AoC State of the Game Inteview with Erling Ellingsen and Thorbjørn Olsen

[B. de la Durantaye]

Three months after launch players have had a chance to make heads roll and experience Hyboria in Age of Conan. But what does Funcom have in store for the future of the title? Ten Ton Hammer snagged an interview with Thorbjørn Olsen, Producer; and Erling Ellingsen, Product Manager to find out more about their take on where AoC sits today, and what their plans are over the next phase of post-launch development.

The Funcom team has a lot planned, including DX10 support, PvP updates, armor, and adding new content to fill the level gaps. Find out what's in store for Age of Conan with plans on criminal and murderer status, bounty-hunter rewards, an expansion and more in Ten Ton Hammer's exclusive "State of the Game" interview.

[wdfly]

these are just empty words from empty suits. they released a game about 6 months before it would have been ready and have already lost at least 48% of their playerbase in the first 1-3 months of the game's existance. failcom needs to realize that without a heluva lot more PVE content their MMO will continue to be the video game equivalent of the titanic.

[Jayel]

I listened to that entire video but it was a lot of talk about nothing substantial. Why keep things a secret? The guy said he doesnt want to commit to a 6-month action plan but he should if he wants the playerbase to keep the faith.

[Chylok]

Where's the brown suit??

As an officer within a guild which possess a Battlekeep I was glad to hear something regarding the massive PvP aspect. After being a defender and attacker on a few occassions the mention of "more players being involved" was good to hear. Anyone there or that has the ears of the devs, or if one should be reading this.. PLEASE PLEASE focus on the raids being able to be a max of at least 48 within the Border Kingdom zone. Having two raids of 24 per, and the requirement for a member of the defending guild to be leading each party within a raid creates alot of problems. One raid, raid leader from defending BK's guild, 48 within it would be so much easier. And while you have them.. LET US OPEN THE GATES WHILE MOUNTED! Hire a craftsman to make the lever taller or wider so that a horses kick will do it. I know, animation involved but it's a little thing which would garner good reviews.

[savvage61]

to little to late, they have already lost the respect of us players who had trust in flubcom. what other games have entire guilds leaving to play another new release (WAR) ,these are the same guilds who left EQ and WOW and had hopes of mature gaming in a non cartoon land. we've abandoned those hopes for a game that is fun to play and playable. not a half finished beta

[Staticwar]

Too late for generic promises. WAAAAYYYY too late.

This game should be launching in 09, after layering in loads of content and variety (of which there is NONE). Only people below 80 are still playing and they're bound to quit when they realize (esp after this gem nerf, whether it was necessary or not) that there is NADA to do at endgame. Wait for your 1 or 2 raids per week, or grind resources for your guild- if people are seriously willing to spend $15 a month for 2 raids a week and the most monotonous mat grind in any mmo, then they are welcome to it.

They played it safe when they tacked on crafting, and they played it painfully safe when they decided to keep pvp out of the pve ruleset completely- for example- many pve'ers have never even seen the borderlands b/c there's no reason to see them, but I bet most pve'ers still expected to be involved in gank-free pvp after watching all those vids using siege weapons to fend off mobs of NPC, or sieges that worked, or mounted combat, or bar brawling.
If Erling and Co. think they can "fill in some content" gaps and that'll fix this steaming pile he's out of his mind. Someone with balls needs to take this game by the scruff of it's neck and change it radically, give pve'ers a flag system, or put quests in pvp zones, or make the harvest zones pvp- SOMETHING.
I'm not crying for my money back- I enjoyed much of the ride to endgame, loved my HoX class, and thought the combat was awesome- but they forgot to make the rest of the game, and clearly, with these new pvp-only rules coming out, even Funcom wasn't exactly sure if AoC was a pvp or pve game, so they gave the public both and then make design decisions based on how the servers were populated. Obviously they didn't have a strong idea about how endgame would work in pve, or if there should even be a pve-only ruleset.
1/2 baked and underdone, the rush to launch has left Funcom with a trainwreck- a game impossible to balance across all these rulesets with, seemingly, no one at the wheel directing the future of AoC. Just a lot of "making it up as they go along."

After watching 2 guilds of 80+ each vanish, people are in denial if they think ANYONE is returning because of a few gem nerfs.

RIP

[waynor]

It really saddens me to see the direction this game is heading... What had so much promise back in June now looks like it's headed towards insignificance...

The game will eventually be good I don't doubt that for a moment but Funcom has bungled it up so badly that it's going to take a good long time getting there..

I played the game from May through till August 19th, in May and part of June I had a great time... But then the people I enjoyed playing with started logging on less and less pretty soon my thriving guild was dead... so I found another guild with over 250 members but then again that guild over the course of a month went from being busy to being empty... Once anyone hit lvl 80 they either started lvling and alt or left the game within a week..

I met a lot of fun people... had some great times but ultimately the people who made it fun left and theres nothing fun left to do...

[bcrankshaw]

I'm also of the opinion that its too late for fixing the great sinking behemoth that is AOC
My biggest issue is the way they treat paying customers on the forums
I have a technical problem or complaint about a realistic issue with the game ..the result " ban my account for a few days or delete my post "
The Mods are on some kind of power trip ..they think they gods .
There is some positive from the perceived failure of AOC ,I hope that other companies that plan to release MMO learn lessons and don't repeat Funcoms errors .For example with WAR they told the community before that there weren't going to be certain features released before the game was out .This is how the paying customer base should be treated..not like Funcom did ..."hype ..hype ...delete any opinion that points out missing content

[Lizante]

If this video wasn't so comical it would be totally sad.

These guys continue to sing the same song and they dance the same dance, actually oblivious to the clear fact and/or refuse to understand that no one wants to hear or see it anymore.

FunCom needs to stop the continued alienation of MMO gamers by losing the hype once and for all and they must provide a lot less talk and a lot more action on actually delivering on at least *some* of their promises for this game we're still waiting to see.

Being still in closed beta and at least 3 months away from release quality more than three months after the game's May 2008 release is totally inexcusable.

I also see by a post or two in this thread that a lot of players are also starting to realize that FunCom really doesn't have a grasp on an actual, fleshed-out "vision" for this game -- this video confirms this (hence the lack of specifics from FunCom) -- it's still a bunch of brilliant, even amazing parts thrown in a bag labeled Age of Conan.

The clock ticks. By Christmas, will the MMO hobby see that FunCom has actually delivered on their promises? Or will the AoC game servers be empty with the Age of Conan game boxes relegated to the bargain bin at GameStop? The clock ticks.

[tharok2007]

if warhammer does even 5% better then age of conan, no one will be going back to it. I'm not a fanboy of either game, if warhammer turns out as bad as age of conan, I will leave it also after the first month.

I guess what this teaches us , is that you should never go for more then a 1 month subscription when a game is released.

Funcom has shown incompetent on many levels and has lost the trust of the majority of their initial playerbase. I also have never seen so many guild leaving a game so fast in mmo history. About 2% of my guild still liked the game after the first month, which resulted in 280 of them leaving and the guild being dead.
The same thing happened to a lot of guilds and it's amazing how they claim to have 400.000+ players when all you see on their forums is whine threads (ok , to be fair , people rarely post compliments on forums), but also people that would like to continue to play the game but are complaining about all servers being dead, with barely enough people on to form groups. So either 80% of those 400.000 players are subscribers who quit , but who's subscription hasnt run out of time yet , or they're just plain lying.