Age of Conan - Past the First Month
Posted by Stropp on June 27, 2008"Two of the most beautiful words in the English Language: De Fault" - Homer Simpson
I reckon that most game developers feel much the same way about the word, default.
It’s probably how they get a lot of first month subscription fees from players, who much like myself, leave it a little late to hit the cancel button.
That’s right. This afternoon I logged into my Age of Conan account screen to cancel my account. I discovered that I was a little late and that my first subscription payment had gone through a couple of days ago. At first I thought it had gone through early, but after some checking the resub occurred about when it was due.
I had finally decided to cancel after some dithering around wondering if I should or not. Age of Conan is a game I really wanted to like, and I think it has a huge amount of potential. But after Tortage, it just really didn’t catch my imagination.
It’s also really incomplete. Funcom should have put at least another six months of development into Age of Conan. Large amounts of the game simply don’t work as advertised, classes need balancing, and huge nerfs are being done to classes to reduce damage output. Monsters on the other hand are being toughened up. Major memory leaks are seemingly being ignored. This all should have been done in beta, or earlier.
So while my Age of Conan account has a reprieve for the next month, I don’t see it lasting longer than that, unless Funcom can pull it all together with a miracle patch or two. There are too few hours in the day, and too many excellent working games out there, to spend time playing broken games. And Age of Conan is broken.
I’d like to think that I’ll give Age of Conan another look in six months, but I thought I’d do the same with Vanguard too. As I mentioned above, there are other games out there that I’d like to play, and there is only so much time to do so. There’s also the fact that in the next six months we are likely to see the releases of Warhammer Online, and Wrath of the Lich King. In the slightly longer term Stargate Worlds, Fallen Earth, and a hundred other MMOs are due to hit the shelves.
In the next month I figure I’ll log in to Age of Conan a few times, but I’m not motivated to spend all my time there. I’ve still got a few goals to reach in other games, so I’ll probably go back to a few of the stalwarts for now. It’d also be nice to get into the Warhammer beta, but I’m not counting on that.
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[...] set of subscription fees had already been processed. It was only shortly after this that I read Stropp’s post stating exactly the [...]
Well I cant blame anyone for cancelling their subscriptions tbh, Funcom have made a royal mess of things and imo have ruined the game for everyone. While i do really think this game could be something special i am really annoyed at the state of it on release. I have to say however funcom did their snide best to try and hide just how incomplete the game was imo by introducing bugs on collecting things for guild citys and leaving instances broken or half finished. They also made the finishing area superb possibly thinking that people would perhaps take longer to level up.
My subscription runs out in a couple of days and i had the foresight to change my payment methods to playcards and as yet iv still to decide wether to keep playing. If i do i’ll need to upgrade alot of my pc and im wondering if its really worth the hassle and money. My PC plays warcraft perfectly so im sure it will more than handle Warhammer when its released.
The one down side if i leave is i will honestly miss alot of the guild members, iv got to know a few of them quite well and it will be a shame to leave them.
sorry i meant to say starting area is superb in the above not the finishing area. At lvl 49 im a bit away from end game content ….. doubt i’ll see it tbh
I still think that AoC has the potential to be the ‘Steak’ that Funcom have said it is, but it’s not at the moment. Going by their past record with Anarchy Online, Funcom ought to have AoC polished up in a few months. Then maybe it will be worth having another look.
In the meantime there are a few other MMOs coming out, why not give them a try — perhaps even look into some of the free games available.
Yeah I’ll be looking for something to fill my time before Warhammer i guess. As for free games, any suggestions?
Apart from Dungeon Runners which is getting a bit of press from Ten Ton Hammer, you could sign up for the Mythos beta. There’s also Shaiya and a bunch of games put out by the same company (I don’t remember which off hand).
Dreamlords: The Reawakening has just launched. That’s an MMORTS and has had some good press. I haven’t played it yet myself, but if I get time I will.
Also just released is Requiem: Bloodymare. I believe it’s a free to play, and it focusses on the horror model. From what I’ve seen it looks somewhat Lovecraftian. This one is very tempting. I might download the client tonight before I go to bed!
That’s just a few of them. They generally aren’t as high a quality as the subscription models, but I believe this is changing as they become more popular. They tend to use microtransactions to fund themselves, and I guess it takes a bit of time before that model provides the funds required for quality and polish.
Cheers Stropp I’ll check a couple of them out, thanks again for the info
well iv signed up to the mythos beta and im currently downloading Dungeon Runners so I’ll let you know how i get on, i do have to say i really really like the look of mythos
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