Age of Conan Delayed

Posted by Stropp on August 12, 2007

With all of the announcements of preorders and business models over the last couple of days, it’s inevitable that there will be some bad news.

Funcom today made the following announcement:

Durham, USA – August 10th, 2007 – Funcom announce a new release date for ‘Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures’. The highly anticipated MMO is now set to release on the 25th of March 2008. By setting a new release date for the game, Funcom can continue the focus on honing, polishing and improving the heralded qualities of the game, ensuring a fantastic MMO experience when it launches next spring.

“We naturally regret that we have to push back ‘Age of Conan’. However, after careful consideration, and analysis of recent Beta feedback, we believe that the new release date is in the best interest of the gamers, our company and our owners,” said Trond Arne Aas, CEO of Funcom. “We are fully committed to delivering games with absolute qualities, and in the current MMO marketplace we know that only the best is good enough to truly succeed. With the new release date we have therefore given ourselves more time to meet and deliver on the massive expectations for the game. We are certain that our choice will ultimately pay off, and that all ‘Age of Conan’ players will get a special online experience.”

”We are honored by the immense reception our game is constantly getting, with an astounding amount of positive press coverage, awards and magazine covers, but we still see that we need to polish some aspects of the game even further, especially when it comes to the entry barriers,” said Gaute Godager, founder of Funcom and Producer / Director on ‘Age of Conan’. “With the added development time we can now deliver something even more unique and powerful, something which is worthy of the incredible Conan legacy.”

‘Age of Conan’ is consistently mentioned as one of the most anticipated PC games in development. It has received numerous magazine covers and awards, including ‘Best MMO of E3′ awards from IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy and Yahoo. ‘Age of Conan’ is a key title in Microsoft’s Games for Windows line-up, as well as being a showcase DirectX 10 title for nVidia. The game is currently in general Beta, and applications for testing are available at http://www.ageofconan.com.

Age of Conan is the second MMO that Funcom have released. While I wasn’t there for the initial release of Anarchy Online, I heard about a lot of the fallout after I did start playing. AO had a really terrible release day. There were all sorts of problems with the servers and the game. Funcom however, managed to get on top of it pretty quickly and a month or two later delivered a pretty solid and fun game that is still going strong.

However, I’m not sure the end of March will be the best time for them to release Age of Conan. With the October 30 release date it looked like they didn’t have too much competition. Sure there’s Fury and possibly Tabula Rasa to compete with. But, next March it’s looking like they will be up against Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King which are both ‘expected’ in the first quarter next year.

Both of these games are king-hitters in the MMO genre and the releases are going to capture a huge amount of player attention. If any of the other games that are due later this year are pushed back, the competition will be even more intense.

Still, I think players would prefer the game to be in a good state on it’s release, even if they have to wait longer for it. It’s disappointing to hear that a game (or anything) that you’ve been waiting a long time for is going to be delayed. But it’s a lot more disappointing to pull the wraps off and find a game that’s not all that shiny underneath.

What do you think; will this delay, and the possibility of an Age of Conan release around the same time as Warhammer and the World of Warcraft expansion affect your decision to buy AoC?

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