Age of Conan - What went wrong?
What went wrong?
1. Performance issues, especially at launch. Things are way better now but many have left already. Stuttering, crashes, game not starting at all wear people's patience down.
2. Too much soloing. Too much power to the loners, as in the chance to play all the way solo to 80. That, in the post WoW era (when a solo-viable MMORPG was very much needed), isn't such a good idea cause everyone is a little more burnout on the genre than they were pre-wow and need solo-viability coupled with gentle and easy group-content. ie: dungeons (see below). Otherwise they'll rejoice for the solo play capabilities only to feel utterly lonely and bored after forty levels or something. As someone else said, there are better single player games around, so they shouldn't abuse of solo-friendliness in multplayer games. That backfires.
3. Lack of rewarding group-casual dungeons. Dungeons aren't fulfilling enough and they fail to provide both a social-enhancing and a gamistic-rewarding experience. They are too hard hence need full commitment, a good group with a much coveted guardian and 6 players. They force you in there after spoiling you to play alone at a relaxed pace for 40 levels. No one wants that, unless it rains rare stuff and the effort is minimal. Which is the opposite of what is required (unless you do them at a higher level). And itemization (see below) for many dungeons came too late.
4. Itemization. Itemization was so stupid in the first 3 weeks that I think the game retained more player than expected. Everything was SO brown that, realism or not, you felt nauseous about it. Now things are slightly better, but a level 30-ish player is stuck in brown mode and he has no way to think things will get any better. Nausea, disappointment, quit. Also, stats and bonus are so moronic they don't make items cool at all, not even in the numbers dept. People like big numbers, +50 Defense Bonus, so there's nothing more depressing than getting a +0.1% defense bonus jacket at level 1 and a +0.2% defense bonus shirt at level 30. Even numbers are brown in AoC, and the UI (see below) doesn't help.
5. User Interface. Totally uninspired. Icons are great honestly, but the inventory/character sheet are WAY uglier than 7 years old Anarchy Online ones just to mention something Funcom. Fonts are ugly, "rolling 3d item thumbs" are SWG ugly, inventory pages is just IDIOT and numbers are once again too sparse, too small and too brown/white. This game needed a little more coloring for item descriptions, better fonts, better icons for items (skills/spells/combo ones are fine). When you get a blue/purple item you don't want a smallish dull list of 0.6 bonus, you want some noticeable figures that stands out when mousing over it.
Non existant Guild management tools, ugly and buggy friend lists and all around plain or lacking menus stink bad in 2008. Big mistake here (yes, better one is in the works. Who cares about tomorrow? Things went wrong here YESTERDAY).
6. Lacking features. For a PvP oriented game, the total lack of incentives is depressing both for hardcore killers and casual battlegrounders. No reasons to play leads to empty battlegrounds, or empty wins in the open areas. As much as it can be fun, too many couldn't start a single minigame due to the lack of players, and the few they participated in felt useless, confusing and not-rewarding (especially because they very much likely died in a matter of seconds). The lack of features could have been less blatant if it wasn't all about the most new/interesting/publicized aspects of AoC: player cities (not working or useless) and PvP (useless, or as we like to say "not-meaningful"). Hell, they even stopped mentioning border kingdom's Towers for smaller guilds. That's backstabbing all the smaller guilds who will never be able to fight for a BK or even just gather the shittons of required resources to go T3.
7. Bugs, so many. Playerbase will forgive you if you feed them with solutions and other things to keep them busy. It doesn't matter how fast they patch, there's a strong perception that something is lacking from the game and it wasn't patched in soon enough. Not to mention the perception that bugs weren't all squashed soon enough. Many are being forgiving with Funcom because they are neglecting the 6 afore-mentioned reasons anyway. But whoever sooner or later got hit by one of those, simply had no reason nor will to cut Funcom some slack, especially since they were paying for it.
8. Finally, Players' burnout. In 2008 no one is fresh enough to accept troubled gaming experiences, and that coupled with that old feeling of "been there, done that already, thousand times" doesn't help a game that, despite being very well crafted on some aspects, lacks some of the features that could make it [i]different enough[/i]. In the end Age of Conan felt "old" too soon to experienced MMORPG players, especially because of one or all the 7 aforementioned reasons, and while I don't really know how new MMORPG (read Warhammer) will do in the future, I am now even more sure than I was that you really need: 1. A cool interface, 2. great itemization, 3. smoother performances and 4. a couple of SERIOUSLY new features. Conan, while being the game I am loving much more than I expected, lacks so far 3 and a half of these elements.
It all sounds like a fiasco. I think it is definitely not. Something went wrong if everyone was SO hyped up despite all the bugs in the first 2 weeks and simply let it fall after 14 days. But all the points I made up there are fixable in a few months and I am confident they will. I wonder if it will ever be enough to gain back all the escaped players. First impression rules everything, the buzz, the hype, and the cool smart kids are pretty much done with it. The game needs ironing out point 1 to 7 so bad. It can be fixed, now they just need to stand out with what they promised and that is not just blood 'n boobs.
( Posted on f13, and on the stupid AoC official boards too: )
1. Performance issues, especially at launch. Things are way better now but many have left already. Stuttering, crashes, game not starting at all wear people's patience down.
2. Too much soloing. Too much power to the loners, as in the chance to play all the way solo to 80. That, in the post WoW era (when a solo-viable MMORPG was very much needed), isn't such a good idea cause everyone is a little more burnout on the genre than they were pre-wow and need solo-viability coupled with gentle and easy group-content. ie: dungeons (see below). Otherwise they'll rejoice for the solo play capabilities only to feel utterly lonely and bored after forty levels or something. As someone else said, there are better single player games around, so they shouldn't abuse of solo-friendliness in multplayer games. That backfires.
3. Lack of rewarding group-casual dungeons. Dungeons aren't fulfilling enough and they fail to provide both a social-enhancing and a gamistic-rewarding experience. They are too hard hence need full commitment, a good group with a much coveted guardian and 6 players. They force you in there after spoiling you to play alone at a relaxed pace for 40 levels. No one wants that, unless it rains rare stuff and the effort is minimal. Which is the opposite of what is required (unless you do them at a higher level). And itemization (see below) for many dungeons came too late.
4. Itemization. Itemization was so stupid in the first 3 weeks that I think the game retained more player than expected. Everything was SO brown that, realism or not, you felt nauseous about it. Now things are slightly better, but a level 30-ish player is stuck in brown mode and he has no way to think things will get any better. Nausea, disappointment, quit. Also, stats and bonus are so moronic they don't make items cool at all, not even in the numbers dept. People like big numbers, +50 Defense Bonus, so there's nothing more depressing than getting a +0.1% defense bonus jacket at level 1 and a +0.2% defense bonus shirt at level 30. Even numbers are brown in AoC, and the UI (see below) doesn't help.
5. User Interface. Totally uninspired. Icons are great honestly, but the inventory/character sheet are WAY uglier than 7 years old Anarchy Online ones just to mention something Funcom. Fonts are ugly, "rolling 3d item thumbs" are SWG ugly, inventory pages is just IDIOT and numbers are once again too sparse, too small and too brown/white. This game needed a little more coloring for item descriptions, better fonts, better icons for items (skills/spells/combo ones are fine). When you get a blue/purple item you don't want a smallish dull list of 0.6 bonus, you want some noticeable figures that stands out when mousing over it.
Non existant Guild management tools, ugly and buggy friend lists and all around plain or lacking menus stink bad in 2008. Big mistake here (yes, better one is in the works. Who cares about tomorrow? Things went wrong here YESTERDAY).
6. Lacking features. For a PvP oriented game, the total lack of incentives is depressing both for hardcore killers and casual battlegrounders. No reasons to play leads to empty battlegrounds, or empty wins in the open areas. As much as it can be fun, too many couldn't start a single minigame due to the lack of players, and the few they participated in felt useless, confusing and not-rewarding (especially because they very much likely died in a matter of seconds). The lack of features could have been less blatant if it wasn't all about the most new/interesting/publicized aspects of AoC: player cities (not working or useless) and PvP (useless, or as we like to say "not-meaningful"). Hell, they even stopped mentioning border kingdom's Towers for smaller guilds. That's backstabbing all the smaller guilds who will never be able to fight for a BK or even just gather the shittons of required resources to go T3.
7. Bugs, so many. Playerbase will forgive you if you feed them with solutions and other things to keep them busy. It doesn't matter how fast they patch, there's a strong perception that something is lacking from the game and it wasn't patched in soon enough. Not to mention the perception that bugs weren't all squashed soon enough. Many are being forgiving with Funcom because they are neglecting the 6 afore-mentioned reasons anyway. But whoever sooner or later got hit by one of those, simply had no reason nor will to cut Funcom some slack, especially since they were paying for it.
8. Finally, Players' burnout. In 2008 no one is fresh enough to accept troubled gaming experiences, and that coupled with that old feeling of "been there, done that already, thousand times" doesn't help a game that, despite being very well crafted on some aspects, lacks some of the features that could make it [i]different enough[/i]. In the end Age of Conan felt "old" too soon to experienced MMORPG players, especially because of one or all the 7 aforementioned reasons, and while I don't really know how new MMORPG (read Warhammer) will do in the future, I am now even more sure than I was that you really need: 1. A cool interface, 2. great itemization, 3. smoother performances and 4. a couple of SERIOUSLY new features. Conan, while being the game I am loving much more than I expected, lacks so far 3 and a half of these elements.
It all sounds like a fiasco. I think it is definitely not. Something went wrong if everyone was SO hyped up despite all the bugs in the first 2 weeks and simply let it fall after 14 days. But all the points I made up there are fixable in a few months and I am confident they will. I wonder if it will ever be enough to gain back all the escaped players. First impression rules everything, the buzz, the hype, and the cool smart kids are pretty much done with it. The game needs ironing out point 1 to 7 so bad. It can be fixed, now they just need to stand out with what they promised and that is not just blood 'n boobs.
( Posted on f13, and on the stupid AoC official boards too: )
posted by Drew the Falconeer at 9:55 AM
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