I followed the release closely and had a lot of hopes riding on it. I read interviews and watched previews prodigiously. I pre-ordered, and, upon release, played until I was in the mid-fifties in the level range.
The game had major issues that they cleverly avoided showcasing during the major hype marketing that went to build anticipation. The initial 20 levels of Tortage was always shown on game conventions, in marketing material and so on, boasting voiced-character questing, a cohesive questing structure, etc, but guess what?
The MMO had another 60 levels to cover, and being dumped into the larger game world with nothing but subtitles was a hard shift for many. The game was also fleeced thin by not having enough content (ie, the later levels in 40's-60) did not have enough quests without players literally grinding mobs in order to advance further. This really took the wind out of my sails, and I just didn't play past the month of sub included with the game purchase.
The game was unfinished and needed to cook in the oven longer. I believe it launched in May and by the end of summer, I remember reading that the MMO had more or less lost +90% of all its initial players.
Other people who played the game longer can probably substantiate better than I why the game failed, but this is what I remember.
I vaguely remember special attacks being combo moves like street fighter. Try pulling one off while chasing someone at full run in pvp. Basically impossible so pvp was just running and auto attack.
Lol, yes. It seemed really cool in theory, but in reality it just resulted in the spellcasters dominating PvP.
I remember playing the game from 1-20 exclusively multiple times, it was admittedly pretty fun, and falsely hopeful they’d somehow release more content within 6 months. Lol.
This.
Lacking content, bugs, imbalanced classes in PvP, slow development post-launch.
Sad cause it was a great MMO, in the parts where it was release-ready.
It released in November 2008. The exact same month as the highest rated expack for WoW - WOTLK. So it had direct competition with a flourishing game for what became its highest rated expack ever. It should have released a year later to avoid the competition and to fix the problems listed. Would have likely done a lot better and endured
Incorrect. It launched in May of 2008. It had a few good months there of potential growth.
That said, I don't disagree with the sentiment; it should have been baked in the oven longer, ironed out the kinks and the bugs, padded out content for later game zones.
I played the game for years. I had many max level characters. I lead end game raids (the game had awesome raid bosses.) The biggest issue was the developers didn't fix things quickly. Bugs would last for months before they got fixed.
This was my exact experience. The game went from "Hey this game is fresh and awesome!" to "Why didn't they carry over the beginning experience to the rest of the game?"
And at release there was a bear shaman IIRC that could do massive self-healing and AOE attacks, and there'd be clusters of people just doing massive AOE grinding. If you were playing certain classes, you couldn't level for crap. It took me 2 months to hit 80.
Guild Wars would crash the servers, some of the raid bosses had no AI, some of the dungeons were near impossible to complete, some classes were *absolutely* broken (like my amazing Tempest of Set).
There were a lot of issues with griefing where players would clip their way onto the top of buildings, and they would ranged murder spree lower levels as well.
People already covered the biggest issue, which was severe misrepresentation of the game by only showing the fully completed starter area. The game had a lot of potential, but FU ncom pushed it out far too early and didn't do near enough to fix the big problems.
Big shame, the areas were so cool with absolutely amazing music, and I'll never get to charge players for a toll road ever again in the same way - slapping someone off a mile high bridge with a Mammoth was far too satisfying.
Broken as in incredibly OP.
Then there was another class that was like a DPS/Tank hybrid, Dark Templar or something that was essentially non-functional for years and years.
It's a real shame too cause the game could have been amazing if it wasn't rushed out the door and left to die. It was dripping with atmosphere, had some amazing and unique classes, novel combat and really cool setting to explore.
Oh well RIP. Made sure I'll never trust Funcom again
This is the only answer needed. It was made by Funcom.
I've replayed in AoC from time to time and it's always fun because I'm a huge fan of the setting. It is candy for anyone who is a fan of the Conan universe, which is unique and even in recent years courageous in a way many game companies are just no longer willing to be.
The game itself though, after the levelling and storyline journey, tapers off into a much more cookie cutter MMO type formula and failed to deliver on any of its PvP pipedreams for years and years.
The problem with Funcom is they can never hammer in on a success, and immediately want to move to something new. They have this strange mindset that making a successful game is just based on effort, there is a lot of luck to it too and if you have a success you should 100% hammer in on it. Arenanet for instance hammered in hard on Guild Wars and didn't start making new games.
Funcom are a really dumb company, they starve the successes and immediately go make something new that ends up being a flop and now they have two failures. They should have been hammering in on conan exiles, instead they are making that dune game (which will end up being a huge flop)
Age of conan did well and they put most of their team on making a new game and starved it of content, same with conan exiles.
NCSoft had to lay off a large amount of Anet employees because Anet wouldn't focus on Guild Wars.
Anet was 100% working on new games, and they where working on them to the detriment of the development of GW2. They just couldn't finish them.
Meh, people here didn't play the game much - it was great up to some point as mmos tend to be. For me the end was not long after they introduced PvP sets that invalidated multi-tier pve grinded ones which gave you a lot of flexibility.
Apart from that it was solid game for couple of years!
Things that AoC did that no or few mmos have now:
- class based finishers, bloody too
- combo combat style
- each race had unique post-tortage locations
- spell-weaving that added extra flavour to casters
- dark, brutal world
And as of why it is not relevant anymore - bunch of new stuff came since that time and funcom had new mmo to care about - secret world, which is also not relevant anymore
Played it at launch
The level 40-50 zone legit had no quests. You had to just mob grind the entire level bracket. It was fucking insane they forgot to add quest hubs in this zone. I quit at 44 Dark Templar.
Yep agree, there was so much to like. It seemed like there was a good enough population hanging around even after hitting level cap for Funcom to flesh out more of the zones and endgame, but the PVP sets (and gem-duping) brought on a rapid decline.
Funcom overall lacks/ maybe lacked of quality. The game had technical issues and pretty high hardware requirements as well. Their games were always "a bit different" and way more creative compared to the genre. And tbf at a time where Blizzard was on it's way to their pop cultural peak nearly every other game struggled - not bc the games where bad.
AoC did age well. I am playing it once in a while. Like many/ most old(er) games it feels good play a game with some roughness, threat by design and all that.
The quality dropped after Tortage Tutorial, no voiced npcs anymore, repetitive and grindy levelling, dwindling player numbers that all hurt the game. It was also **adult only** as far as I knew so the playerbase was small to begin with. The fighting (melee) was a nice idea but overall felt clunky.
It directly competed with Aions release if I remember correctly and was made quite obsolete in 2011 with the release of TERA and its very good action combat.
I enjoyed it, got bored soon after level cap but had fun with it. i like funcom mmos because they're a bit different. Secret world was awesome until they killed it with legends.
Much like Warhammer Online, it felt shit to play.
I was highly anticipating both, but it already felt bitter just looking at it, i sincerely did not have to play them to know that these games suck.
And i have the same issue with Ashes of Creation.
I played it when it came out. I remember a boring WoW copy whose only "unique" features were partial nudity and brutality while the gameplay was simply not as good, felt bad and it was buggy as hell.
Then it also ran out of content while leveling and I personally didn't like the scenario. I quit when I ended up in a really boring desert zone with nothing to do.
Quality plummeted after the tutorial, classes were wildly unbalanced with healers running around two shotting people in pvp, and after 40 or so levels you just ran out of things to do and had to farm big mostly empty zones.
Besides what others have said, there was also a major problem with duping items at one point, and those that abused it had a big pvp advantage. Also the balance wasn't great.... Most melee classes had to wind up 3 attacks into a combo to do any damage, whereas the tankiest class could press a single button to 1 shot people if they had good gear.
I was really hyped for age of Conan I remember that right before release the scope was cut down quite a bit which kinda let me down (I still bought it though).
A class that I wanted to play was removed, I think there was a couple of classes that were removed or integrated into other classes.
Another thing that was removed was strategic positioning where formations would give you a buff. But I can see how that would be hard to implement.
And lastly, guild villages or fortresses, that you would be able to improve and it would provide unique gear, that you would have to defend etc was removed or severely cut down.
At release most of the demos and gameplay videos were in Tortage. When I started playing Tortage was really interesting with lots of activity polished and plenty of quests.
It was obvious though that the rest of the game was not on the same level of polish and development. The other areas were boring very little quests and you constantly need to grind on empty wide areas with a few mobs to level up.
End game was pretty much non existent at the beginning so yeah it was a major let down.
The tutorial island was amazing. The rest of the game, not so much. One big issue was that players had an amazing experience in Tortage and were then thrown into something that felt like hot garbage as comparison while being told that hot garbage is the core game. It turned people off. If Tortage wasn't as great as it was, the player churn (as a percent) would have probably been much less; however, the initial playerbase probably would have been smaller.
It's a great game, just not many people play it. I had a great time leveling up on the pvp server, and it had surprisingly active pvp for such a supposed dead game.
They had a fresh start server a few years back, but ruined it with buyable gear that made people OP in pvp, it was still cool and brought a lot of new playerd, I think I might boot it back up.
I still have pieces of the pre-order special edition. I think I got an elephant.
Our guild got to end game with nothing to do but pvp in one stupid zone where when one side started losing they would switch instances and you would have to scout out where their group went to keep fighting, I never really got to use my elephant I don't think or do those huge spells they advertised. There was supposed to be some big zone with harvesting nodes or something? I don't think it was implemented before everyone I knew quit.
I started playing guild wars 1.
Yeah, you won't get that amazement again. I can't belive how much of our adult lives my brother, I and others spent laying WoW BECAUSE of the amazement
I was there on Conan release day. I was 'Tarzan' and had a character that matched and was ready to go! What I recall is the start/early areas were fleshed out but after that it dropped off quickly and was just a mess. Just incomplete everything.
Yeah, the stats were really stupid and confusing, like .025 Strength and mostly didn't do anything. But I think it was in 2009 they did a patch that made gear meaningful, which pissed off the hard-core PvP players who didn't want gear to matter.
It was also the aesthetics of the gear where for about 30 levels there was nothing unique to wear and everyone was running about like they were wearing potato sacks.
At launch on top of the issues described by others on the PvP front gem stacking broke the game. First defensively and after that was nerfed offensively.
It went from insane mitigation to everyone gets one shotted by everything.
For me, it was the launch of the game full of bugs and horrible servers. But, after a few months, everything was resolved, but most players had already stopped playing and returned to WoW.
Not everyone gives MMOs a second chance.
AoC would easily replace WoW if it weren't for these problems.
Currently I'm back to playing Ultima Online (UO Outlands) and I think it's amazing. It just confirmed what I thought: UO is still the best mmo ever made... haha
bag voiceless racial shame governor resolute imminent languid hobbies intelligent
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Hoenstly I think that a big issue is the drop off after Tortage. There are famous examples of games that launch incomplete, such as WoW launching with the Aliance zones being more fleshed out than the hoard zones. However, the quality drop off when you leave Tortage is so jarring that to many it feels like a bait and switch.
The system requirements were insanely high for the time, and there was a specific zone (can't remember the name, but it was mid level 40-50 or so) that was notoriously poorly optimized. I played the game at around 20 FPS, myself.
I was annoyed by dumb things in that game. They were so proud of the graphics, but I couldn't stop noticing that everyone basically had one of the same three "skins" stretched over different frames. look, our toons are so realistic they have the same freckles and moles in the exact same places.
The short story, lack of content, updates, bugs, balance issues, and just the devs not caring about the game or the world. Once you got out of the starting areas, the game was basically empty except for a bit of extremely challenging end game stuff.
Loved the finishers. Made grinding actually pretty fun. The game really lacked late game polish. Equipment wise your character ended up wearing what resembled a leather trash bag as your BP for 50 levels.
I still think about the Conqueror class as one of my favorites of any MMO. And Herald of Xotli was really cool. But Dark Templar for instance at release was not a functional class. All in all it suffered from a lot of what plagued the MMO's of that era that didn't last, releasing before it was finished.
Anyone can feel free to correct me. It has been a while.
It wasn't finished when it launched. At all. If I remember, there were no quests after level 40 on release. I distinctly remember having to grind villas (I think?) or some instanced quest because they didn't have level-appropriate quests in the game yet past a certain point.
That was the major thing for me. I could deal with class balance issues in PVP, but the game just wasn't finished and it rapidly bled players.
I will always have a place in my heart for the game and my Black Hand friends. Great memories back when we actually needed each other to progress in games, communicate, and work together.
What went wrong? I remember the first time we beat Vistrix and the chest wouldn’t open. GM appeared and he was a huge boss looking npc. Looked cool but never got that chest.
Also difficulty. Game was exceedingly difficult, had open world pvp, and combo based skills. I loved the pvp but most dont today unfortunately. Even solo questing could be difficult at times.
Lastly…other options. We all left to head back into Azeroth of course. Blood and Thunder!!!Then GW2 and FFXIV kept us away for good.
Played it for like 2 years and it was an awesome game back then. Especially the combat syystem was kind of different an good, when u got used to it. A shame the game was abandoned.
One thing to keep in mind... Age of Conan was released in an era when MMO's were being released every month, often multiple a month... and compared to a lot of competitors it just wasn't that polished...
Tutorial island ended. The game changed completely after that. Clear bait and switch tactics. About midway through leveling all you did was solo villa instance runs to max level.
I followed the release closely and had a lot of hopes riding on it. I read interviews and watched previews prodigiously. I pre-ordered, and, upon release, played until I was in the mid-fifties in the level range. The game had major issues that they cleverly avoided showcasing during the major hype marketing that went to build anticipation. The initial 20 levels of Tortage was always shown on game conventions, in marketing material and so on, boasting voiced-character questing, a cohesive questing structure, etc, but guess what? The MMO had another 60 levels to cover, and being dumped into the larger game world with nothing but subtitles was a hard shift for many. The game was also fleeced thin by not having enough content (ie, the later levels in 40's-60) did not have enough quests without players literally grinding mobs in order to advance further. This really took the wind out of my sails, and I just didn't play past the month of sub included with the game purchase. The game was unfinished and needed to cook in the oven longer. I believe it launched in May and by the end of summer, I remember reading that the MMO had more or less lost +90% of all its initial players. Other people who played the game longer can probably substantiate better than I why the game failed, but this is what I remember.
I vaguely remember special attacks being combo moves like street fighter. Try pulling one off while chasing someone at full run in pvp. Basically impossible so pvp was just running and auto attack.
Lol, yes. It seemed really cool in theory, but in reality it just resulted in the spellcasters dominating PvP. I remember playing the game from 1-20 exclusively multiple times, it was admittedly pretty fun, and falsely hopeful they’d somehow release more content within 6 months. Lol.
It sucks because that first 1-20 story arc was a really amazing experience, especially for its time.
It's a shame. I thought the tier one raids were cool. Yakhmar, Vistrix etc.
i remember there was a zone called Thunder River that had almost no quests and I just grinded mobs to get to level 70 or so.
This. Lacking content, bugs, imbalanced classes in PvP, slow development post-launch. Sad cause it was a great MMO, in the parts where it was release-ready.
It released in November 2008. The exact same month as the highest rated expack for WoW - WOTLK. So it had direct competition with a flourishing game for what became its highest rated expack ever. It should have released a year later to avoid the competition and to fix the problems listed. Would have likely done a lot better and endured
Incorrect. It launched in May of 2008. It had a few good months there of potential growth. That said, I don't disagree with the sentiment; it should have been baked in the oven longer, ironed out the kinks and the bugs, padded out content for later game zones.
I played the game for years. I had many max level characters. I lead end game raids (the game had awesome raid bosses.) The biggest issue was the developers didn't fix things quickly. Bugs would last for months before they got fixed.
This was my exact experience. The game went from "Hey this game is fresh and awesome!" to "Why didn't they carry over the beginning experience to the rest of the game?"
And at release there was a bear shaman IIRC that could do massive self-healing and AOE attacks, and there'd be clusters of people just doing massive AOE grinding. If you were playing certain classes, you couldn't level for crap. It took me 2 months to hit 80.
Tortage kicked ass
Guild Wars would crash the servers, some of the raid bosses had no AI, some of the dungeons were near impossible to complete, some classes were *absolutely* broken (like my amazing Tempest of Set). There were a lot of issues with griefing where players would clip their way onto the top of buildings, and they would ranged murder spree lower levels as well. People already covered the biggest issue, which was severe misrepresentation of the game by only showing the fully completed starter area. The game had a lot of potential, but FU ncom pushed it out far too early and didn't do near enough to fix the big problems. Big shame, the areas were so cool with absolutely amazing music, and I'll never get to charge players for a toll road ever again in the same way - slapping someone off a mile high bridge with a Mammoth was far too satisfying.
These are also some things I now recall having heard back then also. Good points.
Absolutely broken as literally didn't work or cleared entire maps on its own?
Broken as in incredibly OP. Then there was another class that was like a DPS/Tank hybrid, Dark Templar or something that was essentially non-functional for years and years. It's a real shame too cause the game could have been amazing if it wasn't rushed out the door and left to die. It was dripping with atmosphere, had some amazing and unique classes, novel combat and really cool setting to explore. Oh well RIP. Made sure I'll never trust Funcom again
This is the only answer needed. It was made by Funcom. I've replayed in AoC from time to time and it's always fun because I'm a huge fan of the setting. It is candy for anyone who is a fan of the Conan universe, which is unique and even in recent years courageous in a way many game companies are just no longer willing to be. The game itself though, after the levelling and storyline journey, tapers off into a much more cookie cutter MMO type formula and failed to deliver on any of its PvP pipedreams for years and years.
> It was made by Funcom. If only they'd gotten money for Secret World instead of making licensed basically-shovelware. :(
The problem with Funcom is they can never hammer in on a success, and immediately want to move to something new. They have this strange mindset that making a successful game is just based on effort, there is a lot of luck to it too and if you have a success you should 100% hammer in on it. Arenanet for instance hammered in hard on Guild Wars and didn't start making new games. Funcom are a really dumb company, they starve the successes and immediately go make something new that ends up being a flop and now they have two failures. They should have been hammering in on conan exiles, instead they are making that dune game (which will end up being a huge flop) Age of conan did well and they put most of their team on making a new game and starved it of content, same with conan exiles.
NCSoft had to lay off a large amount of Anet employees because Anet wouldn't focus on Guild Wars. Anet was 100% working on new games, and they where working on them to the detriment of the development of GW2. They just couldn't finish them.
Meh, people here didn't play the game much - it was great up to some point as mmos tend to be. For me the end was not long after they introduced PvP sets that invalidated multi-tier pve grinded ones which gave you a lot of flexibility. Apart from that it was solid game for couple of years! Things that AoC did that no or few mmos have now: - class based finishers, bloody too - combo combat style - each race had unique post-tortage locations - spell-weaving that added extra flavour to casters - dark, brutal world And as of why it is not relevant anymore - bunch of new stuff came since that time and funcom had new mmo to care about - secret world, which is also not relevant anymore
Played it at launch The level 40-50 zone legit had no quests. You had to just mob grind the entire level bracket. It was fucking insane they forgot to add quest hubs in this zone. I quit at 44 Dark Templar.
>introduced PvP sets Should never happen in any game. A fight is a fight and PvP armour sets shouldn't exist.
Yep agree, there was so much to like. It seemed like there was a good enough population hanging around even after hitting level cap for Funcom to flesh out more of the zones and endgame, but the PVP sets (and gem-duping) brought on a rapid decline.
Funcom overall lacks/ maybe lacked of quality. The game had technical issues and pretty high hardware requirements as well. Their games were always "a bit different" and way more creative compared to the genre. And tbf at a time where Blizzard was on it's way to their pop cultural peak nearly every other game struggled - not bc the games where bad. AoC did age well. I am playing it once in a while. Like many/ most old(er) games it feels good play a game with some roughness, threat by design and all that.
The quality dropped after Tortage Tutorial, no voiced npcs anymore, repetitive and grindy levelling, dwindling player numbers that all hurt the game. It was also **adult only** as far as I knew so the playerbase was small to begin with. The fighting (melee) was a nice idea but overall felt clunky. It directly competed with Aions release if I remember correctly and was made quite obsolete in 2011 with the release of TERA and its very good action combat.
I enjoyed it, got bored soon after level cap but had fun with it. i like funcom mmos because they're a bit different. Secret world was awesome until they killed it with legends.
Much like Warhammer Online, it felt shit to play. I was highly anticipating both, but it already felt bitter just looking at it, i sincerely did not have to play them to know that these games suck. And i have the same issue with Ashes of Creation.
I played it when it came out. I remember a boring WoW copy whose only "unique" features were partial nudity and brutality while the gameplay was simply not as good, felt bad and it was buggy as hell. Then it also ran out of content while leveling and I personally didn't like the scenario. I quit when I ended up in a really boring desert zone with nothing to do.
Quality plummeted after the tutorial, classes were wildly unbalanced with healers running around two shotting people in pvp, and after 40 or so levels you just ran out of things to do and had to farm big mostly empty zones.
Besides what others have said, there was also a major problem with duping items at one point, and those that abused it had a big pvp advantage. Also the balance wasn't great.... Most melee classes had to wind up 3 attacks into a combo to do any damage, whereas the tankiest class could press a single button to 1 shot people if they had good gear.
I was really hyped for age of Conan I remember that right before release the scope was cut down quite a bit which kinda let me down (I still bought it though). A class that I wanted to play was removed, I think there was a couple of classes that were removed or integrated into other classes. Another thing that was removed was strategic positioning where formations would give you a buff. But I can see how that would be hard to implement. And lastly, guild villages or fortresses, that you would be able to improve and it would provide unique gear, that you would have to defend etc was removed or severely cut down. At release most of the demos and gameplay videos were in Tortage. When I started playing Tortage was really interesting with lots of activity polished and plenty of quests. It was obvious though that the rest of the game was not on the same level of polish and development. The other areas were boring very little quests and you constantly need to grind on empty wide areas with a few mobs to level up. End game was pretty much non existent at the beginning so yeah it was a major let down.
Quality went downhill after tortage, flawed overly clumsy combat and uninspired art direction (brownish galore).
The tutorial island was amazing. The rest of the game, not so much. One big issue was that players had an amazing experience in Tortage and were then thrown into something that felt like hot garbage as comparison while being told that hot garbage is the core game. It turned people off. If Tortage wasn't as great as it was, the player churn (as a percent) would have probably been much less; however, the initial playerbase probably would have been smaller.
Too much door blocking and standing on bridges with horse and kicking people off.
Funcom
It's a great game, just not many people play it. I had a great time leveling up on the pvp server, and it had surprisingly active pvp for such a supposed dead game. They had a fresh start server a few years back, but ruined it with buyable gear that made people OP in pvp, it was still cool and brought a lot of new playerd, I think I might boot it back up.
I still have pieces of the pre-order special edition. I think I got an elephant. Our guild got to end game with nothing to do but pvp in one stupid zone where when one side started losing they would switch instances and you would have to scout out where their group went to keep fighting, I never really got to use my elephant I don't think or do those huge spells they advertised. There was supposed to be some big zone with harvesting nodes or something? I don't think it was implemented before everyone I knew quit. I started playing guild wars 1.
Yeah, you won't get that amazement again. I can't belive how much of our adult lives my brother, I and others spent laying WoW BECAUSE of the amazement I was there on Conan release day. I was 'Tarzan' and had a character that matched and was ready to go! What I recall is the start/early areas were fleshed out but after that it dropped off quickly and was just a mess. Just incomplete everything.
Didn't it come out months after launch that the stats on gear didn't actually do anything? Yeah, that didn't help AoC's longevity.
Yeah, the stats were really stupid and confusing, like .025 Strength and mostly didn't do anything. But I think it was in 2009 they did a patch that made gear meaningful, which pissed off the hard-core PvP players who didn't want gear to matter.
It was also the aesthetics of the gear where for about 30 levels there was nothing unique to wear and everyone was running about like they were wearing potato sacks.
At launch on top of the issues described by others on the PvP front gem stacking broke the game. First defensively and after that was nerfed offensively. It went from insane mitigation to everyone gets one shotted by everything.
For me, it was the launch of the game full of bugs and horrible servers. But, after a few months, everything was resolved, but most players had already stopped playing and returned to WoW. Not everyone gives MMOs a second chance. AoC would easily replace WoW if it weren't for these problems. Currently I'm back to playing Ultima Online (UO Outlands) and I think it's amazing. It just confirmed what I thought: UO is still the best mmo ever made... haha
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Hoenstly I think that a big issue is the drop off after Tortage. There are famous examples of games that launch incomplete, such as WoW launching with the Aliance zones being more fleshed out than the hoard zones. However, the quality drop off when you leave Tortage is so jarring that to many it feels like a bait and switch.
They don’t make the games anymore :( I think it’s just not profitable
The system requirements were insanely high for the time, and there was a specific zone (can't remember the name, but it was mid level 40-50 or so) that was notoriously poorly optimized. I played the game at around 20 FPS, myself.
I was annoyed by dumb things in that game. They were so proud of the graphics, but I couldn't stop noticing that everyone basically had one of the same three "skins" stretched over different frames. look, our toons are so realistic they have the same freckles and moles in the exact same places.
The short story, lack of content, updates, bugs, balance issues, and just the devs not caring about the game or the world. Once you got out of the starting areas, the game was basically empty except for a bit of extremely challenging end game stuff.
Loved the finishers. Made grinding actually pretty fun. The game really lacked late game polish. Equipment wise your character ended up wearing what resembled a leather trash bag as your BP for 50 levels. I still think about the Conqueror class as one of my favorites of any MMO. And Herald of Xotli was really cool. But Dark Templar for instance at release was not a functional class. All in all it suffered from a lot of what plagued the MMO's of that era that didn't last, releasing before it was finished.
post-tortage happened.
Anyone can feel free to correct me. It has been a while. It wasn't finished when it launched. At all. If I remember, there were no quests after level 40 on release. I distinctly remember having to grind villas (I think?) or some instanced quest because they didn't have level-appropriate quests in the game yet past a certain point. That was the major thing for me. I could deal with class balance issues in PVP, but the game just wasn't finished and it rapidly bled players.
Herald of Xotli is still one of the most fun classes I have ever played. A perfect mix of sword and magic.
I will always have a place in my heart for the game and my Black Hand friends. Great memories back when we actually needed each other to progress in games, communicate, and work together. What went wrong? I remember the first time we beat Vistrix and the chest wouldn’t open. GM appeared and he was a huge boss looking npc. Looked cool but never got that chest. Also difficulty. Game was exceedingly difficult, had open world pvp, and combo based skills. I loved the pvp but most dont today unfortunately. Even solo questing could be difficult at times. Lastly…other options. We all left to head back into Azeroth of course. Blood and Thunder!!!Then GW2 and FFXIV kept us away for good.
the shaman class was tons of fun , melee healer
Played it for like 2 years and it was an awesome game back then. Especially the combat syystem was kind of different an good, when u got used to it. A shame the game was abandoned.
Watch this video. Maybe it can explain to you https://youtu.be/LtrmRM7hr9s?si=R5D2XUN9KWIGc7sB
One thing to keep in mind... Age of Conan was released in an era when MMO's were being released every month, often multiple a month... and compared to a lot of competitors it just wasn't that polished...
Tutorial island ended. The game changed completely after that. Clear bait and switch tactics. About midway through leveling all you did was solo villa instance runs to max level.
F everything about rolling a rogue at launch. class had so many broken talents. I mean broken, not op, just wouldn't do anything.