Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
Funcom, the incredibly talented people behind The Longest Journey, Dreamfall and (the now freeware MMO) Anarchy Online and one of the best European developer teams around, have finally released their biggest and most ambitious project so far: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. And yes, it’s the latest epic fantasy MMORPG offering that will try to take over your hard-drive, life and bank account. It also is the only game obviously -and officially- based on Howard’s popular, pulp, low-fantasy, high-on-gore, 30s, sword and sorcery works.
But, really, why should you care for another contender to WoW’s throne? Well, for starters, you could be a Conan fan, I suppose. I sort of am… Failing that, you might just care for a less cartoony, more violent and way more adult in its outlook RPG experience. Or perhaps can’t withstand Age of Conan’s absolutely fantastic visuals and impressive production values. See the pic above? Good. Now, imagine moving through it in glorious 3D with sun and weather effects turned on. Not impressed yet? Well, the hefty single-player element and truly innovative action-oriented combat are the last things I’ll try to convince you with; if nothing else, they are a welcome deviation from the standard MMO formula and help make Age of Conan a great game. A great game indeed. Despite its obviously unfinished state and not so modest hardware requirements.
Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by konstantinos
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One of the difficulties with MMOGs is that they have so many difficulties to deal with:
+ Finding groups
+ Group dynamics
+ Class balancing
+ PvP dynamics (related to class balance but more than that)
+ Game economy
+ Twinking
+ Farming
+ Solo vs group vs guild game content
+ Crafting balancing with loot items
And there are more, all of which affect MMOGs. And there’s a reason that they often very similar: wildly different solutions aren’t possible or considered. So, most MMOGs tend to be tweaks of the genre.
I think it’s possible that we’re going to see a behavior across games that players are used to seeing in a game world–population drift. When I was playing EQ II, I laid off for a long while. When I returned, the significant majority of the population had moved much further on in levels, which meant they were in mostly in different zones. For me, this meant that getting a group in these less populated zones was near impossible, thus one reason I quit.
I think the post-WoW landscape is going to be similar, though not as extreme. It’ll be a slow diaspora in which there is no ‘next WoW’ but several smaller populated MMOGs. Who knows how long people will play any given MMOG.
I think this means that MMOGs need to be designed for this smaller model, such as content and quests that are possible with lower populations, a development and maintenance model that isn’t dependent on huge subscriber bases. Vanguard lost over half its subscribers within a few weeks.
It’s far different to play a game that’s designed for 1 millions(a fraction of WoW’s population) but that has just 100-200,000 players. It instantly feels dead.
You can look at the wonderful mmocharts site to see how MMOGs are doing. In fact, consider that their top tier is defined as anything above 200,000 subscribers.
Interestingly, I’m not seeing much discussion of this aspect of AoC in the reviews. It had more than 400,000 subscribers at one point, which is pretty good, but I’m reading of population drops, down to 70,000. But consider those rumors.
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:30 amWow! Once again an incredibly enlightening comment oh Guttertalk! I can see the points you made and agree enough to actually wish an offline version Lord of the Rings Online. Oh, and mmocharts is quite an impressive database…
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm