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.

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.

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.

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.