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Age of Conan - New "Game Director" Interview
H0urg1ass
Member EpicPosts: 2,380
On one of the last few remaining Age of Conan blogs in existence, Assassin's Hideout, an interview with the new game director, Matt Bennett, was posted this Saturday. You can read the whole interview here.
TL;DR: A new game director has taken over AoC. Nearly every feature announced for Age of Conan over the past three years has been shelved. A new feature has been announced, but it's being designed for TSW and imported to AoC, so it's not really an AoC feature to begin with.
Ok ok, so the new "game director" isn't claiming the title. Slith asks Matt Bennett:
"Lets start with proverbial elephant in the room: with Joel Bylos stepping down as Game Director who is in charge of AOC? Who makes the high level decisions about priorities and content? And most importantly: this "directorless" state is permanent or are we in some sort of transition?"
To which he replies:
"So really not much has changed except there is nobody with the title game director, “setting the direction of the game” is part of my job description. I know as there are no formal 'game director letters' it might seem from a player perspective that there is no direction, but I simply don't have time for these as they are more time consuming than you might think"
Soooo, he's really the new game director, but he's not calling himself a game director so that he can shirk the official responsibilities that come with the game director title such as the monthly newsletter. Not only that but the monthly newsletter is too hard.
Seriously, go read a few of AoC's past monthly newsletters. They don't even qualify as a middle school book report in length and content, plus they repeat the same information month after month.
I work remotely from my "boss" whose office is 500 miles away. Because of this he requires that I send a weekly report every Friday detailing what I've spent the week doing. This report is usually the size of one monthly AoC Game Director Letter and takes me about 15 minutes to write before I walk out the door.
You'd think that a company with an absolutely atrocious level of customer interaction would be looking to improve their lines of communication. Instead Funcom has decided to go from one small trickle of information a month, that couldn't take more than 30 minutes to bullshit their way through, to being a black hole.
Two game directors and three years ago, Age of Conan announced that they were going to completely revamp the entire crafting system in Age of Conan. Slith asks Matt:
"Crafting update. There is no way around asking about it since it’s [been] in development for 3 years now. Is there a major setback that makes the update too complicated? Is it less of a priority than, shall we say Cetriss? This is the only time I will ask about release timeframe: is there one?"
To which Matt replies:
"So the crafting update was started at a time when the team was much, much larger than it is right now and it was possible for there to be a focus on multiple systems/areas of content at the same time. This has not been the case for a while now and realistically we can only work on 1 thing at a time, before moving on to focusing on something else."
He then spends two more rather lengthy paragraphs to basically tell us that the crafting update is several more years away, if ever. So the biggest game change for AoC that's been heavily anticipated for 1/3 of the game's life cycle now, has been shelved.
He talks about changes to the new achievement system, cause every game has to have an achievement system these days, right? Sorry, but this, in my opinion was the biggest waste of limited game resources in years. The few hardcore players left weren't the "achievement" type. They had already moved on years ago.
Then he talks about PVP, which is so dead in AoC that I don't know why anyone wastes breath on it. No one does minis or Bori anymore, but hey lets talk about wasting the last few ounces of game resources on more PVP changes.
Another announced feature of AoC from the past was new AA's and new weapons added to existing classes. He then goes on to explain that this wouldn't be possible to do until after the crafting revamp. But... since they've essentially shelved the crafting revamp, then he's saying that this is shelved too? That's how the math adds up in my head anyhow.
Some Tier 5 (6?), Palace of Cetriss, talk came next. He was asked about new armor sets and was told that creating 12 unique armor sets for the next tier of raiding would be too hard. Instead we're going to be getting four base armors for each of the archetypes (rogue, soldier, mage, healer) and that there would be some color variation between them. I don't know what I expected honestly considering that the base game released in 2008 had the exact same pieces of gear for three tiers of raiding with a few slight cosmetic changes for each tier. Less is more now?
No server merges. There's two completely dead servers and one populated server. Matt says he wants to merge them, but it's out of his hands and not on the schedule. So if you're on a dead server, then suck it up buttercup and reroll.
New notification system announced in the past has been shelved. No surprises there.
He admits they screwed up back in May by announcing an "adventure pack" coming out for the game's anniversary... and then charging $20 for it after making it sound like it was an anniversary celebration gift. However, if they make any more of these, then they won't fix a hard deadline to them so that it can be polished... or more likely shelved like everything else that doesn't get a deadline.
The last Dragon Spine dungeon, announced years ago and never delivered, is the next thing on the schedule to release after the TSW ported dungeon finder. However, the animations are too hard and so all new animations except for the main boss will be scrapped and replaced with existing NPC animations in order to get this dungeon out of the door. This dungeon will also be reusing the interior of an existing dungeon which he dropped on us in an "oh by the way, it's always been the plan to use an old dungeon for the... new(?) dungeon"
Reading the interview more carefully you'll find that almost everything that needs to be done "requires a coder" and matt 'Is not a coder". Since Matt is the only Funcom employee working on AoC full time, and he's apparently a level designer, then we'll only be getting code-linked AoC updates when a TSW or LEGO developer has some spare time to spend working on AoC code. i.e. When sun dies, turns into a red giant, and melts the Earth.
Comments
That's grim.
Well if we have not already figured it out .....
Developers LIE,they tell you about massive updates and they will continue to grow the game but truth is MONEY is the real issue talk is just talk.
This game lost all it's players,i would say AOC is a splitting image of WS,had great early success then lost it all.
I actually enjoyed my time in AOC until it became a ghost town,i had AOC rated as a top 5 mmorpg of all time.Yes it had some ideas i did not like,yes it was pretty much a single player game with added co-op play just like all the rest fo the games,but i saw some good stuff in the game.
Point is right now,there is no money,likely not even a full time team not GM support,just a make shift crew to look at the game when needed.
IMO they have given up and only hang onto whatever last dollar they can get from the game,it is sad really,so many developers just give up rather than risk a revamp.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
In other news, I was linked to a site by someone here. It will need to be translated from Norwegian with your browser.
It's an article from yesterday on a Norwegian investment site. What it seems to be saying, which I couldn't corroborate with any English sites yet, is that Funcom has failed to find a buyer for their LEGO game and will most likely go into "technical bankruptcy" by 2016.
I'm not even going to pretend to know what this would mean for their current titles, but I would hope they would survive if the company does go under. I do love the concepts behind AoC and desperately want it to be successful again. Maybe it's a bridge too far, but I can dream.
Did i just teleport back to 2009?
Seriously, everyone knows this game is on life support, why are you getting so up in arms in it? This is well past the point of just let go and move on.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
No, you're in 2015. You're also an ass.
Dude, don't get me wrong, i actually really enjoyed AoC when it came out, i actually leveled 2 characters to max. But after 6 months or so it became pretty apparent that it was a sinking ship. That was 6 years ago. By this point not even the rats are still on the ship. I just can't believe you're so frustrated that you made a huge wall of text complaining about it. This is like a person complaining about snowfall when there is an avalanche 3 seconds from impact.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
This.
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I still think it´s way better than ESO,
combat - win - AOC
setting - win - AOC
story - win - AOC
lore - win - AOC
overall graphic design - win - AOC
It was eight years ago, not six. AoC has never been a "sinking ship". Sure, a lot of people got off at the first port of call, but that's pretty standard with any MMO these days. It's actually a decently populated game on the single PVE server left due to the fact that it's the only game of it's kind. It's the only MMO that offers a combo based melee combat system with brutal and gory fatalities. It's the only MMO with a low fantasy setting. Besides that, it has a deep and rich lore, a grim-dark setting and very good graphics considering when it was released.
I can name almost half a dozen MMO's that came out around the same time that AoC came out and have already closed down. A couple came back after flatlining on the table and receiving some good medical care, but most of these are gone forever. Warhammer Online, Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London, APB, Vanguard, Lego Universe, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Fury, Chronicles of Spellborn... the list is pretty long if you want to get into the more obscure titles.
My huge wall of text is because I love the game. If you love something, then you don't give up on it just because it let you down. You point out what it's doing wrong and pray that it improves.
I want it to be picked up by a new developer much like DayBreak Games bought out SOE, and I want to see some more development love put into one of the most innovative MMORPG's to launch in the last decade.
Funny claims, dude, funny claims.
that´s interesting, because I´m playing in a guild and we have fun 3-4 times a week with plenty server population.
The game went through significant improvements 2 years after launch in preparation for the Rise of the Godslayer expansion Pack. Unfortunately anyone who only tried the game before that time, did not get to experience the game's best years.
The RotG ex pack was horizontal in that it did not add character levels. But that being said it still felt like a vertical expansion that easily more than doubled the player's long term content and longevity. It didn't actually add more zones than what was in the base game, but the longevity, the Zones +1 to +5 levels above the player max of 80, the dungeons and such were more than double the base game in player value. It is fantastic.
if the people that were excited about AoC pre-release and the people that tried it in its first year and a half, combined with those of us who have played it to death and have 11 max level characters with raid gear, were to all go back now... We'd all forget about this forum and Other games because we would be thoroughly immersed in AoC's awesomeness (with the exception of PvP, just forget it exists).
Not only that, but if we did, it would bring money flowing back in to Funcom (yeah I know I'm hesitant to trust them with my CC too). Age of Conan could get a proper team and crush the existing MMO industry. It could crush it right now if people would just quit being stubborn and just give it another go.