Just when I thought I had escaped writing about Age of Conan, something as superb as THIS knocks on my electronic front door. The infamous Gaute Godager, Game Director for Age of Conan and of Steak and Wine fame, has ‘resigned’ from Funcom. For those that don’t know what ‘resigned’ means, it means that they told him to resign or they’d fire him.

I can’t help but feel a little responsible for all this. Sure, my scathing review of sorts of Conan probably didn’t help his cause – but I think I’ve been too hard on the guy. I’ve called him out multiple times, not only for his Steak and Wine quote (man I love that) – but also possibly one of the weirdest ‘welcome to the game’ messages ever created. He managed to include slave whipping, confuse it’s players on whether they are riding a ship or driving it, use the phrase “nature launches” and even use the word “bumpiness”. I’m almost tearing up re-reading that announcement. It seemed so long ago we were so naive of the ways of Funcom and had such high hopes for the game.

While I wish Gaute the best of luck in his new career – and speculation on where that will be will only cause fear in the collective MMO community – I think it’s safe to say that MMO’s probably aren’t your forte. That might be a bit harsh, but for those keeping count, that’s 0/2 for Mr. Godager – Anarchy Online and Age of Conan. At least Richard Garriott has Ultima Online to reminisce about as he shoots off to the Moon or whatever.

Adieu, Mr. Go Danger, your savvy wit and cheeky quips will forever be remembered.

Hi, I’m Daedren. You might remember me from other interviews like “Mark Jacobs: He Didn’t Call Me Back” and “Richard Garriott: Corp Por or In Vas Mani?” I write this not with a gun to my head, or a sharp weapon to my balls, but because I’m an advocate of objective journalism in the MMO industry. That means when I strike up a dialogue with someone as unlikely as even Erling Ellingsen, of Age of Conan interview fame, I must adhere to my own code. I think I’m saying that because I’ve been watching Dexter too much.

A short synopsis of the background leading to this interview: I recently wrote an article titled “Age of Conan: A Post Mortem Analysis” that was, by MMO industry standards, famous enough to have Massively’s chief editor send me a couple hookers and a bucket of KFC for my troubles. Some of my readers summed it up as “The harshest review ever done on a game – but mostly true” or “inane babble by a crazed man, obviously driven insane by his socialist European overlords” – in any case, it got the attention of Funcom, probably because I emailed it to all of them.

I eventually came to discussing the article with one Erling Ellignsen. After he realized I was not all fire and brimstone, he lightened up to the fact that reaching out to MMO player base might be a good idea. No one is perfect, of course, and it’s only fair to give someone the chance to explain. With that said, I’ve given Erling 5 questions to answer, and here are his responses:

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Daedren: In an interview with Jon Wood of MMORPG.com, you state that “No big features didn’t make it in to launch”. However, Age of Conan was marketed as a PVP-Oriented MMO. As the game was launched without a PVP system, how is this possible? We understand the need for testing and ironing bugs out, but it really does seem like the PVP system should have been there at launch and wasn’t. What gives?

Erling Ellingsen: I disagree with you that the game launched without a PvP system. You could PvP players from day one, both in mini-games, in the open world and in sieges. One of the things we received the most positive feedback on was actually PvP, and Age of Conan is unique in regards to the fact that the majority of our players actually play on PvP servers. We even launched with a PvP cultural server ruleset. However, we know that we need to develop PvP further and that’s what we’re doing when we’re now rolling out PvP experience, levels, armor and the consequence system. Saying that Age of Conan launched without a PvP system would, however, be incorrect in my opinion.

Daedren: In the same interview, you mentioned that “We know better than anyone what issues we are facing with the game”. That said, how can you then justify the recent gem changes, the horrible gem balance from before, the past and current in-game itemization, and lastly, failure to fix game breaking problems like gems and epic item farming (effectively ruining the economy) in a reasonable amount of time? What sort of assurance do players have that mistakes like this won’t be done again in the future?

EE: I certainly understand your concern, but rest assured that we are doing the best we can at the moment. We would like to fix everything right away, but that’s simply not the way it works. These changes take time to develop and implement, and we need to work from a list of priorities. We have done a tremendous amount of improvements since launch, just look at the various patch notes. That being said we know there are still many issues that needs to be corrected, and we are working relentlessly on that. The gem system is being worked on as we speak, and the recent change we did was a temporary one to offer an intermediate improvement until we get it right. We will address all the issues we can, we just need to work from a list of priorities, and that means some issues will be ironed out before others. I know it’s hard to be patient about these things.

Daedren: There has been a lot of criticism about Funcom already announcing a pay-for expansion for Age of Conan. A hefty portion of people have been allocated for this project. How can you justify spending time on paid content when basic features (like PVP) are missing from the game, and how can you try and compete with other games like Lord of the Rings Online who provide these content updates at no cost?

EE: I have absolutely no idea where you have “a hefty portion of people” from. Right now the expansion team is very, very small. Our main focus now is, of course, the live game. It would make no sense whatsoever for us to not prioritize the live game — we need players to be happy with the game or else there isn’t much point even making an expansion, so improving on the game that’s there is priority number one. We wanted to drop some news on the expansion now because we wanted to show our playerbase that we are making long-term commitments to the game. Again, addressing the concerns the players have about the live game is alpha omega to us. The expansion is far, far away from release and we merely wanted to announce that we are indeed committing ourselves to delivering that sometime in the future. Until then, the live game is top priority.

Daedren: With the release of Warhammer Online and the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, how do you plan to retain players? What is the focus in the next 6 months of Age of Conan to either keep players playing or get them back from other games?

EE: That’s a good question, and I’m sure it will be a challenge! Right now what we want to do is work with our players on addressing the concerns they have and making the necessary changes and improvements that both we feel is needed and that the players feel is needed. We’re definitely getting there, and I think you will see us picking up speed in the time ahead as more and more good stuff is coming out. The first part of the PvP update is leaving the test servers now, and I can’t wait to hear the player’s feedback on it. Then we need to get the consequence system out, and I think we have definitely made a heavy improvement to PvP. We’re also rolling out a whole new outdoor area for level 55+ players, a whole new dungeon for level 60+ players, Tarantia Commons for mid-level players, as we have at least two level 80 dungeons in production. Then there is epic raid gear coming for all the classes, and we will continue to revamp content similar to what we did with the Black Castle. We are also looking into loot distribution, making the items more meaningful and making raiding more rewarding. We are committed to improving on Age of Conan and a large number of the changes you’re seeing is a direct reaction on player feedback.We will also work towards improving communication with our playerbase, and we want to keep everyone more in the loop on what we are doing with the game.

Daedren: How are the current subscription and server numbers? We’ve hear rumors of server merges and severe population declines on some servers. Any plans for these?

EE: I’m not at the liberty to discuss subscription numbers due to the fact that we are a publicly traded company. The latest number we announced was the 415.000 customers per August 14th. We will certainly do what is necessary to entertain a healthy community of players on the servers, and if we decide on doing anything such as server merges we will make sure to notify the playerbase when we can. Right now I can not give you any definite plans on this, though. We do, of course, register the feedback we’re getting on the forums and we’re taking it into consideration.

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*And there we have it, folks. I’m a bit disappointed with the answers, of course, but that’s not surprising. If you call “able to attack another player” a “PVP System” then I guess that’s your call. Perhaps I should have said “No meaningful PVP System” or perhaps “A PVP System different than Bruce Lee on the Commodore 64.” Not releasing subscriber numbers might not be Erling’s decision, but I think it’s safe to say with Warhammer launching this week and WotLK out in November, Age of Conan is going to have a bit of a difficult time not only retaining players but getting new ones as well. From how Erling talks, Age of Conan is being patched constantly and fixing problems, not introducing new ones. How accurate is that?I’ll be honest: I haven’t played Conan since June. That said, I’m not the most informed on the current game status: though word on the street is that the PVP patch still hasn’t launched and there are still some glaring performance problems. I’ve heard from a couple MMO hobos that still play AoC that a real patch hasn’t been introduced since July or early August, and that the PVP patch (the one promised in June) is hyped up every week, only to be let down come patch day.That said, I ask my readers to come up with some questions to bring to Funcom. Of course, I’d like to know peoples response to these answers. I’ll be compiling what I consider the “best” questions from readers around and giving them back to Erling in a week or two – that is, if he doesn’t put a restraining order out for my vivid pictorial references above.

Consider this an open dialog with “the Funcom”. I’d like to hear from both ex-customers like myself and also some current subscribers that still enjoy the game.

Oh, on a last note, here is the three month trend for Funcom Stock. If you’re too lazy to click, it’s gone from $55 per share to $8 per share in just over 90 days. I’m no market analyst, so I ask for help on this as well. Is that healthy?

The great Sun Tzu, father of modern journalism, once said in his treasured writings: start with a Mime and you can’t go wrong. Of course I just made that up, and I assure you that the WoW-killing Mime is not yet with us. We’ll leave mimes and memes to rest for a moment, and venture over into the underworld of Hype.

Hype in the MMO industry isn’t all unlike hype in other industries like Music and Cinema. People anxiously await the latest release from their favorite artist, film-maker or actor with some level of anticipation, and this “anticipation” can be roughly translated into “Hype”. Measuring hype over a large fan base isn’t an exact science, of course, so what it comes down to really is a persons impression of the level of hype via various mediums.

I speak for many people when I say that the hype for Age of Conan was absolutely insane. Of course, this could have been one of the reasons for its ultimate demise, a point I actually didn’t cover in my “Post Mortem Analysis” – to put it lightly, the game “didn’t live up to the hype“. People were writing and posting and going nuts over the prospect of finally getting to enter into the Hyborean frontier, possibly under the false impression that the entire game of Age of Conan was as polished and “fun” as the open beta area, and possibly because they hadn’t experienced major MMO released since the failure of Vanguard a year before.

People can debate the reason that Age of Conan was hyped so much all day: whether it was the possibility for a revolutionary “Next Gen” MMO to finally be released, a mainstream MMO that was built around the promise of PVP combat, or people longing for a game that catered more towards a mature, adult audience. Funcom even took the phrase “There is no such thing as bad publicity” to a whole new level by trying to piss off and alienate the majority of their loyal playerbase by trying to make a buck or two out of the Open Beta. Even trying to scam 5 bucks out of people to play a beta wasn’t enough to scare most people away.

New domains were registered, new blogs were created, and people spent countless hours pouring over beta videos, deciding what classes to play, and trying to get a “feel” for the game. People started throwing terms around like “Wow Killer” and “Finally, a PVP based MMO!”. Theory-crafting was rampant, alliances and guilds formed, and at release, roughly 800,000 people rushed into the world, satisfying this primal urge to experience something they’ve truly anticipated.

Needless to say, Age of Conan let down the majority of players, on a larger scale than Tabula Rasa or even Vanguard: Saga of Brad McQuaid. Age of Conan was marketed towards a somewhat niche set of MMO demographics: adult content and a PVP oriented game. Without argument, the game has completely failed on the latter point, though it somewhat succeeded on the first – it kept its “M” rating, you get to see breasts, and the level of violence is unparalleled in any MMO on the market.

This brings us to Mythics upcoming beast Warhammer Online. It is my personal opinion that the hype level of Warhammer is less than Age of Conan, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People were so aching for some new MMO blood on the market, especially PVPers, that Conan had a distinct advantage of being “first”. In general, it seems people are much more cautious when considering Warhammer. Not that the internets has any shortage of fan sites or ongoing blogs about WAR – there are far more of these than there were for Conan. Warhammer has a clear advantage of using a very established Intellectual Property, meaning the amount of information and fan interest is already, by default, higher than Conan.

This might change once Warhammer Open Beta hits this weekend. Things really took off for Conan once the open beta disaster was underway – while the previews for the game itself were positive, the methods that Funcom used to both distribute and charge for access to the Open Beta caused a huge uproar in the collective MMO sphere, thus generating even more attention and/or interest to the game. Warhammer has taken a far more professional and less controversial route by not charging for Open Beta access, distributing the beta client on their dime (or via partner and fan sites) and generally being very open and forthcoming discussing problems and issues with their upcoming game. It’s not easy to tell players that 1/8 of their playable classes won’t make release, and only 1/3 of the proposed major cities will be there.

Conan might have had the upper hand with this “first MMO excitement” – but Mythic was clearly happy letting Funcom “pave the way” and learn from their mistakes. In fact, Mark Jacobs and crew have done almost the polar opposite of Funcom in many regards: calculated delays, cancellation instead of inclusion of sub-par game content, and overall a very professional and stable open beta platform.

Without a doubt, the hype level for Warhammer Online is about to peak next week once the Open Beta is up and running. And, while any game is susceptible to being over-hyped or “not living up to the hype” – I think that for the most part, due to the failure of Age of Conan, people will expect less overall from the Mythic team and from Warhammer Online. Using this logic, the failure of Age of Conan will be directly tied to the success of Warhammer Online in the first few months due to players overall caution and lower expectations going into a game.

I don’t want to try and downplay Warhammer Online potentially being a good, epic, long lasting game: for a PVP wacko like myself who got tired of killing sad AI MOBS 10 years ago in Everquest, WAR could offer a PVP MMO experience that could rival the fun factor of DAoC many years ago. Sure, it might just be WoW 2.0: PVP Reloaded, but it still beats Blizzards joke of an “e-sport” (emphasis on quotes) even if Warhammer PVP/RVR ends up being a frontier zerg fest. As long as there is an Emain Macha in Warhammer, people will want to PVP, and PVP in any open environment is highly preferable to the controlled and instanced PVP battlegrounds of both WoW and AoC.

So, what do my readers think? Is the Warhammer hype less or more than Conan? Has Mythic done well in their attempts to hype the game? Are people really going crazy and I’m just missing it? Do tell.

Hi, I’m Daedren. You might remember me from other articles such as “The effectiveness of raiding in only a tubesock” and “Erling Ellingson: Age of Conan Dev by day, Transvestite Cyborg by night?”. It’s me, alright, and I’m here, playing the role of the unbearer of bad news. I’m not bearing it, because it’s not even news. This little tidbit of info-mation is that Age of Conan sucks. It’s not the Gigli of the MMO industry, thank God, but that’s only because Ben Affleck turned down his role for voiceovers for King Conan. No, I’m likening Age of Conan to be more of the Alexander of the MMO Industry: Huge expectations, huge budget; huge letdown, gracious cleavage.

This article isn’t for people thinking about maybe playing Age of Conan. It’s not for those still playing Age of Conan – which, admittedly, there still are. It’s not even for the large majority of people who played the game, let it take you home, and then never called you back. This is solely targeted at a select group of people: the people at Funcom who helped make this piece of shit, and other people at other game companies who are also making a MMO. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself “Why the hell would Funcom devs read this wordy, highly opinionated article that’s basically beating a dead horse, albeit more thoroughly and hopefully more eloquently than the past beaters?” The answer to that is I’m going to personally e-mail it to every one of them.

Funcom, now lovingly deemed “Failcom” by a good portion of the planet now, dropped an estimated $60M US pesos to produce what ended up being, for the most part, a huge disapointment to nearly everyone that played it. But hey, don’t take it from me, let’s take it from the burly, helmet clad raiders of Funcom themselves:

Erling Ellingson confirms that “subscriber base” is now 415,000 out of the original 800,000

My carefree use of the quotes here are for a reason. The term “subscriber base” seems to need an explanation.

Subscriber base is a fairly loose term which roughly means “People that might still be playing”. You see, they fail to mention that in this 415,000 they’re including anyone that still had their subscription active at the time of the report (15 August 2008).  That means if you were unfortunate enough to subscribe for 3 or 6 months at the time you bought the game, you’re included in this number. No one actually knows how many active players they have as they’ve not released any server metrics, with damn good reason.

That means that half of the people that bought Age of Conan jumped ship within the first month of the release. And, if player estimates are correct, the actual player base is more realistically somewhere around 150K or 200K players. 3 months after release. Hell, Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest 1 are pulling those numbers today. Perhaps if Erling was actually honest and forward about the game and its flaws, instead of talking it up like it’s the bees knees, his statements would gain a bit more credibility.

Next, we need to present the financial woes of Funcom and more importantly the CEO of the company:

Funcom Stock

Funcom Stock Sinking

Funcom CEO sells a pissload of his stocks, punches a baby

One really cool thing about Funcom is that all the execs have really cool viking sounding names like Olav and Gaute (pronounced like Gout). While this might be useful picking up American girls at a bar or scaring the shit out of someone by screaming their name at them, it seemingly means piss all when it comes to making a successful MMO.

Funcom stock dropped to all-time lows recently and the CEO is starting to liquidate. Next thing we know the lead Community Managers will be busted for kiddie porn and their corporate headquarters will mysteriously “catch on fire” – darn, and things were going so swell.

The Analysis

So, what the hell went wrong? Age of Conan does have a few redeeming qualities, that usually come with a price. Let’s list these redeeming qualities, along with it’s price:

Redeeming Quality     Price

Nice graphics         Shitty client

You see boobies       Shitty client

Heads do fly off      Shitty client

Good starting area    Delusion that the rest of the game will be like that

That takes us to cause of death #1: Poor client performance. Stability was actually better at release than it is now. Very few aren’t victim of the memory leak bug – causing blue screens and CTD’s quite frequently. Nothing like a few CTD’s in a night to keep that immersion level going. The client itself is clearly lacking polish, something World of Warcraft did so splendidly. All the high res graphics and tits in the world don’t mean anything if you can’t keep your customer in the game and seeing these things.

Moving on: promised features. You’ve heard it all before: stuff was on the box that either wasn’t there on release, or, functioning like Jenna Jamesons naughty parts: present but highly suspect.

Feature on the Box                    Status

DirectX 10 Support                    Rumored to exist somewhere

Drunken Brawling                      Needs more polish, like Gaute's Ferrari

Massive 150/150 PVP battles           Shitty client feature kicks in well before 300

Siege Battles, Keep Takes             Buggy and boring. If only there was an...

An actual PVP System                  Missing, presumed dead

I’ll stop right there. In all honestly, no one gives a shit what is on the box of a game: who reads that anyway? However, a certain professional level is at least expected from a game company when they promote their product. Where do we draw the line? If the next MMO that hits the market says the box will give you a blowjob once you hit level 30 on your in game character, it had better well live up to its name, no matter how uncomfortable and disturbing that sounds.

Cause of death #2: Missing basic game features

Blah, blah, blah. This is all repeat shit from everywhere else. I’m effectively beating the proverbial horse here. It’s time to move on to a more lucid analysis:

THE GAME IS NOT FUN

I suppose this makes all of theser “Causes of Death” a bit redundant. Objectively speaking, though, why is the game not fun? It’s hard to put a finger on the exact reason, much like it’s hard to explain why eating a plate of dog poo is not fun, other than it’s a plate of shit. Let’s start with this small, chaotic list:

• Instanced zones
• Lack of content past level 20
• Uninnovative questing system (kill 50 what?)
• Poor class balance in PVP
• No PVP System whatsoever
• A simple Rock / Paper / Scissors PVP design
• Horrifically boring dungeon encounters
• Lack of meaningful or interesting end game content
• Itemization that seems like it was designed by a learning impaired doorknob
• Extremely hard to customize your character or look different than anyone else
• Travel system consists of trying to find new ways to kill yourself as quickly as possible
• An economy that is completely broken
• Crafting that is nothing more than a pointless time-sink
• Identical guild cities everywhere that are, you guess it, nothing more than a pointless time-sink
• Lack of creative vision when designing combat system
• Complete lack of ingenuity regarding the spellcaster magic system
• Failure to fix bugs in a timely fashion
• Fixing bugs usually introduces more bugs into the game, which are then ignored for long periods of time
• Focusing on stupid shit like spell names and sound effects when basic features of the game are not yet implemented
• Legendary in-game customer support inspired by Verant and SOE
• Constantly surprising players by showing how little they know about their own game
• Inclusion of game breaking bugs (like gem duping or epic item farming) and then fixing them, oh, a couple weeks later

I know I missed a few. What it boils down to is that Age of Conan just doesn’t provide a unique or meaningful game experience. Characters can level to max level somewhat quickly, yay!, only to be presented with the option of doing absolutely nothing interesting other than leveling yet another character to max level. A certain kudos is in place to Funcom for even failing at the basic treadmill system; for most people, that carrot on the end of the stick (being making another character to keep waiting for the real carrot) didn’t go over to well.

That leads us into cause of death #3: Poor core game design makes the game not fun, nor addicting

Making a MMO that doesn’t encourage players to play more, come back, or feel drawn to the game is like selling crack that doesn’t get people high. I suppose some crackheads might say “but hey, I’m still smoking crack!” – but really, it’s just a sugar cube that you paid 20$ for. In that sense, Age of Conan is a MMORPG without the first “M” or the “RPG”. It’s not Massively, because you’re forced to be separated from the rest of your people either by the horribad instancing or poor zone design. It’s not RPG because you don’t feel like you are, indeed, roleplaying, due to the games limitations. At the end of the day, all we’re really looking at is a “Multiplayer Online *something*” – or, in other words, a glorified chat room with mediocre Showtime-esque nudity that is prone to memory leaks.

I’ve by far passed the normal sane limit word count and thrown any credibility away as not saying whatever the hell is on my mind, so I need to hit one last point. There is one area, I must say, that Funcom has truly outdone itself:

Funcom Devs and Public Relations guys, we salute you!

For being complete tools.

Not all of them, of course. In fact, I bet its safe to say the majority of the Age of Conan team was just doing what they were told. Kind of like the Nazis were doing what they were told when they started cooking people. Intentional Godwin aside, most people of the dev team didn’t have a big picture look at the game, so they can’t be much to blame. However, Funcom has blessed us with a few memorable souls, and by memorable I mean complete assclowns and/or utter douchebags. First, we focus on the man himself. The one, the only, the…

Gaute Godager

This guy had some potential. Though his first name sounds like unsightly gout, his last name had the chance of being epic. It could have been “Go, Danger!” or, more sinisterly, “Go, dagger!”. Now we’re just left with not giving a shit what his name is because he’s not only the “Game Director”, meaning he’s the one ultimately responsible for the state of this game, but also because his PR skills hover somewhere between “ghastly” and “humorously deranged”.

Perhaps his most famous quote is this:

“I enjoy playing WOW, I enjoy playing Lord of the Rings Online. But you know… I’m going to be a bit cheeky now, but if you’ve been to McDonalds for four or five years, and had your burger and your coke, sometimes it’s great to just have a great steak and a glass of good wine,” he said.

You’re exactly right, Gout. You were a bit cheeky. However, your analogy is a bit flawed. I’ll fix it for you:

“I enjoy playing WOW, I enjoy playing Lord of the Rings Online. But you know… I’m going to be a bit cheeky now, but if you’ve been to McDonalds for four or five years, and had your burger and your coke, sometimes it’s great to go into a restaurant, give them 50 bucks, stick around for 3 hours hoping you get food, before finally passing out with a bottle of MadDog 20/20 in your hand and still fucking hungry,” he said.

You, sir, are no steak and wine. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. You could be a rancid Salisbury Steak TV dinner, along with a glass of wine that came out of a box, but even that’s pushing it.

Last up, but certainly not least, is the great Erling Ellingson. This guy was pretty much unheard of before a few weeks ago, when he decided to show up at a couple conferences and do some interviews. Instead of handling these interviews like a normal, sane person, he decided to go another route. The route of lies, delusion and outright idiocy.

Don’t believe me? Watch this video with Jon Wood of mmorpg.com – at your own risk. This guy squirms so much when talking you can tell he’s bullshitting even with the sound muted. Here are some highlights:

“The game turned around 100% just before launch. Miracle patch…”

“The 1-20 part of the game was intended to be very detailed… When WoW launched, high end content was sparse. We have lots of stuff for players end game…”

“The PVP fugitive system, it’s all new stuff that we’re adding in. It’s not stuff that was supposed to be in before launch…”

“We’re incredibly happy with the launch of Age of Conan, it was an incredibly successful launch… “(proceeds to self fellatiate)

“It’s really few things [that didn't make it into launch]. It’s not really big features. “

The asinine comment about PVP not being a major feature earns a collective cockpunch to Erling on behalf of every player that played AoC hoping for a PVP oriented game. It was its main selling point, and it’s the reason that most people wanted to play the game. Hell, even Erling himself states “This might surprise you, but most people that play AoC play on PVP servers” – no, that doesn’t surprise us. What does surprise us that this “PVP Oriented MMO” doesn’t even have a PVP system. Oh, and when you roll out this magical “PVP Fugitive Patch”, you’ll be taking away yet one more slightly redeeming quality that AoC once had: PVP Freedom.

Now, it’s time for desert. The icing of the cake is brought to you by the collective tools at Funcom who thought that announcing an expansion for Age of Conan was a good idea. Apparently they’re busy listening to Erling rant on about how the game is pure awesome-sauce rather than actually playing their game. Scarily enough, there is now a team of developers working on an expansion to Age of Conan, rather than fixing the fundamental problems the game has. Make it X rated and you might get a substantial player base back.

Conclusion

In summary, the main causes of the death Age of Conan were this:

1. Poor client design and performance

2. Lack of basic features included in the game

3. Unaddictive gameplay, lack of thought put into game design: the game simply isn’t fun.

Worst of all, we have a company and the makers of this game telling us that it is good. These same people will be put on the next MMO. Hell, Gaute might even get the nod to direct Funcom’s next MMO – assuming the company still exists. “Gee, Gaute, you did so well on Age of Conan, here is another 50 Million, go make us another blockbuster like it!” Get your head out of your asses, Funcom: the people that made the decisions on where this game was going need to never be allowed on another MMO project again. But hey, it’s your money, it’s your funeral.

Many people might be thinking “Man, why so fucking hostile?” – and I sympathize with that. I’m not pissed at these guys I’m making fun of, I’m more disappointed. The MMO industry is just peppered with mediocrity now and it’s almost becoming industry standard. Objective journalism is nigh-unheard of at mainstream MMO websites because they don’t want to piss anyone off. Lastly, while what I’ve written here is my opinion, it’s really the collective thoughts from nearly every veteran MMO player that had the misfortune of playing Age of Conan.

Future MMO developers: use this as a lesson learned; things not to do. Above all, do not patronize your players like they don’t know what the hell is going on. Funcom: the game is beyond saving, but try to save some face by actually admitting the games problems, and not tap dancing around the issues like a drunk circus bear. Honesty, though missing from your corporate vocabulary, goes a long way in player retention.

That’s all. Daedren out.

We’re raising the bar around here. We’ve noticed that a lot of alleged MMO news sources and Warhammer info sites have been spawning lots of generic, non-informative and highly “graphical” previews and sneak peaks at some of the features of Warhammer Online. That’s all good for some, but what about our readers, many who are still using AOL or Compuserve dial-up on a 56k line? Trust me, they are out there. Hell, I even got an email from a reader who still uses Prodigy.

We’ve had enough of these flashy “Character Generation Previews” – yeah, thanks for the 10 minute video watching you stumble around trying to make your Dark Elf’s tits look bigger. Also, quite frankly, all of these videos of PVE battles are pretty damn boring. Rather than add to this problem, we’ve decided to bring you a real, original and informative look at RVR in Warhammer Online.

So, I logged on my Bright Wizard last night and headed for the frontiers for some good ol’ PVP action. I missed an important piece of information as I logged in; either due to consumption of alcohol or my one handed navigation thanks to my new duel monitor setup.

The piece of information I missed was this:

Order population: 372  Destruction population: 561

Knowledge of this might have made me enter the RvR lands a bit more carefully. I entered the frontier land, past the “small group” of Order I saw (why are they standing near our RvR entrance, I thought to myself) and then promptly got knocked 30 feet the wrong way by some level 40 guy and then chewed in half by 7 Squigs.

Using the Warhammer in game editor, lovingly called “WARPaint”, I drew this up as a summary of my night of RvR:

All kidding aside, I think that Warhammer Online does have a bit of a population balance problem. I’ve done a strict scientific analysis on this, involving me logging into each EU server at least once, and I’ve decided that Destruction has roughly 20-30% more players at any given time. Keep in mind that this strict scientific study was, in fact, done in one night. Word from the US has roughly the same estimate.

So, what’s the reason behind this? Are Destruction classes just more interesting? Do the girls look better? Is there free beer? Is the inner emo of many players finally being reached, and you find that playing a Destruction character is a way to tell the world you are a beautiful and unique snowflake in a tasty goth flavor?

What do I think? I think that it’s a combination of a couple things: Destruction classes are more interesting, Orcs and Goblins are cool, and the chicks definately do look better on the evvvulll side. Truth is, they’re just showing more skin. Order Elves, in my opinion, are pretty “meh” in regards to aesthetics and class fun factor. Dwarves and Humans have the most interesting class choices of Order, yet both only have 3 to choose from, sadly.

So, how will Mythic handle this? Will Destruction be the new Albion/Alliance zergfest of Warhammer Online? Lastly, how will this effect your decision on what faction to play? I know after a couple nights on both sides of the fence, there is no way in hell I’m going to play Destruction on release.

Hi, I’m Daniel. You might remember me from such other MMO articles like “It was great except for the Elves with 5 o’clock shadows” and “Tits and Fatalities aside, Age of Conan sucks flaccid donkey genitals”. I’m new here; and bringing you a highly opinionated, wordy rant on the latest of MMO trends: the term “WoW Killer”.

The meme itself isn’t new: the first earliest recorded instance of this meme was by the scribe Pontus Sextus Alphonsus in 300 A.D, writing about the threat of an invasion from far eastern Empires into the vulnerable Roman empire. He referred to these savages as possibly the first “Rome-killer” -  yeah, ok, I just made all of that up. The term “WoW Killer” has been kicking it around since WoW first became a success back in 2004. Any major MMO release since then has been plagued with this term: “Will this game be the WoW Killer? Will this game gain self-awareness, attack the Blizzard server farm with a targetted nuclear strike, then start searching for Sarah Connor? Does this game have the potential to learn kung-fu?”

No, it doesn’t. The term itself implies that WoW in fact can be killed, which it can’t. Sure, it can lose some subscribers: even for arguments purpose, it’s possible (though not likely) that games like Warhammer Online have more total active subscribers than WoW. Does that mean WoW has, in fact, been killed? No. It would still be the 2nd largest MMO subscriber game, and it would still be the all time biggest MMO in terms of subscribers. Even in this best case scenario, WoW would still have a piss-ton of subscribers by industry standards.

Many people say that the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself. I liken this to people watching too many Terminator movies as kids or possible temporal lobe damage from hearing the pre-pubescent screams of Eddie Furlong too many times. WoW can’t kill itself, but it’s supporting staff of humans can perhaps muck things up a bit. A lot of WoW subscribers were alienated or quit after the Burning Crusade expansion: WoW subscriptions were down to around 2 or 3 million actual subscribers and about 17 million chinese gold-farmer accounts. Wrath of the Lich King might do the same thing; and it’s good to theorize that if Warhammer Online provides as good of a PVP experience as everyone hopes it does, it will take a good deal of the “real PVPers” away from WoW (if any still play) – and WoW can be happy in deluding people that the little e-sport Arena games are “real PVP”. At the end of the day, though, there is still a core group of people that love WoW for what it is: whether it’s because it was their first MMO, the majority of their friends play, or even it’s cozy familiarity: people will always stay and play World of Warcraft, and in great numbers.

TL;DR version: WoW has too many loyal fans and addicts to ever be “killed” as a MMO. End of story.

Now that we’ve determined that WoW can’t be killed, it’s time to move on. Even though it can’t be terminated, it can still lose a lot of customers, or better yet, it *is* possible that another MMO has just as big of a following and playerbase as WoW does without stealing their customers. In fact, this latter scenario is the best scenario because it means that players have been gained from outside the genre and the industry has indeed grown. This can’t really happen with titles like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan because it’s still stuck in the same genre (Fantasy) and is really just a rehash of the same thing – and maybe niched to a certain demographic, like PVP/RVR with WAR or Nudity and … well, whatever for AoC.

So what can rival WoW in fanbase and subscribers? A non-fantasy, perhaps “non RPG” based MMO that is rock solid, using a known IP. Whether this is a MMOFPS or MMORTS (or even both) – this is really the only chance that the MMO industry has at ever producing something that rivals the beast of WoW in revenue and following. Using this logic, companies like Mythic, Funcom and 38 Studios actually hurt the MMO industry because they won’t be generating many new players (from outside the genre) and have instead been focusing on stealing other players away from other similar games. Meanwhile, hordes of fantatical FPS and RTS players are uncatered for in our over-saturated Fantasy MMORPG market.

I digress; in conclusion, let’s stop using this tired term “WoW Killer”. The term is just plain inaccurate; we need to be more creative and constructive in representing the MMO industry. So, let’s focus on objective reviews and previews of upcoming releases and advancing and expanding the industry, rather than throwing this lame meme into the mix with every new title that’s about to be released.