On August 21, 2008, Funcom laid off half of its Customer Service department located in Durham, North Carolina. On November 22, 2008, third parties reported that Funcom fired additional 70% of the staff in their US workforce, possibly endangering future releases.[3]

On September 17, 2008, Gaute Godager left Funcom, stating he was dissatisfied with certain elements of Age of Conan, which he directed.[4] Craig Morrison took over the direction of AoC.

On February 23, 2009, Funcom reported financial losses of approximately $23 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. The unsuccessful launch of Age of Conan was cited as the reason for such steep decline. The chief analyst of DnB NOR, Fredrik Thoresen, estimated that 100,000 subscribers played the game at the time of the report, far below the publisher’s expectations, though these numbers were not confirmed by Funcom itself.[5]

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Ouch. One MMORPG makes shitload of money and the gold rush begins. Now most of them are F2P. I wonder how that helps anyone.

It’s interesting to read this on a random web search having just this month stopped playing after 3 years of “hardcore” playing. Hate to burst the fanboy’s bubble but much of the intent behind what the original poster said is still true. For sure theres been a huge amount of changes (stats now mean something, expansion, new areas etc.) but so much of the intent behind his post is still very much true.

Funcom are a DIRE producer. There is nothing redeeming about their approach or attitude at all. After 8 years (I was Anarchy Online hardcore for 5 years before that) of their complete and utter contempt of their paying public I’ve now finally thrown in the towel and given up hoping. The sad thing here is that the games, at their core are exceptional. Truly head and shoulders above anyone else. Their ability to realise this potential is, however, nil. So many wasted chances and so much wasted potential.

I could go on, at length about the problems and issues that the game still has but to be honest theres no point. The game consolidating down to 2 English servers in Europe (no RP servers any more just one PVP and one PVE) and going “Free to Play” pretty much tells you all you need to know. One enterprising player tracked playing figures in game. It wasn’t scientific for sure but on the primary PvE server Crom (the ONLY pure PVE server, the other being PvE RP), on a week night during peak playing hours the number of level 80 characters logged in never went over 400. Thats just sad.

I did have a chuckle though at one of the first posts in this thread, written in December 2008 defending the game.

“The future is looking bright….
-DX10 is just around the corner.
-AoC is going to be the worlds first CUDA enabled game.
-Expansion pack is already being made
This game is no where near dead

Our server (Doomsayer) has had tons of new guilds form within the last 2 weeks.”

DX10 didn’t make it in until 2010 and even then unless you had a beast of a rig had performance issues, lag issues and graphical glitches all over the place. Many chose to go back to DX9 just to get a more stable game.
As far as I’m aware, CUDA physics never made it into the engine at all. Theres plenty of talk about it back in 2008 but theres no mention of it since around that time. It may be in there but I’m pretty certain it never made it out of beta.
The expansion, at least, did get released. Unfortunately after the initial excitement and positive reviews the actual expansion was, well, pretty poor. It effectively introduced grinding to the game in a spectacular fashion. You had to grind for EVERYTHING. There were at least 4 completely separate and unrelated grinds – none of which you could do a single task to get. The worst was a grind for tokens that basically involved faction sided quests only not all factions were equal. With one faction (of 8) you could make about 100 tokens with an easy set of quests all in the same area in about 1.5h. For some other factions, the “optimum” route and quests only gave you about 25 in the same time. But certain classes were locked to certain factions (faction = armour type so Plate could only be bought from 2 factions) so if you were one of the unlucky classes you were expected to take 4* the amount of time or more. (or you could jsut train up a faction you had no use for JUST to get the tokens). Ridiculous.

Though I’m not much of a PVP player it’s the PVPers I feel most sorry for. Stuck with a combination of broken sieges (unplayable for about 2 years due to crashes), exploits useable by a very small number of classes (known in game as combo-skipping) which to this day haven’t been fixed (and have been in game for 18 months or more), terrible game design (Shrines of Bori PVP addon which never worked as intended and was horribly exploited), massive imbalance between new PVPer and old due to gear/battlekeep/pvp level bonuses (some imbalance is fine, but the imbalance is so extreme between PVP0 and PVP10 that new players on PVP0 simply cannot compete even if they’re the best in the world and there is no mechanism or balancing system to let them get to PVP10). The list goes on.

PVE’s don’t have it all that much better (though certainly better than the PVPers)
Tier 2 raiding was blocked for completion for 6 months with a locked door to the final wing of Tier 2. When Tier 3 finally made an appearance after 18 months of waiting the last 2 bosses were broken and were very close to impossible to complete. After another 6 months they were finally fixed so 2 years in and you could now complete the content that was touted at the games launch. When the new “Rise of the Godslayer” expansion was originally advertised and discussed Funcom promised another tier, tier 4 would be part of the expansion. When it arrived T4 didn’t happen. In the past 12 months only 3 guilds have managed to complete what of T4 there is and what they found was that only two of the raid bosses were there along with a solid brick wall to stop further progress. In the last 12 months, T4 has been rendered impossible to complete on no less than 4 occasions. As far as I know, it is currently right on the edge of impossibility.

Every single patch introduces hidden, knock on effects. The 4 times T4′s been made impossible it’s because of, as far as anyone knows, unexpected or invisible changes that never appear on patch notes. There is next to no communication between dev’s and the community and there is nothing to even acknowledge if there is a problem with anything at all. VERY occasionally the game director will mention they’re looking into something if it’s a massive problem. Other than that, you hear nothing.

I could go on and on about the dire stare of the game, the dire state of Funcoms “support”, the lack of input, lack of feedback, poor communication and downright ignorance of the company but I’d be here all day. I’ve taken my 17 level 80′s (2 of them full Tier 3, another 10 full Tier 2) and parked them for good. Funcom will NEVER get another penny from me, I don’t care if the Secret World includes free sex for everyone. Never, ever again.

A lot of what you state is very much what has happened to the game, yet, there is so much in this post that screams “Because I hated the game”…which felt like it should have been added to each line.”

Pretty much, pretty much. Called it for what it is.

First off, besides being apparently biased against the game, the alleged reviewer here has obvious little gaming hours under his belt, Age of Conan or otherwise. If he were even moderately familiar with the general process of MMO’s, then yes it should be obvious you die. Death, respawn and resurrection in MMO’s…happens.

The implication here is that Age of Conan has no life or content after level 20. In fact, at 19+, you’re finally leaving the newbie region of Tortage far behind. Things are just getting warmed up as you’re off to face the big bad world of Hyboria (stressing BIG). If you think Strom, final boss of the newbie zones was bad, just you wait. If you think that axe he dropped was nice, well, it gets better.

Let me talk to you about guild city building…

Best part yet; look at the date of my post. Mid-summer 2010, over two years later, Age of Conan? Yeah, still there.

Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer? First full expansion, released this spring. As a rule, game developers don’t bother with money pits. They don’t produce new content for dead MMO’s. I should know; as a Norrathian citizen since 2002.

Yeah, EverQuest is still there too.

“In the end, all that is left are guilds of gankers, hiding in grinding caves and waiting for someone to unstealth.”

If you’re on PvP servers, yes, largely the state of things. However, most servers are PvE, and a little bit more sophisticated than this.

“What began among the jeweled towers of Aquilonia ends then, here in caves and dirt. And brown. Lots and lots of brown.”

I’m sorry. All I feel I can say is, get a video card that can actually handle the game before you review it. You may find Hyboria looks a lot better if you’re not seeing it through a two-bit color range.

Will the game die? Once it ceases to be profitable, yes. But until then? No. It will retain its small player base so long as they continue to pay, though it isn’t likely that people will return now that the terrible and widespread word of mouth has ruined its reputation. Even WAR fared better, retaining 300,000 of its initial 750,000 subscribers.

The facts are available to you. If you want to deny that this game is extremely lacking in popularity, I would suggest that you refrain from doing any research. The results may disappoint you.

The only redeeming thing about you writing this article is the probability of you being one of the mindless wankers waisting their lives in WoW. What a shame that is, or perhaps on second thought, its blody brilliant, as it keeps many jerks from entering other MMORPGs, including you it seemes. I usually do not respond to shit like this, but for you i make an exception.

Looking at this today, this article contains nothing of the truth about how AoC has developed, but luckily there be still a number of players out there who has a mind of their own. Every game of this type starts off having issues, but they develope over time, something this article tend to miss.

The all brown is just Stygia. The other two areas are a bit more colorful but still feel barren compared to what went on in Tortage. I wish they had junked the idea of a MMORPG and just make a full adventure game with the engine and make the whole game like Tortage with the option to have you friends multiplay with you. It would have could have been great.

In addition adding in things that should have been in the game upon release a year + later isn’t exactly showing gamers that you really mean what you say. Just because DX 10 is going to beta doesn;t mean it will be live before the two year mark is even up.

This game is gonna fold up in a year or two and there’s not really much you can do to save it.

I’m surprised you found the graphics “brown” and boring though. After Tortage there are so many diverse areas with snow, jungle, desert or grasslands – make your pick.