MMORPG.com's Carolyn koh was at E3. While there, Carolyn caught up with Erling Ellingson of Funcom and Rick Reyonlds of Eidos to talk about the future of the game.

Although Eidos was not showing Age of Conan at E3 this year, Product Manager, Erling Ellingson of Funcom and Rick Reynolds, Sr. Marketing Manager of Eidos were on hand to talk about it.

“We've got our roadmap of patches already out,” said Erling.  “And we are working on a holiday version of the game box,”  added Rick.  The holiday version is just a box which will be  fun to give as a gift.  We looked at the various versions of Age of Conan boxes that was being shown behind glass as we walked into the Eidos meeting room.  Nothing has been decided as to what the holiday premium will be, if it will be a fun piece of equipment or bling, but “If you have any ideas,” said Rick, “I'd love to hear them!”

Read the whole thing here.

wtf a holiday edition?!? how lame

Originally posted by falc0n

wtf a holiday edition?!? how lame

Lol yeah, what I thought too.

some pretty interesting info in there I must say it has excited me a bit.  The holiday edition may be cool depending on what it comes with.  (in game bonuses or cool swag.)

anyways great story and very informative looking forward to this kingship thing.

They throw that poorly designed bug ridden broken  game out there and then have the nerve to say we have some more for you.

There was a lot of 'It will have' & 'They will get' in there which of course directly translated means 'it doesn't have' & 'they aint got it yet'.  But hey, that don't matter the people who haven't bought it yet can look forward to christmas conan and his fluffy santa suit, these guys really need to get a clue.

Would love to see how many subscribers fell off after the 1st month.

I know I was one of them, lack of communication and game stability.

How about fixing all the bugs for a Holiday Edition.

Originally posted by eric1000

There was a lot of 'It will have' & 'They will get' in there which of course directly translated means 'it doesn't have' & 'they aint got it yet'.  But hey, that don't matter the people who haven't bought it yet can look forward to christmas conan and his fluffy santa suit, these guys really need to get a clue.

Exactly my thoughts. But you can't deny the effectiveness of the overhype system. They ignore everything that is happening, they make up their own "facts" and keep the hype going!

One poster is already hyped and dying to preorder whatever they want to sell lol.

I had to laugh when I read that you could enter a guilds city if they had no walls or gates, well if you tried to enter any other guilds city you will find yourself at the end of the city guards sword and running back to reclaim your gravestone. Not too sure they really intended the guards to be aggro to non guildies.

Originally posted by urbanmonkey

Originally posted by eric1000

There was a lot of 'It will have' & 'They will get' in there which of course directly translated means 'it doesn't have' & 'they aint got it yet'.  But hey, that don't matter the people who haven't bought it yet can look forward to christmas conan and his fluffy santa suit, these guys really need to get a clue.

 

Exactly my thoughts. But you can't deny the effectiveness of the overhype system. They ignore everything that is happening, they make up their own "facts" and keep the hype going!

One poster is already hyped and dying to preorder whatever they want to sell lol.

Looks like they got their lessons from the US government.

From the game developers:  “'The speed of levelling is conforming to our expectations,' said Erling.   'The game design is targeted at getting players to the level 80 end game of siege warfare, city capture and city building.  The objective during the journey to the end game is for the player to understand their character, to relate to it and to learn it.  Funcom doesn't believe in making a player grind in the lower levels or make levelling hard and slow.'"

In point of fact, AoC has the fastest leveling pace of any major MMO on the market.  It takes about 120 hours played to reach maximum level.  The previous king of fast leveling, World of Warcraft, requires about 360 hours.  Now Funcom is telling us that this speed is by design.  So what is there to do when you get there?  City building is out if you join an established guild.  They will mostly have their cities built by this point.  Especially the large guilds.  But if you are part of a smaller guild, you can look forward to many, many hours spent harvesting resource nodes as part of the level 80 "content".  Yeah, that's a lot of fun!  Not.  As for siege warfare and city capture, those features still don't work right.  It's an endless parade of bugs.  Even if/when they do get it working right, it's still not going to be the massive 200 vs. 200 PvP battles that were promised.  In order to allow a mere 36 per side, they had to cut visibility in the battle keep zones so much that you can't see the outer walls from the top of the keep.  To date, no guild has successfully captured a battle keep.  Not because it's so difficult, but because bugs make it impossible.  Even if the defenders fail to show up for the fight (which isn't uncommon given that these battles have to take place during odd hours, and can only happen once every 3 days), the battle keep still can't be taken by the attackers.

As for the statement that "Funcom doesn't believe in making a player grind in the lower levels or make levelling hard and slow," let's look at the facts:  Once you pass level 50, content quickly starts to evaporate.  By the 60's, it's almost entirely gone.  Your life at that point consists of repeatedly running the four "villas" quests and AoE grinding for experience.  Once you do hit a milestone where new content opens up, that content is exhausted well before you reach the next milestone. 

The game looks great, but its "epic draw distances" that were advertised are considerably less vast than Vanguard (once fog is disabled) -- and Vanguard does it without instancing.  AoC is VERY heavily instanced in order to make the pretty graphics possible and allow a port to the Xbox 360.  Also, the box states that the game supports DirectX 10, but lies.  The devs still give no word on when that will actually make it into the game, despite the false advertising of the box.  And as for the Xbox 360 version, that has been pulled from online resellers like Amazon and Gamestop.  They used to list it, but no more.  The developers originally planned on it launching in September of this year.  It has now been pushed back to "late 2009."  I wonder if that's in real time, or Funcom time.  These are, after all, the people who promised the new PvP rules by "late June, or the very beginning of July" -- changes that have yet to actually materialize.

In the final analysis, this game starts strong but quickly fizzles.  It blasts you through the early levels, then leaves nothing to do once you reach your destination.  Crafting is decidedly lackluster, the economy is a shambles, and almost all end-game content is broken.  Players are abandoning the game in droves, while many others hang on simply because there's nothing else until this fall's batch of new MMO's hit the market.  Calls are constantly going out for server mergers.  Customer service is terrible.  (Consider how the developers are pleased that support is now to a point where most requests are handled in "only" one day.  Of course, that's partly because there are now far fewer players even asking for support.  The rest have left, or have learned not to bother.)  The forums are on heavy moderation lockdown.  Posts of dissatisfaction are quickly labeled as "troll bait" and locked.  Put it all together, and you have a game that's going nowhere fast.  My recommendation is to skip it entirely.  Alternatively, buy it and play the free month.  You'll see most of the content in that time, anyway.
 

Only 3 more feet to go to get 6 feet under . Holiday pack to pay for fixes ? this is a new low for any gaming company.

at this point they must believe they are gaming developer gods and the game community / forums / critics are all retarded.

Nothing is funnier then watching egos parish ala Sigil.

The 30 days included with the game are well worth 35€. Then it's up to you if you wanna keep playing/paying or not.

I've purchased single player games that either are not worth the 50/60€ they cost just because they are plain bad or some other games that are good but they have so few content that I can finish them in a single day like CoD4 which is a really nice game but provided game content only for a day.

All the other stuff was kind of "blah blah blah more promises blah blah blah" but I read they're going to revamp the UI. Hmm, really? Perhaps make it more WoW-like?

This could be a good game in about a year or so, at the present it is not one at all.

I still don't understand why they thought that leveling to 80 in such a fast time is a good thing, like previous posters mentioned most of the things you can do at 80 are broken and there are not that many things to do at present.

Fast leveling is only good if the end game is there and working which is not even close at present.

After waiting almost 7 days for a stuck character petition, I am glad they are actually improving that, but then, there are a lot less players on the servers now too.

Funcom has a long way to go for this to be a good game, lets hope the initial funding they got from selling all those boxes gets them there. 

I don't think the holiday edition will be a big seller, as War will be out and everyone will be trying out the new game on the block.

Well I wish them luck, they will certainly need it.

I want what these guys are smoking...

Is Funcom located in Amsterdam by chance?

So much smoke being blown...

Originally posted by tinywulf

Would love to see how many subscribers fell off after the 1st month.

I know I was one of them, lack of communication and game stability.

How about fixing all the bugs for a Holiday Edition.

How about lack of content?  I don't care about communication.  That shit happens with every developer and games stability for me was good.

---

Originally posted by abal
The 30 days included with the game are well worth 35€.

---

Unfortunately, the 30 days game time, so graciously included with the games purchase, is worth exactly the same as one months subscription fee (~15€). In fact, that box and all the goodies inside it, is only really worth the same 15€. It's not like it has any value outside of it's use with a game subscription. In essence you're paying an outrageous markup on your first month of play time. (What you're really doing is paying off Funcom's debt to Eidos.)

Erling is a lier. This guy is painting a different picture than what is actually going on.  If they really wanted players getting to 80 easily they wouldn't have implemented changes like taking away xp for gray quests (which they re-enabled after an uproar from the player base) or changing how much XP the Villa quests (repeatable quests to grind) give you.  They have made mobs more difficult to kill and they almost doubled the xp needed from 70 to 80.

Originally posted by Ascension08

All the other stuff was kind of "blah blah blah more promises blah blah blah" but I read they're going to revamp the UI. Hmm, really? Perhaps make it more WoW-like?

LOL. They promised to revamp the UI back in may. Now it's almost end of july and they just put out this Revamp UI promise as NEW news

Mark my words, next month they going to promiss (again) to start adding more armor sets (like they promised back in may). LOL!

Seems like FAILcom is running out of things to promiss, so they hope the people are stupid enough to have forgotten the old promisses and fall for it AGAIN

For the FIRST TIME EVER!  I agree with all but one of you (the one who is looking forward to the lame gift box).  This game is broken! dont waste your time.

Originally posted by abal

The 30 days included with the game are well worth 35€. Then it's up to you if you wanna keep playing/paying or not.

I've purchased single player games that either are not worth the 50/60€ they cost just because they are plain bad or some other games that are good but they have so few content that I can finish them in a single day like CoD4 which is a really nice game but provided game content only for a day.

yeah thats why 9 month later I still play COD 4 for at least an hour an day. So much for 1 day's content.

I would rather have a cactus rammed down my 1 eyed purple headed dragon than pay 1p for Conan

aoc is dead, some ppl think it needs time to get fixed, but personnaly i dont think this game is going to be....

2mounth ago we were 50-80 gamer loged per night in our ally, and 1month ago barely half of that, since 2weeks ago 2-5....only casuals can stand staying on aoc, hardcore gamers just left, and most of them arn't coming back, and personnaly i dont like games with casuals community, hardcore gamers and competition come hand in hand....reminds me of vanguard.

i wish one thing, that another company buy aoc from funcom.

and well now waiting for aion, i stick with ncsoft.

OMG just *look* and who she (Carolyn Koh) spoke with!  She was @ E3 and spoke with *cough* the FunCom AoC Product Manager and the *cough* Eidos' marketing guy!

These two  are very likely the guys who were most responsible for most, if not all that sizzle in AoC's pre-release hype -- tons of broken promises and when they did deliver the game there was very little steak -- AoC went live with a Closed Beta product, which even today, in it's third month after the game went live, we still have not seen a release quality product.

Mr. Erling tell Ms. Koh that AoC "probably has the largest live team around at this time as the entire team is still working on the game"... I said "*HELL YOU'D BETTER BE!  THE GAME IS STILL BETA QUALITY!*" ... but then later on in the article, they tell Ms. Koh they are breaking some people away from AoC to work on the Expansion -- Expansion?!!?  Focus on the beta game you have now please -- get it to release quality ASAP, and only then pull people out ok? LOL!

I'll give FunCom credit for one thing these guys mentioned -- bravo to FunCom on tghe CSAs -- Customer Service has improved tremendously and are closing the gap/almost up to par with Turbine. 

I am currently playing and enjoying AoC, the future looks promising..keep up the good work Funcom!!, you got alot of support from majority of the gamers...