Age of Conan: Time to Clean Up the Mess?
As you may recall, I wrote a review of Age of Conan a few months ago: Age of Conan is a Hot Mess. My review was extremely unfavorable. I have followed the game in the news since then, and while I have read about improvements nothing has really addressed the (imho) core flaws. Then I happen upon this article today, and it would appear my opinion is not in the minority:
Age of Conan subs fall below 100,000.
Time to pull the plug?
Before anyone thinks I am gleeful about another MMO failing, I most certainly am not. Age of Conan was supposed to be a major player in the MMO industry. It was supposed to have a more mature, adult theme, and integrate PvP through the game world itself. I was very excited about this, as I feel there is a woeful lack of mature oriented games (and by mature, I mean more than just boobs – although there is nothing wrong with boobs).
But bad games that limp along are even worse for the industry than failed games that go away. Poorly designed games that fail to innovate and simply build on worn out concepts contribute to stagnation rather than growth. I won’t go into all the reasons I think Age of Conan was a horrible game – you can read the review for that.
The continued free fall of AoC is not a surprise to me. One has to wonder how long until they close up shop. AoC has one advantage over games like Tabula Rasa: Funcom cannot afford to close AoC. Funcom needs this revenue stream or else its entire company will be in jeopardy.
The only good thing about Age of Conan is the scenario. Occasionally they capture the spirit of the savage Hyborian world of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, but usually it is more about showing some mild nudity, the usual well endowed women and rivers of blood. Does not make the game any better.
The game is flawed to the core and was extremely overhyped. That it is such a sub-par MMO made the disappointment only more severe.
I wonder if WAR can make a stand, like LOTRO. Age of Conan will for sure not survive.
I really don’t know about WAR. It plays like a game trying to hard to imitate WoW and DAOC, and doing a bad job at both. It lacks the style, polish, and amount of content from WoW, and lacks the sense of belonging to a team/kingdom that DAoC had. An RvR game that doesn’t make me give a crap about a keep being taken has gone astray.
And what worries me is the WAR devs seem to think the answer to fixing a system is to attach more rewards and loot. That simply is not the case. People loved DAoC’s RvR because they CARED about their realm and their frontier homeland. It was not about the loot. Making WAR’s RvR all about loot trivializes the experience and creates all sorts of bad behaviors that hurt the game (like empty keep swapping).
Age of Conan: Did they do anything right? A few things, but not many.
LOTRO: They definitely captured the feel of Middle Earth. That alone goes a long, long way. I might still be playing it if the interface were not so sluggish. A sluggish interface and “delayed” responsiveness to commands is unfortunately something I just cannot get past. Most importantly, LOTRO’s devs seem to understand their strengths and they continue to design towards those. That is generally indicative of smart developers who know what people like about their game.
Just like chasing the bleeding edge of graphics, chasing the “adult” (it’s anything but “mature”) segment of the market will inevitably wind up limiting your audience. That’s not necessarily a guaranteed failure, but there’s no way that AoC could ever have the same sort of mass appeal that WoW has. Throw dev incompetence into the mix, and you’re just not going to reach a good critical mass.
Well, they sold over 800,000 copies so they clearly had a lot of initial interest. They just couldn’t keep those people because the game, well, sucked.
I agree the adult factor limits your market penetration (no pun intended), but that is the direction I actually hope MMOs will go towards. I’d like to see a lot more games, with a lot more variety, not all trying to be the 10 million subscriber WoW killer. More 10-100k subscriber games that cater to a variety of interests would be awesome imho. 10k subscribers is almost $2 million a year in revenue. That can easily support a staff of 10-20 people all being well paid for their work. (NOTE: I hate subscriptions, but I use that business model concept just to illustrate a point). That is more than enough people to make really cool, fun games.
Aye, smaller, more agile games in a more diversified market can be a good thing. You can’t do that chasing the bleeding edge of tech and graphics, though.
They should have copied the melee combat of Mount & Blade. You already mentioned in your article how awful their combo system and melee in general turned out. I am not quite sure, but at the time I was playing AoC the Tempest of Set class was quite godlike with their 1-button-lightning spam. While the warriors used the macro-recording abilities of their keyboards if they had a Logitech G15 or something like that so that they had to push only one button for a combo, too.
Mount & Blade is freaking awesome. If you charge towards a target, you get a speed bonus that directly translates into damage upon impact. If you stab while falling back, your damage is reduced. Two Knights charging each other with lances is deadly if you cannot deflect the lance or avoid it. Running over a footman is also possible, this is where an armored and heavy warhorse is better than the faster unarmored horses.
Even a tuned down version of this combat system would really help Age of Conan. But the game is already so damaged, I think it is beyond repair and hope.
Even more so, the game is not what the players hoped for. In the Forums I saw tons of young adults. Already one year before release they were already boasting their strength and prowess, I feared that the community would become a wannabe-PK-community till the “Mordred syndrome” (Lum the Mad wrote about it; almost all players are not the hardcore PvP gamer they think they are) kicks in.
Instead, they were confronted with a clumsy game with clumsy interface and had to fight the numerous issues of the game, often including hardware related issues and the buggy software itself.
I was always sceptical about the extreme hype that surrounded the game, and I think it only helped the initial sales, but scarred the image of the game forever beyond repair. Some reviewers hopped on the bandwaggon and gave the game favorable reviews.
But you cannot deceive MMO gamers forever. The only company that manages to deceive its customers that their game is near perfect and great is Blizzard, and even Tobold finally realized that the WOTLK dungeons are so damn easy that they are not fun anymore. http://tobolds.blogspot.com/
I think even Blizzard realized that WoW is the highly polished final evolution of the DIKU-Mud, and that this cannot be the future of MMO gaming.
I am really excited about their ideas for the still secret “next generation MMO”. I also wonder if they manage to disappoint their fans for the first time with Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. The young ones will probably love the games, they are just a somewhat improved Starcraft and Diablo 2 that has been brought up to today’s graphics and interface standards. This can work, but it will probably not excite me old fart and gamers who actually played their old games in their young years too much.
Right now I am playing King’s Bounty. It is a remake of the predecessor of the HOMM games, I never played the original. And it is freaking awesome. Listen up, Muckbeast! You can even have a family and children! My 4 children are not giving me proper boni, unfortunately. And my wife turned into a frog again. Which has some advantages, but well… I will drop her for the pirate girl or the succubus sooner or later! :>
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3186/kblevel16.jpg
Just for Muckbeast and those who want pregnancy in video games. Children are born after you and your wife agreed to have one after 10 battles.
Not playing a MMO leaves a lot of time for other games and things, as you can see.
Yeah, AOC was a huge disappointment – perhaps moreso for me. I’d followed the game since I first heard about it, peppering the devs with questions at each con I attended. In the end though, it reminded me too much of Shadowbane – there just wasn’t enough content and there were entirely too many bugs. It was almost like they had spent all their time developing the newbie isle, cause once you left it, everything went downhill.
As for WAR, I like the game for the simple fact that I can jump in and immediately start PvP. No traveling long distances to get to battlegrounds or anything of the sort. But I think there should have been a third faction like they had in DAOC.
Couldn’t agree more with the third faction. I was pretty disappointed in how they decided to design the sides in WAR. If you’ve ever played Warhammer Fantasy or Warhammer 40k, you know that there are basically infinite sides. Orks will fight orks if must be! With just two sides, the imbalances become glaring. People pick apart terrain, powers, etc., and both sides will always feel like they’re disadvantaged.
I was a gigantic DAoC fan, so you can imagine how excited I was when one of my favorite tabletop games met one of my favorite game developers. Alas, the dream was short lived, but I did enjoy WAR until… well, until I didn’t. I still enjoyed it quite a bit more than I liked Burning Crusade, though, so that’s something!
Speaking of the newbie area polish Gargantua mentions, might AoC have fared better as a single player game that just focused on that level of gameplay? I understand that the newbie quests (”destiny quest line”?) were pretty much solo anyway.
In response to Longasc:
1) I am so glad you read and post here. It seems like you have played all the games I never played (and I didn’t think there were many), so your input is awesome. I really have to figure out a way to try Mount and Blade. You are not the first person to tell me it had some great mechanics in it.
Milawe, if you are reading my comment, please skip #2 and move right on to #3.
2) “my wife turned into a frog again. Which has some advantages” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
3) “WoW is the highly polished final evolution of the DIKU-Mud” Without a doubt. Now, if only the rest of the industry will catch on that we only need one uber-DIKU, they can stop making DIKU clone MMOs. We already did the DIKU clone thing in the MUD world, and it sucked then too.
4) “Diablo 3″ – I am a huge Diablo fan. I really, really, really hope they deliver.
In response to Gargantua:
“In the end though, it reminded me too much of Shadowbane”
That’s an excellent point. AoC does bear a lot of resemblance to Shadowbane. From the whole 3l33t PvP attitude that surrounded it, to the lack of content, to the generally unpolished nature of the game, there are a lot of similarities.
Shadowbane is a little more tragic though, because the developers of that game seemed to really want to make something new and special. The AoC developers seemed bent on ripping off WoW, throwing in some PvP, and sprinkling in some boobs. That is not inspired design at all (though again, nothing wrong with boobs).
In response to Milawe:
The lack of a third faction in WAR was ruinous. That is one of WAR’s many enormous, fundamental mistakes. And at this point, I don’t see how they can recover from it.
Tesh, you must be reading minds. I was thinking about Age of Conan’s best feature – the initial starter quests in Tortage and the “Destiny Quest” line.
And I had the same thought, it could have been a great single player adventure game. They could have left out tons of repetitive fights and put some more focus on the story, and would not have had all the server, hardware, multiplayer and whatever related issues.
It is a lot of work to make some 10+ somewhat balanced classes for a singleplayer game. I fear this is part of the mentality nowadays, and what makes King’s Bounty shine. Somehow love and dedication seem to be reserved for subscription based MMOs. Delivering unfinished banana products on the other hand, too.
Even if I am not absolutely convinced by Bethesda’s games (I did not like Morrowind or Oblivion for diverse reasons, but Fallout 3 was really good), they do it: They put lot of effort in their games, create huge worlds for just a mere singleplayer game. They carried on this tradition from ages past, from times before the “MMORPG” age.
Tesh and everyone who commented on this article by Dave Perry http://tishtoshtesh.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/cloudy-crystal-ball/ was quite furious that he basically said the singe player game is dead nowadays. It is not, MMOs just became more popular with modern broadband connections and WoW made sure they also gain mass appeal.
Age of Conan would have been much better as an epic scale single player action-adventure. I totally agree to Tesh’s thought in this regard. Even if he did not play the game, he got this idea, too, strange!
I guess Funcom thought of creating a game that becomes a long-lasting source of steady income. In the end they did not have Blizzard’s huge financial success, but only the huge expenses and scarred their image. The game possibly killed Funcom, time will tell.
What’s so good about a wife turning into a frog? (I didn’t skip #2 as instructed.)
100% attack bonus to frogs, snakes, spiders and other swamp beasts. That she is croaking funnily is a bonus.
Funcom either needs to pull the plug on AOC, or settle on an actual focus for the game. The biggest mistake they made was courting the Darkfall/Shadowbane so heavily then abruptly deciding they wanted to be a WOW killer. They blew the first 3 months of development time trying to satisfy browsing WOW players who were only waiting for Wrath of the Lich King.
Trying to “kill WOW” is suicidal, you either end up failing miserably at huge cost or keeping a few subs due to the IP (LOTRO). In fact the traditional “MMORPG” market seems pretty tapped out ATM. The big waiting market is for “Masively Mutliplayer” games that are willing to discard most of the “RPG” mechanics or do much lighter versions of them.
In relation to AOC: Funcom would have been vastly better off improving the action gameplay in combat, putting more emphasis on skill and even less emphasis on items/character progression. Then combine that with an overall game focus on territory conquest and seiges. As other posters said, a game more like Age of Chivalry or Mount and Blade on a massive scale with skeletal progression elements. It would break most of the canon “MMORPG” concepts but I think a game like that could have a large if not wow killing playerbase.
Serith: Those are spot on points about AoC’s hyperkinetic focus. They hyped up the PvP aspect of the game (Shadowbane-style), and then spent almost all of their time trying to make the game WOW-ish. And in the end they failed at both. Add to that generally bad game design and 90 million shades of brown and you have a big loser.
I agree that AOC could differentiate itself by being more skill and action oriented. I actually liked that gear was not hugely important like it is in other MMOs. As many of you know, gear is nice in Threshold but not the deal breaker.
There are plenty of things to like about AoC. There’s plenty to -not- like about AoC too though. I was willing to put up with alot of stuff, but the game was basically completely different every month because of Funcom’s patching style. That drove me crazy. Their nerfs and buffs were always massive overkill. I did enjoy the game, but I developed a complete distrust for Funcom’s patching, and patch time was always a crap shoot on whether they’d destroy the game for me with some ridiculous change or not. I got tired of it and quit. I might go back and try it again at some point, but they are still at the stage where they are completely redoing major game systems, with no sign of stopping soon.
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fabuloso osurga de eranira y requis con riadeis cuirazev. sedinstam a cemonsin y ncorquiu cemobro con coria emosuco!