Funcom adds another ball to their juggling act

[AOFanboi]

Funcom are going to the stock exchange, but the real meat is two items I picked up in some Norwegian online newspaper articles related to the news release:

• Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is apparently slated for a Q4 2006 release for the PC, and sometime in 2007 for consoles. I am guessing next-gen here.
  
• They are also working on another MMOG, a "modern-day" (2023 Earth with aliens and magic?) game with the working title "The World Online".

All this, and Dreamfall (The Longest Journey 2) too.

Methinks they are spreading their resources thin - and AO is in dire need of a fixup as shattering as the SW:G one.

[Hoax]

I  Funcom, now if only they have actually learned anything from the mistakes in AO we might be looking at the next NCsoft or perhaps even better.

[AlteredOne]

I have a strange soft spot for Funcom, and I'm optimistic that they might actually be able to deliver some true FUN in Age of Conan.  I'm just a bit surprised they have the funding for so many development projects, considering that AO seems to be on its last legs.  I get a desperate e-mail from them about weekly, reminding me that I can get free access to their expansions.  Nevermind that I already own some of those expansions.

AO had a certain charm as a creative gameworld, but somehow it never really gelled.  The lack of any compelling PvP experience doomed it for me.

[AOFanboi]

I think they do allright with subscriptions and the ad-supported free clients. Plus there is some funding coming in every now and then - for instance the Nordic governments are somewhat supportive of their game industries. (Iceland, Sweden and Denmark also have dev studios, Norways has a few more than Funcom as well - like Innerloop, makers of Project I.G.I. and the JSF combat flight sim.) The registrsation on the Oslo stock exchange is apparently to get even more funding, though.

[SurfD]

I wounder if they could get away with calling that one game "the World Online".  I mean, whoever created the .hack// games and anime should already have "The World" under some kind of trademark/copyright, shouldnt they?

[Evil Elvis]

Methinks they are spreading their resources thin - and AO is in dire need of a fixup as shattering as the SW:G one.

They need to revamp the character control and action scheme to something resembling intuitive, gut their IP point system so that it flows better with their race/class system, and redo their GUI (again).  Oh, and get a crafting system that doesn't not make sense.  Then we're still left with a repeatative, bland mmorpg that noone really would go back to. :)

[Zane0]

AO is full of layered eccentricities from its many years of buggy updates; the engine is full of leaks and is incredibly inefficient.  Given its questionable profitability, I think it'd probably be better to start from scratch if one wanted to do a thorough overhaul.

[AlteredOne]

Then we're still left with a repeatative, bland mmorpg that noone really would go back to. :)

When I first tried AO, I thought the Clan vs Omni concept looked neat, and the various "no suppression" (PvP) areas added a thrill.  In practice this was never fleshed out, and the later Notum Wars expansion just made a ridiculously complex system where guilds attacked each others' bases for bragging rights.  I never did figure out the mysteries of the level limitations in PvP, i.e. for some reason it made since to twink lower-level alts to attack other guilds' bases.  I guess the low-level toons couldn't be attacked by level 200 toons, and with 200 levels there was no guarantee the defending guild would have their own twinked alts in the right level range to defend.  Or something like that.

Which leads me to a bedrock principle...  If I cannot even DESCRIBE the PvP system of a game, it is fuxxored.  It's hard to say exactly who plays AO anymore.  I reactivated for a free ad-sponsored trial maybe 9 months ago, and I was impressed at the remarkable idiocy level of the public chat.  Somebody turned over a rock, and let the AO kiddies out.