etc. That's one of the reasons why they started having the problem of too many people playing. Their game was done so well that people started rushing to it. They not only got lots of players from other MMOs, they got people who didn't do MMOs before.
Parent
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Last time I checked, it's now over 3 months since launch and there are still huge holes in content, NO PVP experience system, bad raid content, no DX10 and a lot of other missing things. All which was advertised on the box.
WoW's problems at launch were mainly due to server capacity. There were bugs, but nothing nearly as bad as AoC's launch. Or the current state of AoC today.
Funcom should try and finish the original game before even thinking about an expansion.
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Holy smokes! You have GOT to be kidding me.
I was in the closed beta of WoW, and I was in the closed beta for AoC. There was a HUGE difference in the feelings both communities had.
In WoW, everyone was stoked about the upcomming release. There were very few bugs, and the only major outstanding issue was that Paladins didn't get a fix to their ability tree until 2 weeks before launch, so it wasn't tested properly. They really needed help at launch. Otherwise, everyone in the CB was glowing with enthusiasm
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I played both games, and played AoC from launch to 80 Conqueror inside of month one. Granted this was fairly hardcore playing, the equivalent amount of time in WoW only got me to around 50, with about 50% of the content explored.
I had half a tier 1 set inside of 2 months, mostly from exploiting bosses, because they were so broken and out of balance (Honorguard Champion) that there was no way we could take him down in a remotely legit manner with a full raid.
WoW was definitely more tedious and grind intensiv
Not that impressive (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't think you know what standard means.
A standard is something every one is doing or trying to do. Unless every MMORPG has stated they're striving for 7 major content dumps a year, there isn't an evidence they're trying to do that.
While you might want every one to do it, that doesn't make it a standard.
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Why not one of Turbine's other games, aka Asheron's Call? Monthly content updates since '99/'00. They're just about to pass their 100th (or just did?) monthly update. Plus two expansions. It even lacks the whole dwarves/orcs/elves thing.
Of course, the game does look like it came out back then and a P2 could run it handily, but hey. You claim you wanted content.
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Then I guess you haven't played *any* of the big MMORPGs, not when they launched anyway. WoW and SWG all had their problems, and who can forget when UO opened up Trammel for housing?
AoC has a lot of potential; nice combat system, the dark fantasy setting feels right, especially if you hate WoW Cartoon Central (and WAR looks just as silly albeit with better graphics), or Lotro's theme park looks. If t
They need to focus on fixing the current release (Score:2, Insightful)
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Expansion? (Score:1)
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No, you don't "finish" games now. You release them enough to get money, then announce the expansion.
I bet they're running scared over at Funcom. Half the people who bought the game have already quit, and Warhammer draws on the same type of player that AoC does. I'd bet they'll be hurting a lot more from Warhammer's release then Blizzard will be (since they can afford to lose a lot more customers, and there is a huge audience of WoW players who have no interest in leaving anyway).
Hping for some new countries (Score:1)
I wouldn't bother. (Score:3, Informative)
I am both a former WoW and AOC player. I got to level 71 in AOC before I finally called it quits; most of my friends quit a week or two before I did.
The game had a lot of potential, and the hype led me to buy it before I had read the reviews. But the potential to be good is not the same as *actually* being good.
AOC was riddled with bugs and was largely incomplete. Almost every aspect of the game had something wrong with it -- there were zones that were entirely broken (e.g., the Pyramid), character talents that didn't work, and hardware compatibility issues. The crafting, gathering, and siege systems were also largely non-functional, and I'm not sure if gear stats actually did anything.
There were other, more fundamental problems with the game, for me. For example, the zoning system (and load screens) really detracted from the "grandiose" feel. The look of the earlier levels felt fresh & innovative, but the end game was dreary and ill-conceived -- just about every zone from the Field of the Dead onward involved snowy, ice-covered mountains populated by angry humans, serpents, cavemen, and bears.
AOC lacked a certain "magical" feel that WoW had engendered in me. Leveling in WoW was about starting in a tiny corner of a huge world, and over time, coming to realize just how enormous the game world was -- how many different types of landscapes, enemies, and hidden "gems" there were. AOC, on the other hand, felt small -- by level 50, I had visited every outdoor zone, and apart from the aforementioned creature types, there just wasn't that much variety. Sure, it may be true to Howard's lore, but it felt boring nonetheless.
The zones and character design did little to encourage any "emotion" while playing -- while WoW's Duskwood felt "creepy" and Ashenvale felt "alive", AOC simply just ... was. Play-wise, I was never concerned about being ganked by a human player or accidentally running into a mob that was too potent (for my level-appropriate zone) because I was almost always able to run away, even when attacked by characters 10 levels higher. Against same-level mobs, I almost never ran out of mana, and found myself grinding enemies in groups of 6 at a time. The most amusement that I had stemmed from figuring out how many critters I could pull at once without dying.
While it may have been a "smooth" launch for an MMO, it availed itself to be an unpolished, largely unfinished game. I don't like the idea of paying to beta-test other people's software, and found the game to be fairly disappointing.
I won't be partaking in AOC's "ongoing beta", and I doubt that their expansion will be any better. But I may consider WoW's next expansion -- if anything, my experience with AOC has taught me just how well Blizzard play-tests its games.
Smart move (Score:2)
Age of Conan is bleeding customers. I am a lifer from Lotro who tried it out at launch for 3 months, I know many a gamer for Lotro who tried it and then we all came back, one by one as our subscriptions ran out.
Dark and Light managed to launch without being able to run on Ati cards, that is probably the only reason why Age of Conan won't actually earn the title of worsed MMORPG launch in history.
There were so many things wrong with AoC, but most telling perhaps in relation to this article is that they mus
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> That was fundementally the flaw with the entire
> game, it just wasn't designed. Things didn't
> "click".
So true. And you were dead-on with your assessment about the arrangement of zones and lack of fast travel. By the time that I had played for a month or two, it had become clear to me that Funcom had released AoC way too early, and I got fed up with being a paying beta-tester.
I felt that there were just so many elements of AoC which were interesting in theory but terrible in implementation ...
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Personally, I feel that fast travel is the beginning of the downfall of modern MMOs... Guilds play a close second seat to that, but YMMV. There's nothing like selling your game based on peer pressure (our guild is moving to ____ because they have better guild ____) and screwing everyone who prefers not to "guild." Fast travel only accommodates those looking to team up with guild mates on the other side of the world. Otherwise, you'd be forced to actually complete a dungeon instead of farm specific mobs,
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What ruined a lot of AO was the inclusion of community controlled raidgroups, that took everyone from everywhere and raided everything. As there is no limit on
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But I have to ask you... why do you need to be on every side of the world in a matter of minutes? What game mechanic deems this a worthwhile endeavor? If you can't complete a mission line in one area, what's to stop you from taking the "easy mode" way out and jumping to another area to complete their quest line instead? Where's the pride in character development from "suffering" through something difficult and having bragging rights? ("Oh wow, you completed ___ dungeon!? How did you get past ___?")
What
Why do I get the feeling... (Score:2)
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At an additional cost?
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Look, Fanboi, he's not acting like an idiot, he's being facetious. All of those things were promised at launch, still have not been delivered, and Funcom is now announcing an expansion. AoC was a fun game, for the first 20 levels....then everything was rehash. Basically the same combos and approaches to situations. Endgame content is/was non-existant.
For me, there was no single thing that was dealbreaking....it was the plethora of little annoyances. Corpses can see you and stop you from stealthing....c
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My experiences with AoC in beta and release confirmed beyond a doubt that Funcom is a second rate company obsessed with misleading the public about their product and delivering broken goods to the marketplace.
In other words, they're the Microsoft of the MMO market?
*ducks*
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AoC is far from the worst MMO I've ever played. Honestly, the content and feel of the first twenty levels were amazing. They blew their wad making that a fantastic experience.
You keep yammering about casual gamers and teamplay experiences... Now that I have a career and family, I consider myself a casual gamer....but I managed to get up close enough to the endgame to see the lack of engaging content. I'm happy to see that we agree on their poor approach to teamplay. Group quests and mobs were not level
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"I really love it, but the game isn't done yet."
Yes, exactly, the game isn't finished. Try playing a MMO that is actually "finished" and you will love that one even more. Trust me.