Saturday Jaw Session: Worried About Age of Conan?
May 3, 2008
In a refreshingly new and delightfully smelling (lavender) series here at WAAAGH!, the Saturday Jaw Session is here to kick off the weekend with a discussion topic relevant to WAR. It’s kind of like forums, except we don’t have them and it’s slightly less convenient to use!
So!
With Age of Conan in open beta and nearing release, a lot of talk has stirred up in the WAR community over this title. What are your thoughts? Will WAR and AoC compete for market share? Will AoC peter out before WAR hits? Will millions and millions of impatient WAR fans desert and cross over to Funcom’s bosom?
Leave your thoughts in the comments section, along with any fresh fruit or bubble gum as a peace offering.
Waaagh! A Warhammer Online Blog 
As I was reading from Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog they were saying that the open-beta of Conan was very buggy and unstable. However the closed-beta was much more up to date and had fewer bugs. They were saying however that Funcom shot themselves in the foot since they blew their first impression. For those who do not read up on AoC or know of the closed-beta they think the open is very buggy and crashes a lot. This is not good PR for Funcom at all, since in MMOs you only get one chance to impress people and if they do not like it well then you blew it.
I think that AoC is more a clique in the market since for one you need a relatively high performance computer to play well on it and also its rated M. WAR is trying to appeal to the PvP fans and also those who are just tired of WoW. I do think though that WARs biggest competition will not be AoC but WotLK instead.
AoC will target a different type of crowd, and WAR is closer to WoW than AoC. I’ve already got AoC CE on pre-order and will be playing it, but I suspect by the time WAR comes out, I’ll be done with AoC, or had my share. If not, can always come back to it later, but WAR is where I really want to be. It seems to have a lot more. Then there is WotLK, which I will get, but probably won’t jump into right away, much like TBC. TBC only provided about six months of content (from lvl 1 to 70, epic flier, and geared totally in epics in just a few months), and so I am expecting the same from Wrath, I just don’t think Blizzard can provide long term content.
WAR will probably be my home, assuming it doesn’t suck completely, up until the next great MMO, such as Starcraft Online. But in the future, MMO makers will have to make sure to provide better account security, because any popular MMO will have to deal with account hacking, and it’s killing WoW. They could easily make it secure, but Blizzard is sitting on their asses about improving login security with user authentication system via mouse clicks, and using different login’s for forums than for your account. Blizzard is full of fail.
Account ‘hacking’ isn’t killing World of Warcraft…time is. As is everything, the new and shiny gets the dollars as long as it’s good. So far nothing I’ve seen or read tells me AoC is going to be any more than a flash in the pan.