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Age of Conan Servers To Merge, Funcom Sees Layoffs
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Dec 04, 2008 06:47 AM
from the bailing-water dept.
from the bailing-water dept.
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.
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This is welcome news in light of all the recent troubles in the MMO market.
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Is anyone supprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly? I mean, did they ever finally get the DX10 working?
The game was great on the island, after that it was a waste of time and money. Wish I could get my $60 back...
Re:Is anyone supprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Great on the isle? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Great on the isle? (Score:4, Insightful)
The LOTRO UI pretty much just works. I haven't felt a burning need to customize any of it. This is a Good Thing, because casual gamers are not going to customize - if the default UI sucks, then the game appears to suck.
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Re:Is anyone supprised? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm Swiss, that's my excuse for macking a spelling mistake. What's yours for being an ass?
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Re:Is anyone supprised? (Score:5, Funny)
He's French.
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Re:Is anyone supprised? (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, I'm french, you insensitive claude!
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The writer at Vox ex Machina never played the game (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish he had mentioned this at the beginning of his article so I wouldn't have wasted my time reading it.
so? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't at the Battle of Gettysburg but I can still write a reasonable essay on Lee's mistakes.
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Re:so? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, Lee had had a buggy UI, and teh suck graphics.
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The Longest Journey (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got a many, many good points there.
This is the most important one for game designers to absorb:
What many MMO companies don't seem to understand is that WoW has really raised the bar.
With these as a close seconds:
WoW really is a slick game. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but polished and quite a bit of fun.
Now you have to compete with a game that is polished ...
I think a lot of the companies know that WoW has raised the bar. I know that they haven't quite come to grasps with exactly how high that bar has been raised and how high customer expectations are, especially if customer is or was a WoW player.
I think they fail to understand the level of polish and functionality that experienced players have come to expect, especially regarding the user interface and related systems. If there is something in the user interface or related systems that is clunky and unwieldy to use the players will know it, and they'll let you know about it by complaining. You have to pay attention when they inform you of these shortcomings and address them.
Failure to address these sort of complaints will quickly snowball into great dissatisfaction, especially if there are many such things in the user interface that elicit such complaints.
Your gameplay can be great fun but no matter how fun it is if the user interface and related systems are as unwieldy as trying to type a novel while wearing mittens it will leave players frustrated, and frustrated players will eventually leave.
Any MMO hoping to succeed these days has to have a well thought out, well working, polished user interface (encompassing player controls, system and control configuration setup, chat system, and mail system if you have one) or it will immediately disappoint players who are used to better. Forget the actual gameplay itself. If your user interface falls far short of what is expected then your gameplay, no matter how fun, simply won't make up for it.
Turing word: inferior
In a sentence: If your user interface is inferior then your game is inferior.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You make an excellent point. I am one of the WoW players you're talking about.
When I purchased AoC, installed it and started it for the very first time, I was really disappointed at what appeared to be a pay-to-play beta. I stuck with it for about two more weeks before canceling my subscription and heading back to WoW.
It should also be mentioned that the game runs horribly on high-end hardware and doesn't make use of SLI. The worst part about it was being a fan of the original books and waiting for this
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
While I don't play WoW right now, I have played a bit in the past (but only to the mid-thirties). I will agree with you wholeheartedly that it is not a perfect game (again, only made it to the mid-thirties), but that it is probably the single slickest game made that is also on such a grand scale.
I didn't realize this, however, until I played on some free servers in an attempt to accelerate my leveling just to see what some of the game's later areas were like. Maybe I was playing on a particularly bad "fast leveling" server, but I could tell that such an interruption to the game's delicate balance really wrecked everything.
I'd be at level one, with zero experience accumulated, and it'd be awesome to kill that first wolf or boar (or whatever woodland critter that I'd be fucking frightened to see in my backyard) and shoot up eight levels and collect sixty gold.
However, this immediately nullifies the usefulness of all quests in the area, so you're stuck with traveling already. And then as soon as you get to enemies who will shell out experience, you realize that all of your attacks are missing and you're getting pounded, because you skipped eight levels' worth of weapon/defense proficiency growth. Since you nullified the usefulness of all of your earlier quests, you're stuck grinding. Immediately.
Basically, I'm just trying to say that WoW's slickness comes from the developers' strict attention to balance -- even the player economy in WoW is a pretty beautiful thing.
I've been trying to find another MMORPG to play so that I don't have to be another "WoW junkie," but I don't know how successful I'll be. I haven't tried AoC, and after RTFAs, I won't. I'm currently playing Lord of the Rings Online, but I can't help but think that it's nothing more than WoW wrapped in Middle-Earth. And the player base is vastly smaller, so finding people to group with can be a chore.
I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Guild Wars 2, however, because the original Guild Wars is such a phenomenal game...once you get past the fact that games with no monthly fee attract a lot of idiots, and idiots don't handle the character customization that GW gives you very well...
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Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
I play LOTRO and Eve. LOTRO is a bit more than WoW in Middle-Earth- I got bored in WoW & Guild Wars a lot faster- but then I have a good kinship, which is key to any game of that type and didn't hook up with as good a bunch in WoW. Still, I like the quests, deeds, crafting, etc better in LOTRO than WoW but I can see how WoW would appeal to some. Both WoW and LOTRO are primarily PVE games with uninteresting PVP, but the PVE is well flavored. I haven't picked up Moria yet, but I hear very good things from my kinship about it; the legendary weapons (weapons that can level) seem to be a hit. LOTRO is what I play if I want to just relax with no consequences to screwing up.
Eve is a totally different monster. Excellent in-game economy. High stakes PVP. Everything important is player driven. The PVE is not particularly developed. The game is very much what you make of it- and the reason it is a niche game is that these characteristics appeal to some and make others feel like they are doing something too much work to be a game- or they reduce their risk by finding a boring corner of the game and get bored there. If you make bad decisions you can lose a lot of stuff- that's the double-edged sword that gives PVP adrenaline and pain.
AoC buzz was like it was gonna be a PVP game. Instead, they didn't really finish it enough for me to tell what it could have been- at least based on the bit of time I tried it before going back to LOTRO and Eve.
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Re:No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
What is surprising is how so few companies appear to "get it". You want to make an MMORPG that can survive in the Age of WoW? Simple. Do everything that WoW does first, then build on that (e.g. player built content, dynamic content, etc.).
We saw the same thing with the FPS genre where tons of games were released that actually moved the field *backward* (e.g. games with no AI players in multiplayer mode, games that featured no -- or restricted -- controller customization(!), etc.)
The state of the gaming industry is unbearable to watch nowadays. It's like everyone is rushing to push out garbage, relying on IP laws and Digital Restrictions Management software to secure income.
And, dammit, when is someone gonna make a new, *good*, squad-based, tactical turn-based game like X-COM or Jagged Alliance again?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm the opposite: AoC is now (still) my primary game. I have tried numerious other MMORPGs, and liked quite a few of them (SWG and LOTRO come to mind), but every time I have tried to get into WoW, I hated it. For some reason that
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that was sacrcasm, but I must way: WoTLK has surpassed my expectations in a major way. The Burning Crusade was just a joke compared to it. For the first time in a long, long time I've found myself actually interested in the story lines behind many of the quests. There are still a few of the "Kill 12 Super Snow Bears" quests around, but even a lot of those have some purpose behind them.
The whole issue with Malygos is great. The Worgen story in Grizzly Hills. Almost everything that happens in Dragonblight. The Death Knight starting quests. It's all just great. Heck I'm a few bars away from level 78 and have still only stepped foot into half the zones - I just don't want to leave any of them until I've done all the quests there are to do.
The the flip side it seems like all raiding has been "simplified", so I'm thinking a full clear of the content will be fairly trivial, so despite it being so much better out the gate, my interest in WoTLK will likely fade within 6-7 months. Still, this is certainly enjoyable for the time being.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wrath of the Lich King has some neat moments, but it's killed when you start to come across the same "Kill X of Y" quests of the last four years. The game is very imbalanced right now as well. Warlocks are nearly debilitated in damage and survivability, and elemental shamans are hurting. Retribution paladins and arcane mages are dominating the landscape because of their ridiculous burst damage.
In PvE, Blizzard created redundant buffs between classes so that there is no longer a special reason to bring a
Kind of silly (Score:5, Insightful)
NCSoft was publically adamant that Tabula Rasa development would continue too, right up until they weren't. MMO companies are always like that, they need to maintain the illusion that everything is fine even while the ship sinks.
Funcom botched this in spectacular fashion. I can't wait for the day when they get DX10 in and can finally say "Age of Conan: now all the features listed on the box actually exist!" Only seven months later too!
Bottom line is that games that release in this poor a state deserve to fail. It's a good lesson for other game companies. Release crap every beta tester tells you isn't ready, and pay for it.
A good game for us old fogies (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Gave it a try, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Blizzard, SOE and Funcom raising the Titanic (Score:4, Funny)
For different reasons.
Blizzard wants the gold from the safe.
SOE is interested in the technology.
Funcom wants the board orchestra that kept playing 'til the end.
They ain't got 700k or 400k (Score:4, Insightful)
Your math is flawed. The game SOLD 700k boxes, but that includes a free month of gameplay. The game has been in development for 5 years or so. Those costs have to be payed first plus some extra because investors don't invest for the fun of it.
The people selling the boxes want to be payed too, and of course you tend to need to produce more boxes then you actually sell. Again, this has to be done with borrowed money essentially so box sales are not all that impressive.
The game has trouble right from the start. Once the first free month was over the servers started dying fast. MMO's tend to have rabid fanboys who live in their own fantasy world but the simply fact was that two weeks or so after launch the rot started to set in. Yes, new players were coming in but there were also a LOT of people who just didn't even bother completing their first month. After the first month ran out thing really went down hill. Entire guilds collapsed, not unusual but not all of these were ego tripping guilds with 1 leader who wants his own name on the guild.
It is very hard to judge just how many players AoC has left, but they faced a real problem. During beta and early launch they had to add servers to deal with the population, just a couple of weeks later they had servers turning into ghosts towns. Do you think their hardware vendor cared? Those servers had to be paid for and now they can try to sell them off second hand.
A small MMORPG can survive, if it keeps a stable population. But going from 700k to having to close servers... that means a LOT of money has been lost. They had huge trouble at launch with not enough customer support. They HAD to get more people in but as they got more employees the number of subscribers collapsed. Now they have to fire them again. That is a LOT of extra money over a small MMORPG who just has the same stable employee pool from the start.
No, Funcom is in trouble. They gambled and they lost mostly because they completely failed to understand basic MMORPG design. They just didn't get it. To list the games fault is easy, just list all its elements. Every single one of them was flawed.
For instance, its so called maturity. Naked boobs. True it had them, and that was it. But the game had no sex, there are several NPC's who hint at it, but nothing ever happens and the armours worn were totally non-sexy.
Its economy was out of whack, a horse, a staple of MMORPG design, was just to fucking expensive. So expensive that gold sellers just gave up because NOBODY was going pay to a 1000 euro's for a horse. For that matter the level requirement was WAY to high.
No fast travel options.
Its melee fighting system basically being nothing more then instead of WoW's 1 button mashing you mash 4 buttons. Whoo! Long live macro keyboards.
The list goes on. Sure there were some highprofile bugs, but basically, at its core, the game just wasn't any good. It was for a short while an intresting diversion from WoW and other fantasy MMORPG's but basically, it just wasn't a good game. A couple of nice ideas don't save a product if its core is flawed. When basic things like chat don't work as they need to, everything else is secondary. And lets face it, Guild Wars had boobs that jiggled, and weren't hidden after level 1 behind a brown leather slab.
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