Is Age of Conan slowly dying?

It's been a very quiet year so far in MMO-land as far as I'm concerned. Very few new and upcoming games really managed to grab my attention, with the notable exception of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.

Warhammer Online is still in development, but Age of Conan was released in May. The initial hype the game managed to generate at launch was amazing. The game attracted loads of players, entire guilds in World of Warcraft migrated to the new game, while other guilds had a hard time getting enough members online to keep their raids going. Within a couple of weeks, the game's developer, Funcom, reported sales of over one million units, making it one of the fastest selling MMORPGs ever. It was obvious that loads of people were getting tired of WoW and were looking for something new. I gave it a try as well, playing the game when I wasn't raiding in World of Warcraft.

However, the bubble burst quite early after. Reports of bad performance on reasonably recent PCs, frequent crashes, numerous bugs, missing end-game content and features that were promised on release that either weren't in-game yet or totally unplayable were a bad blow to the game. There even was a bug were female melee characters attacked about 30% slower than their male counterparts! That must be the weirdest bug ever in any online game and Funcom reported it would take several weeks to fix it.

Personally, this was the bug that sealed the deal for me. I didn't care much about missing end-game content and bugged boss fights, because I wasn't levelling up all that fast anyway. But the fact that my character was only playing at 70% of her abilities, was too much. Apart from that, I still experienced frequent crashes to desktop and sluggish performance, even on a recent system, so I cancelled my subscription.

Apparently, I was not alone. People left the game in droves. From the players who gave it a try that I know, which would be about 20 players, none of them are still playing at the moment. Even the most avid fans of AoC are now back in World of Warcraft, either playing their old character again or levelling up an alt. Obviously the game was released too soon, with too many bugs still left to be ironed out and content to be added. My guess is that Funcom's cash supply ran out and investors started demanding some returns on their money. The result: an unfinished game with very few people renewing their subscription after the initial first free month was up.

It's a shame to be honest, AoC has a lot of potential and I really wanted this game to succeed. One of the very first MMORPGs I played was Anarchy Online, Funcom's previous MMORPG. AO itself is notorious for having the worst MMORPG launch in history. But when I started playing the game, most bugs were already gone and it was a very enjoyable title at the time. It's my hope that Funcom will manage to do the same again, add all the missing content and get rid of all the bugs and make the game the class A title it deserves to be.

It'll probably be too late to attract the big numbers again though. But if we can learn anything from the AoC story, it's the fact that there's a real demand for a new MMORPG and lots of money to be made if someone manages to release a good game with lots of content and a minimal amount of bugs. I hope the guys over at Mythic are listening.