AoC Schizophrenia

Posted by Stropp on May 5, 2008

It’s a little worrying.

I’ve been reading some of the first impressions and reviews of the Age of Conan beta. Tobold has posted his, and Keen has added some more to his impressive repertoire of AoC articles.

AoC is shaping up to be a find game. That much is clear. By all reports the PvE is excellent while the PvP could use some polishing up, but is promising.

The problem is, it appears, that Funcom didn’t really learn anything from the Anarchy Online release debacle years ago. According to Keen, it appears that Funcom is using an old buggy version of the client, even older than the PvP open weekend, as the client for the open beta.

Now if that isn’t a mistake, I don’t know what is.

While it’s true that beta testers should be playing the game in order to test it, after all that’s why they signed up, the reality is a lot of beta testers just want to get in early and play an upcoming game for free. This is even more the case during the open beta when anyone can get in, not just those selected by the developers.

This makes it really important for the developers to put their best foot forward and provide the best experience for the beta testers. First impressions count, and this includes the beta.

There are still people who consider Tabula Rasa a bad game because of their experience early in the beta, even though the game improved immensely towards the end.

Funcom knows what it’s like to lose out to bad first impressions. Anarchy Online had a dismal launch, and this put a lot of people off the game, even after the problems were ironed out. AO has gone on to a long and successful career since then, but who knows how much better it would have done had the launch been smooth.

A game only gets one shot at a good first impression.

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