Death of a Game: Age of Conan

Filbur

Age of Conan is now officially in maintenance mode and won't be getting any more updates from now an.

While many complained about daily quests and faction grinds, I still believe that Rise of the Godslayer is one of the best expansions ever released for an MMO. The tiger mount you could train was extremely cool.



Nerdslayer just recently made an interesting video about the troubled history of AoC:

Wellspring

Do you have a source?

Filbur

Wellspring said:

Do you have a source?

Funcom announced it in the recent financial report: http://massivelyop.com/2017/02/27/the-secret-world-is-being-relaunched-in-2017/

time007

this game lasted like 6-8 years.  im shocked.  i just remember playing it at launch and how me and my friend quit after a month when we found out there wasnt any city sieges on elephants/mammoths like they said there would be or sth of that nature.  was a long time ago haha.

SpottyGekko

"Death" is relative in this case, the game will still be running and will keep getting new players, just not large crowds.

If Anarchy Online is anything to go by, the AoC servers will still be up in 2024, lol

Kyleran

Not surprising, Funcom is investing their resources in new titles with a promise of increasing financial success.

Aging MMORPGs is not the place to drop money into, you just milk those cash cows until they one day keel over.

CCP seems to be doing the same, but without a successful new title.

Maybe they need to make a survival game?

SpottyGekko

Kyleran said:

...

CCP seems to be doing the same, but without a successful new title.

Maybe they need to make a survival game?

Perhaps with... vampires ?


/runsandhides

flizzer

What new Funcom games?   Full fledged MMOs or more mobile games?

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Alomar

AoC is the perfect example of how important an mmo launch is and the first impression. Released too early and it never recovered, I played it a year after launch for several months and again 3 years after launch and had a blast each time on two different servers. I tried to return to it several more times but couldn't as it just felt dated and empty. It will remain one of my top 10 mmo's and the best real "M" rating as it was an mmo made for adults rather than children.

Elsabolts

Well deserved ending in my opion, was given a perma ban for asking when bar room brawling would be added around 3 months in. I am not a Funcom fan.

goboygo

Two words.   Combo System.........

Tsiya

I tried to recover my account about a year ago, I had preordered with all the goodies but no longer had the email account attached to the game. I even offered to give them the CD key and never heard back from them. Just bad service. When you can't be arsed to help a person who wants to play your game, maybe it is time to hang up your jock.

Golelorn

The game was beautiful, but the combat was terrible. If you're going to name your title Conan, the combat better be darn good. It wasn't.

goboygo

Golelorn said:

The game was beautiful, but the combat was terrible. If you're going to name your title Conan, the combat better be darn good. It wasn't.

Agreed and its still beautiful.  Combat, ugh.  The combo system required binding your 5 best keys to the combo direction keys, then you still had all the regular skills on top of that which started the combo moves. And worst part is they built the combos backwards so every time it leveled and it added a new "step" the step didn't go at the end of the combo extending the order you already had memorized it went at the beginning so combo order keep changing while you were leveling, it was a mess.  On top of that there were shields you had to keep re- positioning around your charcater to try to block the incoming combo damage specifically the final step of the combo, getting your shield to be in the place of their combo arrow, top side etc.

Also you had to complete the whole combo in order to get he full damage from it so the whole system just fell apart in PvP since eveyone would just dodge away when you started combos.  It was an interesting experiment on paper but never should of ended up in game.  The people that actually liked it defended it like mad on the forums, all 300 hundred that stuck around to play.

However casters just smashed single buttons like a traditional MMO, made no sense at all.

Po_gg

SpottyGekko said:

"Death" is relative in this case, the game will still be running and will keep getting new players, just not large crowds.

If Anarchy Online is anything to go by, the AoC servers will still be up in 2024, lol

Yep, that was my thought too... Sure after the financial report and the official maintenance mode it's a well-timed video, but he starts with listing the 3 categories by which he choose a game for the "death of ..." series, and AoC fits into none of those.
Still, it was a nice video, with some minor factual errors here and there.

I agree with the positive list at the end (lore, story, music, gfx, combat system), but only with half of the fail reasons he listed   as in 1.5 of the 3 mentioned.

The teeter totter balancing is spot on, those were the stupidest years of the game, anything the pvp'ers whined about loud enough got quickly rehashed, no matter how it wrecked the overall gameplay. As a straight counter to "stupidest", the smartest choice was when they decided: screw them whiners, and put an /ignore mode on the pvp. Crom lived on strong (and who cares about the empty pvp server :awesome:  though two years ago they tried to throw some bones to them as well, even planned to mess with Crom too, luckily the uproar was fierce enough to leave the PvE alone).

Bugs and perf. issues - I can't really relate to that, I barely had any (laughed though the Ati remark in the video), probably just had a lucky config.

Funcom'd, that's the half agree. The player side ("the hype was enormous and they didn't deliver all"), well, when do people learn not to jump up on hype trains?
The other half is valid though, Funcom "finished" the game with Godslayer, and then put it on back burner for the sake of TSW, just like they did with AO for AoC, and now they do with TSW for Exiles and the new TSW-themed game later this year. They do this all the time, and it's a shame for their veteran players.
During the near 5 years since TSW's launch, AoC got barely anything besides a couple smaller tweaks, and Dragon's Spine...


So yep, game is on maintenance mode since years, this report just made it official. Still, as Gekko wrote, it is not the death of the game, just means it will continue in its current state, without the -over the years already diminished- hope for any change or content update.

Bellomo

Great video thanks for sharing. I loved playing Age of Conan as I went into it knowing about the bad launch and did not expect a lot back then and I was really surprised how fun this game was. Tortage was a fun place to level and you would make another character just to go back haha and the fighting style was the best I have played in any mmo thus far. I totally agree with anything they did afterwards was to little to late but I am glad I had a chance to get into this game. Conan Exiles I am currently playing and am having a blast with it . I really suggest people check it out.

Nebless

It was a good video and just to check him out I also watched his one on Star Wars Galaxies.  Both suffered from the same faults.  His facts on the how's and why's to many times were just his opinions.  Like ...

To support his lack of population reason he sighted only Steam numbers.  Now I know it must be hard to really find out how many are playing a game, but basing a 2008 game on Steam numbers is just silly as IMHO most players are old box players or just don't use Steam.

He also sighted his 'fact' F/C was still screwed up because he couldn't get the store to work so he could access his old higher level character, which I'm taking to mean he wasn't able to buy Godslayer, Turan etc...  Store seems to work pretty much for everyone else so who knows what his problem was.

Is AoC dying?  Sure no argument there.  Has F/C made some really bad choices?  Once again sure, but are you the all knowing expert on the subject ..... ?