Originally Posted by
ArcaneScientius
I agree with you, but Krippa is also right that more focus on polishing the games would have improved their life expectancy. Moving on from a half-finished product does not improve your odds for sales of future products.
AoC could do with a revamp and rework of many parts and quests, including many of the lower levelling zones, and some work on the graphics, as well as just more content, such as more and new quests for all parts of the game.
I half-agree with you on the PvP-MMO and PvE-MMO argument, but AoC did garner much interest initially for both PvE and PvP (even now many people play AoC for PvE, though I love my PvP), but the game was badly neglected while TSW was being developed, so it lost many of the people who were active. These people rarely come back, but if the cadence of updates and improvements had been kept high, then many could have been kept playing the game. And the continuous updates would have meant that the game would have been in a better state now with a larger player base.
The lack of attention span of Funcom is the main problem the company should address.
Some of the mechanics in the games are from the early 2000s MMOs (fetch X of Y and return to Z, boring!), and new ideas could have helped, such as more complex and involved quest chains, PvP quests, (I don’t know, just some new ideas, maybe player-designed quests that then get voted on by Testlive players and then developed by FC. AoC seems to have been made to mimic WoW despite having much broader potential for other ideas and not stuck in the “high fantasy” genre of elves, fairies and PG-13 stuff. AoC seems to have come between the WoW and new MMO timeframe, so introduced in a time of changes to MMOs, while being stuck with the old MMO ideas).
But, the ship has sailed over the horizon, not just out of port, so I really doubt any actions can change the direction Funcom is heading and our beloved AoC. Let’s hope some person with too much money and time will buy the IP and pay some developers to upgrade it. But I seriously doubt it. We are probably looking at another gaming house buying their IP once they go into liquidation.