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Age of Conan: Unchained

Age of Conan 

General Discussion  » Does anyone know why AoC never really took off?

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78 posts found

Apprentice Member

Joined: 11/21/11
Posts: 7246

1/13/13 10:39:03 AM#61
Oh it was a bad buggy launch too, only launch I can think of as possibly as bad bug wise was wow.

Was much worse launch than supposedly buggy warhammer and swtor.

Thankfully funcom learned, tsw was actually a pretty good launch.
  User Deleted
1/13/13 10:43:25 AM#62
Originally posted by allendale5

I played this game and had 5 level 80's and tbh I had a great time of it with my friends.  I didn't quit because of the game, I quit because it became a ghost town.  

It seemed to offer a lot of things that people here on these forums are begging for.  The first few levels were linear but after that, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.  The graphics were good, the story was good imo.  

I liked the different combat style -- it was frustrating at first but tbh a challenge, at least for me.  

Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

 1) The world wasnt well populated after level 20. Tortage was amazing, then you get dropped into a wasteland without enough quests or lore to keep it interesting. They have fixed this now, but it soured many players.

2) The combat was far more annoying at launch, with up to 6 button presses after a combo.

3) The game was buggy at launch.

4) The updates were too slow.


They would be the main four. The first 3 got sorted by the time Rise of the Godslayer came out. The game was grindy, but the dungeons were great at that point, but number 4 crept up again, with the game remaining stagnant for a long time.

So yeah, had a good time in Conan, but there was no long term staying power because of the lack of updates.


Apprentice Member

Joined: 7/17/11
Posts: 976

1/13/13 10:46:24 AM#63
Thats easy and no its not lack of end game etc. Simply the "combo / shield system".  The only people that stayed were the people that liked it and there isnt very many of them.

Advanced Member

Joined: 9/28/04
Posts: 1843

1/13/13 10:46:33 AM#64

There were so many reasons why.

After Tortage the game quality dropped big time...or maybe Tortage was just REALLY good. Then, the massive dungeon bugs making it near impossible to complete the raid dungeons, this was still in game when I left 3 months after release due to not being able to do end game content at all. Then there was the mounted combat issues...the PvP siege issues...the down right HORRID crafting...Funcom taking forever to fix bugs...Funcom not creating new content often...

The list goes on and on...and you can apply it to Anarchy Online and The Secret World also. Funcom, has issues they cant seem to resolve. Fixing bugs, updating the game, listening to players before its too late.

They come up with great ideas, and can never actually bring the potential out.



Apprentice Member

Joined: 1/24/11
Posts: 880

1/13/13 11:05:28 AM#65

No immersion.

1. It wasn't open world. I was very surprised to find that you teleported from zone to zone. Big immersion killer for me.

2. 100 percent instancing. Even in the common areas. It was too much. Should have kept it restricted to specific quest areas. (though this issue solved itself when the populaton dropped below the threshhold to trigger a new instance) Again, big immersion killer when you have to bring up the instance picker and teleport to the same place you just were in order to see the person you're trying to play with.

3. In a multiplayer game the idea that my character is the single hero of the storyline foretold by the stars, is frankly stupid. This is also an immersion killer. In an multiplayer rpg don't tell me who my character is. A big part of the fun is developing my char myself.

4. As nicely done as Tortage was, in a multiplayer game with different races and classes, having only one starting area which made you do the first 17 to 20 levels of each character nearly identically killed my motivation to try new chars.  Not to mention the silliness of a game with thousands of players who all have the almost exact same origin. "Yeah, I woke up on a slave ship, we crashed, I survived, was told I was the prophesised hero" "Really? Me too!" "Hey, same here!" If you're at all interested in who your character is you're pretty much forced to disregard then entire opening of the game.

  User Deleted
1/15/13 12:49:37 AM#66

Well it had a horrible launch.  To the point where after you got out of the starter areas there wasnt much to do.  Everything was buggy and broken.

Once it became popular to hate the game it never fully recoverd.  I think it took them a good year an ahalf to get the game full and playable.  From what ive heard they just kept adding to the game.

Actually debating downloading it, I played this for a while, granted i picked it up a year after launch, and i never subscribe to hating a game because its cool to do so.

All i can remember about the game was that the combat was awesome, best implimentation of a combat system in a mmorpg (aside from tera that is)  Also it was a rare endgame to have clan vs clan territorial seiges and no factional divide amongst the community, meaning you could pvp people you talk to ect.  Really was fantastic.  

I reached a point where sieges and raids got a bit old for me and moved on, also remember the raids were great.


Anyway, glad to see the games still going and they are still developing it.  For all of Funcoms launch problems, they always stick with the game and end up turning it into some great, sadly the game will never be a big hit just because of the launch fiasco and the "its cool to hate" stigma.




Novice Member

Joined: 2/06/04
Posts: 473

1/18/13 4:32:12 AM#67
I just played one character to level 80, explored most of dungeons, completed most of quests and did run raids dungeons. After awhile, my character didn't progress anymore (there was still things to get - but those would have taken forever) and there wasn't more reasonable challenges left (yes - there was still extra hard encounters that would have required highly dedicatd team of players) - so I did quit. Last big expansion didn't really hit to me - I never have liked asian looking stuff. Community didn't really bind me to game - we did run raids and missions, but those were mechanical meetings where you changed your time to get chance win a new gear. If developers really want to keep players like me more than few months, then they must realize that they need more than mechanical game world - they need to create world where players can actually be social, creative and explore each other and themselves.



Novice Member

Joined: 5/20/05
Posts: 2054

1/18/13 4:54:49 AM#68
Originally posted by allendale5




Just wondering why this game never really became successful.  

I personally never played it apart from trying it quickly because at the time it launched i had enough of those bags of buds they would sell as games with box price + monthly fee. Both AoC and Vanguard were trashed because of that.

Compare to other games mmo are super expensive for players so they should deliver top products, and de facto mmo are considered as the "top of gaming" due their nature (persistant world). But not only mmo became nothing else but combat simulator online where they once was full virtual worlds, so they went from the top of gaming to totally bland and "normal" games, so called expensive to develop because they are online, which is bs because pretty much all games are online now. And there is pretty much nothing outstanding about them yet they kept their so called "top gaming experience" price,  not only that but they were so badely coded that they were barely playable, which obviously other "normal" games never really was able to do without commercially failing. And people had enough of this crap so they trashed this kind of behavior and literally bad mouthed both AoC and Vanguard to no end. Imo this is the only reason both AoC and Vanguard failed, and the reason nobody returned to those games either.


Novice Member

Joined: 1/08/07
Posts: 1614

1/18/13 5:01:12 AM#69

There fault was the start of the game.

Tortage was so epic so well designed so brilliant to play through on all classes.  That it was let down afterwards by a normal questing game themepark.


Novice Member

Joined: 9/28/08
Posts: 1652

1/18/13 5:34:35 PM#70

To me, AOC was only fun from level  0-40. The level cap should have been 40 cuz after that, its bricks after bricks. Boring and repetitive. Same shit all over again.

Also, aoc was suppose to be a game focus on pvp, but like any mmorpg, bg's and arena's kills the game. Open world pvp is a mess. Its mindless pvp. You kill, you get kill, but for what? Nothing. Its a repetitive cycle.

C:\Users\FF\Desktop\spin move.gif


Novice Member

Joined: 11/10/12
Posts: 1338

1/21/13 8:03:39 PM#71

Interesting read, because I never played it at launch, only started some months ago when I learned about it through playing TSW.

Right now I´m almost playing as much AoC as I play TSW. Both games are amazing and my favourite MMOs atm.

AoC 4.0 seems very polished to me(again don´t know what it was like but I guess AoC 4.0 is pretty different than AoC 1.0)


I don´t get why people write off games and never return to a game when it is fixed up (which it is apparently, no bugs or crashes so far, everything set to high and it plays smooth like butter and I love the story)

Secrets of Dragon´s Spine Trailer.. ! :D


The Return of ELITE !


Hard Core Member

Joined: 7/02/11
Posts: 1966

1/21/13 8:13:07 PM#72

There was a lot I didn't like about AoC.  The simon says combo system, the healing system, the over use of instancing, the harshness of soloing, the incredibly ugly character avatars, the lackluster adventuring reward systems (decent gear seemed to only come from dungeons and raids, making soloing quite unrewarding).  I'm sure there are more, but I don't want to take the time to think of them  : ) 

Like all of the Funcom games that I have played, AO, AoC and TSW, I find their gameplay to be too hardcore for my tastes, but then again I have a very casual oriented point of view.


Apprentice Member

Joined: 4/14/10
Posts: 467

1/21/13 8:17:59 PM#73
it was literally half done at release there were a lot of features that were part of their selling points for the game that we never got to test in beta once, I was a very early closed beta tester and ya it was trainwreck at launch, few games recover from that.

Advanced Member

Joined: 6/15/07
Posts: 810

1/21/13 8:57:41 PM#74

On the Pve side: 


At launch, many things were broken, or out right missing in the game.  early on Gear was limited to everyone wearing brown paper bag armor (brown, light brown, and dark brown leather armor) , which took a month or two to sacrifice a couple of developers souls push out enough different kinds of armor.

then the large gap between mid levels, where people had to grind, and then the devs once again had to make a new zone for the 40-60 range including extra quests to appease the pve questing crowd. but since the game was themeparked, that content was sucked up like a puddle of water to a sponge.

around that time other mmos started coming by ,  Aion...darkfall..mortal online, Rift.. Fallen Earth...and so on,  whether people liked those games or not, very very few of the pve crowd came back..or returned but didnt stick around due to being tired of funcoms delaying, as well as funcom, ease of falling so closely to the run in the mill cookie cutter quest/raid mentality.

Then, Funcom pretty much said  screw it,  released Rise of the God Slayer, a place where the zone are spacial, but the core of the game itself was one big giant hamster wheel of grinding for purples, tiers and tokens.


On the Pvp side:

Balance issues plagued the classes,  DT being the red headed step child  while TOS and Guardians were gods among men. then there was the gem enchantment issue, one shotting was the norm (ugly norm btw).  funcom revamped gems,  then the flavor of the season, was the Tempest of Set. then once that got resolved , Funcom then had the bright idea (not really) to scrap the current combat system of 1.04 in favor of 1.05, that began the start of gear dependency. 

after 1.05 hit the scene, months later arrived PVP levels.  the community overall was asking for funcom to fix sieges,  since at launch, funcom failed to make sieges work properly, across the board.

So Rise of the God slayer hits,  and the introduction of more pvp levels 1-10 now, the Gap/Gear disparity sky rockets when funcom with their bright idea again, to introduce Shrine of Bori, while blissfully ignoring the common trait of  human beings always taking the path of least resistance to get what they want (i.e.  join super uber giant guild, or super uber giant pvp guild and farm away,). the idea sounded great on paper, but the execution said otherwise.

long story short,  gear disparity, along with funcoms extreme desperation of trying to appease the pve crowd while throwing the pvp crowd a half of a bone (Deathwish) put a sour taste in alot of pvpers mouths, while most of them , if i recall, claiming funcom falling back on their sales pitch of a brutal, mature game - and craigs response boiling down to, and paraphrasing:

"Pvp was never been the focus of AOC"


Me personally, i left around   Rise of the GodSlayer, i lost motivation of doing pvp in the game when Shrines of Bori was introduced.  for me i felt that the game became more about the gear treadmill and group pvp balance instead of individual pvp balance between classes. i ended around getting pvp 7 or 8, that was when funcom then had a hacker breach with a number of accounts being compromised, mine being one of them.  despite getting my account back, my gear was pretty much sold and gone by who knows where - with funcoms customer service being what it is,  I played Age of Conan casually for a extra month or two  then migrated over to SWTOR, then back to Planetside 1.

If i were to go back to AOC, it would strictly to see those that i know and probably just to see what AOC's pve is worth to venture in.  As for AOC on a pvp level -  i dont have that kind of time to be a masochist.


Apprentice Member

Joined: 1/28/13
Posts: 7

1/28/13 11:00:24 PM#75

Age of Conan has very challenging and fun endgame content. Any player who has been disappointed in endgame in other games because of the lack of it or the lack of challenge of it should definitely give Age of Conan a try.

The Dungeons are 6 man Dungeons ( There are plenty of dungeons to explore at all levels however some of the low level ones are avoided by the majority )

The Raids are 24 man Raids. ( There are roughly 9 raids for the raid enthusiast to conquer )

I had the most group-based fun in these dungeons as the level of co-operation required is high to complete these. In other games it's more of a silent routine dungeon run of the day. Groups don't even speak to each other or chat with each other during a dungeon.

For those who are willing to give the game a try, roll on US Set server if you are mainly PvE. If you are a PvPer I recommend you roll a character on Deathwish server. You can only roll one character on that serve and it has good low level world PvP. I had a lot of fun in the early levels doing open world PvP on that server.


Novice Member

Joined: 4/27/11
Posts: 116

2/01/13 3:42:21 AM#76

I remeber I played my first character to 50 the first time I played.  Tortage was great but I remeber the quest after Tortage, and I wondered if my speakers had broken down or something.

It wasn't just that the voice from almost all the quests disapeared, it was also the quality of the quests, from doing relative epic stuff like exploring a prison dungeon, replacing virgin blood with hooker blood and blowing up a volcano, your back to collecting 10x wolf pelts, then 10x badger pelts, and next quest was to collect 10 planks... wtf.


Then there was the economy, back at launch there was no BOE system, so you could equip items and then sell them again. Blue items sold for 1-2 copper back then. If there is one thing I enjoy to do in a game then it's so sell my loot I get on adventures and buy stuff I need, and perhaps make a profit too.

Eventually they sorted it out, and when I returned from hollidays in August there was BOE on blue/green items, and a recipe system. The improved crafting system worked quite well, but they never built on it after 2009. It's now getting a full replacement.




Novice Member

Joined: 9/30/04
Posts: 160

2/01/13 1:36:09 PM#77

Bottom line for me: it's just  not that great of a PVE game. The game play doesn't even come close to say, WoW or Vanguard and the toxic community makes you want to avoid other players at all costs. Don't get me wrong,  It's a very good looking game but it's always seemed to me that they pissed away their entire budget on the graphics engine and combo system then added everything else at the last minute as an afterthought.





Joined: 7/26/03
Posts: 11795

2/01/13 1:44:53 PM#78
Originally posted by paul43



agree, stark contrast between Tortage and after

- leading to big disappointments w AoC

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