A postmortem on Age of Conan's launch

by Michael Zenke on Jun 11th 2008 8:00PM

MMORPG.com's Mathew Reuther offers up a retrospective on the recent launch of Funcom's Age of Conan. We've obviously been following the game's ups and downs here on the site, but it's interesting to see the whole sordid tale laid out in one fell swoop. Reuther actually starts his tale back in 2001, with a brief look back at why Anarchy Online's launch was so very bad. He then walks us through the different steps - the early start that almost wasn't, launch day itself, and the some of the more lurid post-launch issues.

The second part of his analysis decries the current state of communication between the company and the players. His view is that their limited discussion of bugs, patches. and bannings is broken only rarely by sometimes-confusing statements or blanket declarations. It's a nice walk back through the last few weeks of Conan's early lifespan, and should provide context to any new players who have just joined the Hyborian parade.

Source

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, funcom, launch

Reader Comments (2)

uhh...last time i checked a postmortem usually involves a dead stinking corpse and AoC is far from dead. (although the stinky part im not so sure about)

For me, I won't be continuing my subscription. I'm sure to come back after they release the DX10 version, which they lied about until after launch, then mentioning that it won't be shown until late August. Who knows when it will be out.

Right now, it's an unfinished game, they keep adding new bugs with every patch, and the classes are horribly unbalanced, which is important for a PvP game. Crafting is far from finished, and content from half game upwards is lacking.

So give it some time, and it will get better, you would hope. I'll be back to check it out, but like most MMO's, this one was taken out of the oven too soon.

Now to see if Mythics delays actually means they end up releasing a more polished game, or if they too will suffer from the premature release, which in their case, shouldn't be, with all their delays.