There has been a flurry of disappointing MMORPGs to hit the market since the release of the juggernaut World of Warcraft. I’ve had the displeasure of playing through quite a few of these. The most recent MMO to cross my PC was Age of Conan…and what an experience that was.
Age of Conan had kind of snuck up on me. Several friends were quite interested in it and continually tried to convince me to play but I was so engrossed in World of Warcraft (/sigh Yes, I’m addicted) that I paid little attention to it. Then within a week or so of its release, a large number of my WoW guild were going to play, so my other half and I hopped on the bandwagon and bought it.
At first the game was refreshing. The visceral combat system was engaging. The dialog trees used by NPCs kept me immersed in the story. I was having a good time. In the back of my mind however, the constant bugs and questionable design choices kept nagging at me like…a big naggy thing. “But this is fun and new!” I would tell myself as I logged back in day after day. Some time around level 45 to 50 the Big Naggy Thing™ finally became unbearable and I quit the game. Shortly after I quit most of my friends followed suit.
The game had so much going for it. Impressive graphics, a deep and rich history, an intuitive and innovative combat system, and several other features were what kept my interest for some time. So what went wrong?
The problem was that the game wasn’t finished. Yeah yeah, I know “MMO’s are never finished,” but this game was incomplete out of the box. This wasn’t a matter of needing a little more polish, balance, or added end game content, there were literally no quests for me to do from level 52 to 60 and again from 62 to 70. They expected you to grind, which was a bit unacceptable to me.
A common argument from the detractors was how polished World of Warcraft is, the counter to that was always “Blizzard has had 3 years to finish its game”. While this is true, it bothered me a bit. Prior to World of Warcraft it was understood that an MMO would have rocky launch, be missing content, and full of bugs. World of Warcraft however has completely changed the MMO marketplace from how I see things. Sure, WoW had a very rocky launch, server stability was a huge problem. You have to take a step back and look at how things were looking at that point. Blizzard probably knew that WoW would be successful, but there I doubt there is any way they could have predicted that WoW would become the runaway success that it is. Up to WoW’s launch, Everquest was the most commercially successful MMO on the market boasting a whopping 450,000 subscribers at its peak. World of Warcraft took the world by surprise as it sold 240,000 copies in it’s first 24 hours. Blizzard actually sold out of copies of WoW and could not keep up with demand.
While this was a huge success for Blizzard, the servers and network infrastructure suffered greatly. It’s clear that they had not anticipated how many people would be purchasing their game and it showed. After a couple of weeks things started to smooth out and people were happily making their way to level 60. Up to this point, Age of Conan and World of Warcraft had remarkably different launches. Age of Conan’s launch is considered to be one of the smoothest launches in MMO’s history (probably tying with Lord of the Rings Online). Post launch, the paths that each game took continued to diverge.
The content leading up to level 60 in WoW was mostly complete. There were bugs here and there, but you were very rarely, if ever, left wanting for additional quests or things to do while you leveled. Grinding was near non-existant, and if it was present, it was intended (reputation, honor, etc). Age of Conan’s lack of content post level 50 was a deal breaker for me. There was no way around it. Forum goers urged people like myself to give Funcom time, they would resolve it, but the damage was already done. To their credit, Funcom adopted a very aggressive patching schedule (two times a week) and have been working diligently to resolve issues as they arise…but it was too little, too late.
Blizzard entered the niche market with a game and watched as the market flourished, expanding beyond anything they could hope for. The most recent press release shows WoW breaching 10 million subscribers. More than 20 times its predecessor’s record. Thousands upon thousands of people who have never touched an MMO prior are now happily raiding and pvping their way to those shiny purple epics. What does this have to do with Age of Conan? Well, as I stated before, the market has grown and changed. The expectations of the player base are different. All of those players who started their MMO gaming career with World of Warcraft now expect every MMO to be as polished and complete as WoW is today.
I don’t necessarily think that it’s a bad thing either. It’s not unreasonable to expect a game entering the market almost 4 years after WoW to be as close to, if not better, in terms of the quality of experience. My prediction is that we won’t see a WoW-killer until that happens.
Perhaps publishers are to blame for rushing the game to retailers, perhaps it’s lazy developers, without an inside look, it’s really hard to say. If someone doesn’t take notice soon, I think we’ll see decline in the number of MMOs developed because WoW still has a strangehold on the market and there aren’t many dollars to be made without pulling some of players away from them.
So, in the meantime, I’m back to WoW as my primary game of choice and the Big Naggy Thing™ seems appeased for the time being.