What caused age of conan to fail

[Beazy]

1) Engine sucked balls. One of the worst engines to ever host an MMO. Period.
2) Touted "EPIC NEW COMBAT SYSTEM THAT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE MMO GENERA" turned out to be the most horrid combat system ever devised.


Those are the 2 main reasons AoC failed hard and Funcom is now called "Failcom". I cant believe they have the audacity to make 'The Secret World' and think that people will purchase it after they fumbled the ball and lost the superbowl in the last 15 seconds.

[Hellfury]

The Conan franshice wasnt good for a MMO

[Valeron]

It's a pretty good game right now (except for the low pop) but the poor launch really killed it. I still have fun with it though. It still has the most fun melee combat I've ever played in an mmo.

[Digglett]

The game was really well made until level 20. Then you noticed a HUGE drop in quality.

[Wilian]

The game was really well made until level 20. Then you noticed a HUGE drop in quality.

Huge? More like

[SirRobin]

Huge? More like

Hehe... Yeah, something like that.

I was in the Technical and then General Beta and it was pretty clear pretty quickly that the game suffered from significant flaws with its design and management. AoC only had one starting zone which was not only linear as hell but also quite different from the rest of the game. Not only did they cut a couple of classes but they even did a last minute launch delay for two weeks in order to give them time to grind out a miracle patch. That miracle patch is the reason AoC's launch wasn't a complete catastrophe.

As has become the apparent pattern since WoW, AoC got one chance to make a good first impression and for most... It didn't. A change in management helped the game at least survive but the finicky mmorpg market isn't big on second chances. So AoC remains a niche game. I finally gave my Beta to another guilder so I could focus on testing WAR, fat lot of good that ended up doing, but I've come back to AoC a couple of times. Its a much better game now but, again, it had its chance and failed to deliver.

[Oerba Yun Fang]

It failed? News to me. I thought it was still going.




I think AoC was harmed by its awful launch and what many perceived (correctly or otherwise) as broken promises (drunken brawling, etc). I personally rather like the game, though I only play it a couple times a month now.

[Deleted]

It failed? News to me. I thought it was still going.

I think AoC was harmed by its awful launch and what many perceived as broken promises (drunken brawling, etc). I personally rather like the game, though I only play it a couple times a month now.

I can agree with this, a game doesn't have to kill WoW to be successful - as long as it stays around I'd call it a success considering how many MMOs have gone down through the years.

[Korgoth]

I thought the combat was atrocious due to a horrible horrible control system and some really bad design choices for classes. The whole combo system, which is not a real combo system!, was awful to use because all it really is, is hitting your hotkey for your ability which is just like your wow abilities, except you have to hit < ^ > < then it does the ability, but you cant rapidly hit < ^ > <, you have to wait for the UI to move to the next one, and you just end up watching the stupid UI instead of playing. Then on top of that bullshit, you couldnt really move and do combos at the same time which made pvp so horrible for melee, and then on top of that shit salad they made it so your dps resource was also what you used as a gap closer, so everytime I could catch up to a ranged character, I couldnt use any attacks on them.

Combat is the basis of any mmo, and its why WoW is still the king, because it works so well in WoW, and in Age of Conan, even though it has much better graphics and interesting zones, and adult content, its combat is terrible, and combat is what you actually do while playing.

[Edge-]

I got to the mid 20's, questing/content pretty much just stopped. I had tons of low level grey quests, but I couldn't find much in the way of level appropriate content beyond grinding mobs.

As everyone else has said, that was the big problem. The finished parts of the game (starting island and some of the first few zones you go to) were amazing, the problem is at a certain point, things stopped. It was like they released a version of the game missing the second half of the actual game content and instead just put a bunch of monsters around.

Like Warhammer, Vanguard, and a number of other games before it, a rocky launch caused the game to flounder about for a while. Glad to see the F2P/Hybrid transition has been good for them though, as it really is a pretty damn good game.

[Valeron]

Combat is the basis of any mmo, and its why WoW is still the king, because it works so well in WoW, and in Age of Conan, even though it has much better graphics and interesting zones, and adult content, its combat is terrible, and combat is what you actually do while playing.

Interesting to see how the opinion on the combat varies so much. I loved the combat but others hate it. I think what you said about WoW's combat is telling and I bet others who feel the same way about WoW will share your feeling about AoC's combat. Personally, I thought wow's combat was boring as hell, the one point I will say about wows combat is that the responsiveness of the controls are probably the best in an mmo.

[Wilian]

I can agree with this, a game doesn't have to kill WoW to be successful - as long as it stays around I'd call it a success considering how many MMOs have gone down through the years.

It was a financial failure and major failure in the eyes of the general public (And in my eyes). Those three adds up a "failure" in my eyes.

It only survived the rough first half(or full) year because it was basically fed with money (was far too much of an investment to be left for dead). A game doesn't have to kill WoW to be considered succesfull, that's true. But being "alive" thanks to external help doesn't mean it wasn't a failure either.

LotRO is perfect example of a game that sold well in terms of MMO market, had large (Not WoW large duh) playerbase for a long time and was a "succeess" while not beating WoW.

AoC was not such.

[Digglett]

Huge? More like

Pretty much, couldn't place it in words, the image does a better job at showing the quality drop.

[pewpmeiser]

I don't think that why caused age of conan to fail. If anything, what did.

[SirRobin]

AoC was not such.

True but it did survive and given the numbers of games which haven't, its still an achievement. In my opinion of course, getting rid of Gaute Godager was a big part of what helped AoC survive.

[Johnny Tsunami]

It failed because it had no end game content, and like another poster said, content after 20 sucked. It was a grind fest, and it had MANY MANY bugs in the game. My friend was the "warrior" class in the game and the charge ability was bugged in such a way that it would sometimes throw his character in the opposite direction he was charging. And i mean THROW, as in he'll slide across the field a good 30-40 feet or fly through the air. He actually used it once or twice to get away from people trying to kill us.

Also the idea behind the game was that you needed to perform dance dance revolution with your fingers in order to use abilities. It eventually got to the point where there were around 5 or 6 buttons you'd have to press, all of them different. If you failed the game your ability did less damage or didnt do an extra effect. (such as root or slow)

Also certain classes were VERY broken in the game. Not just hindering broken, like my friend's warrior, but too good. One of those classes was the class the "druid" class i believe.

[Spurmwhale]

it really wasn't a good MMO. It came out at a good time tho, if i remember right it was right before WAR? when a lot of people were looking to jump from WoW....

i thought the directional attacks was it? was really lame. it felt sub par to WoW in overall movement and play, like more choppy maybe....but this was around the first month of release. WAR had movement/choppy issues as well where neither were as fluid as WoW. oh and the abilities were kind of dumb, like i'd get rooted and shot dead without being able to counter, or the run button had something i didn't like but i can't remember what it was.

i wish i wrote this when i was playing it since i'm sure i could remember a lot of the stuff i'd like to have said....

[Spaceshaman]

For me it was the extra low FPS. But it was probably my computer. TBH my comp got out of sync because of WOW. I ditched a lot of game because of it's performance. Nowdays I just spend my WOW sub fee on hardware.

[Blackmist]

Being a shitty version of WoW killed AoC.

Seems to be quite a common cause of death in the MMO genre...

[namelessone]

Hey,
So I was wondering what caused age of conan to fail, it looked nice, nice mmo, good graphics, good gameplay, good animations, so I am suprised why it failed.

Any thoughts ?

Because apparently only 20 levels were finished on release. After that it was a wasteland.