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Comparing Age of Conan’s dark, blood-splattered fantasy world to those of its competitors is like comparing night to day, so we suppose it’s only fitting that we can’t really see a light at the end of this tunnel.
Age of Conan developer Funcom recently announced its relocation to the pointy edge of a quickly crumbling cliff (artist’s depiction here) – reporting that it lost $23.3 million during its fourth quarter of 2008. The culprit: Age of Conan’s free-falling subscription numbers, which now sit at a mere 100,000 after reaching an all-time high of 700,000.
On top of that, Funcom CFO Olav Sandnes decided to risk a dip in the economy’s increasingly choppy waters rather than continue with Funcom, announcing his resignation with all the optimism he could muster.
"Funcom is a company with a substantial potential based on a unique combination of skill sets in a fast growing global market. I wish Trond Aas and the rest of the organization all the best in realizing the full potential of the company," he said.
So, do any of you still play Age of Conan?
Comments are closed on this article
aCi11i3s
March 09, 2009 at 6:35pm
I played AoC loyally since it's first day and unfortunately have moved on myself after almost a year. However, I will keep my eye on the games development (if any) to see if there is a brighter day for Acillies in Hyboria. Especially to grind with the best guild there...Black Hand.
fspikec
February 24, 2009 at 2:31pm
Yet another promising MMO killed because they rushed the release. Will these companies ever learn that you can't compete in today's MMO market releasing a broken game?
Magius
February 24, 2009 at 12:30pm
AoC had a lot of potential...
The game was marketed as a dark, griitty, bloody, and sexy MMO for the 18+ crowd, yet playing it you could not find much to justify the rating it received. Yes, there is blood and some ok fatalities, but everything else in the game was fairly inconsistent. There wasn't any real strong content (seen better in the original Diablo) and the setting were just drab and empty.Pubs were a joke with NPC going through very uninspired animations, in fact most of the world looked like that.
The cities were really impressive though, but you never got a sense you were in a continuous world. If you played the game you know what I mean... travel points just broke it for me.
All in all a lot of boasting and little on delivery.
bear
February 24, 2009 at 10:17am
As another said, great until level 20. Hah! I was even one of those crazies that went around and collected every bonus that could be obtained. Then made the bonuses completely worthless by giving everyone every bonus PLUS snow mammoth. Bah!
Killed my sub a few months back, hated paying for something I didn't enjoy anymore.
Pyrophorics
February 24, 2009 at 10:01am
Unfinished games will experience this problem.
Heck, it's been months and they still haven't even included DX10 which they claimed was in the game from launch (according to the box).
They lied and now it's catching up to them.
averageGrod
February 24, 2009 at 9:46am
I know the devs don't feel this way but they basically shipped an unfinished game. The first 20 levels were great! After that I felt I was penalized for playing. You can't give players a great experience and then strip it from them for the remaining 99% of the game. NOTHING seemed fresh to the genre after the first area. After hours of play the "new" combat felt exactly like WoWs and every other mmo. The game wasn't stable. The voice overs disappeared. It just got harder and harder to get a group or a guild. And why would you require people to invest so much time in a game just to begin crafting? Especially when the crafting system offered very little reward for the individual and was really only meant to contribute to a guild. Anyone who installs the game now will have a full day of patching just to start and I hope you have 25-30 gigs of hard drive space for this monster. Sorry Funcom. I wanted you to give you my $15/mo.
habuza
February 24, 2009 at 8:00am
FAIL TRAIN.
Haha. Saw that coming a looong time ago. It was a crap game at release, and is still a crap game. Doesn't surprise me one bit, and I've never even wanted to play it or waste my money on it.
mccordrm
February 24, 2009 at 7:09am
Agreed. I wasn't impressed...
You can't release a game with promised features and then remove them. And then, in their place add play-stopping bugs.
Nuxes
February 24, 2009 at 5:41am
Age of Conan was a great game, but a horrible piece of software.
I played for two months after launch, and the patches actually decreased performance and added more bugs. Add to that the fact that PvP wasn't finished, and the game just wasn't worth playing.
