Age of Conan

I agree with Whacko, No one is held accountable if an MMO fails. Vanguard got away with murder. Video games are the only product in America that can't be returned for money back, and MMO's are worse you don't get back $15 a month. 

AoC is using an even better marketing tool. They use fans in key places to help market their product, a few are on this site. 

I believe that vanguard will be the biggest flop in history - but AOC will be close behind it, so far sources are reporting invisible walls, bugs, bad graphics, linear gameplay, and generally a second gen game.

I do feel sad for the AOCbois that have been following this game for so long.

Uh oh, first post... hello there!

Regarding MMORPG-Flops... we shall not forget EA's "Motor City Online". Well, it wasn't a RPG but you had to pay a monthly fee - I think that's the reason it deserves to be mentioned here.

MCO was a Racing-MMO developed as "Need For Speed Motor City" (Project Title), a revolutionary view at the racing genre with many elements of MMORPGs like Items (car parts), rare stuff (rare cars/parts), socialising (Clubs/clubraces), avatars, content patches (cars/tracks/gameplay addons). MCO was great fun, addictive, skillbased, well-balanced, easy to learn & hard to master. Too bad it became an epic failure:

- gfx-engine was totally outdated by release (10/2001) with gfx used by NFS3

- lag/crashes/cheating was horrible those days... remember paying for an online game wasn't popular in 2001.

- there was absolutely ZERO marketing&promotion (hey, EA!)

- and maybe the biggest reason to be D00mz: They promised content patches (cars/tracks/parts blabla) to be distributed after release. But what did they do? They ripped off about 30% of the content seen in beta (cars/tracks/parts) and gave something from that stuff back every several months, allthough the data was placed on the retail cd-rom already!!! Imagine WoWs Burning Crusade Addon sleeping on your HD since 2005 but released as "new stuff".

They sold about maybe 20k copies of MCO... 4 servers from the start... an average of 300 people per server playing on prime time six months after release... 120 a year after release... two years after release in 8/2003 the servers were shut down by EA in order to concentrate on the next epic failure Earth & Beyond. 

Now thats what I call one of the biggest flops in MMO history. 

But I would still pay&play If I could...   

My vote is on Dark and Light.  The biggest belly flop is made from the highest board, and the D&L hype was in the stratosphere until its release.

The Vanguard hype wasn't anywhere near as high as the D&L hype.

I say just wait for the game to come out and then post an intelligent opinion.

Like Vanguard, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, etc (these were the last major MMORPG's...) Age of Conan will flop.

And there is a reason it will flop: too high grahics, means toooo, way toooo much LAG for an MMO.

This combined with so called "real time" combat will mean that the guys with the lesser lag will win all the time. Bye skill, bye advantages of gear.

All this for a PvP game and you are DONE.

Of course this was already mentioned by a LOT of pre reviewers on the web, but what did the developpers do?

They put in the first 20(!) levels of solo play for Conan.

With this method they could fill in the content and PRE LOAD graphs so players won't be aware of the terrible lag when they want to do battles of let's say 10 against 10 in the later levels.

So ... who is cheating on who in this MMORPG, which for its first 20 levels is just an off line game with preloaded fancy graphics.

But like neutral comments said on the web: the moment you fight with groups 5 against 5 it's LAG time and really unplayable.

There you go ...

Another one bites the dust .. N E X T

War's incoming implosion will suck more air then AoC's.

That's all I have to say on the topic.

What are you people so getting worked up about? The chances of Age of Conan having a good launch are slim to none, that's just MMO life. Will the game grow up to be good and/or succesful? Time will tell. If not, then not...

If you don't want to waste money, wait a year before you buy it. It will be a lot easier to judge by then...

And the people hurt most by a failed game are the developers, not us.

Honestly, all the bugs in the world won't be the problem for AoC

The absurd system requirements, on the other hand, I would consider the game's biggest nemesis.

Cutting edge technology is cool, I'm glad they're rewarding those who are up to date. But it's just a simple fact that not everyone has super computers, or even great computers. Practically requiring a monstrous machine to even play the game is silly, honestly, and I think that will hurt the sales ,more than any other factor.