Interview: Turning AoC Around



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We recently contacted FunCom to find out just what was involved in turning Age of Conan around after the less-than-perfect launch last year.

Age of Conan was a highly anticipated game, seen as a possible contender for World of Warcraft's MMORPG crown. However, a number of setbacks including delays on launch day, performance issues on lower spec machines and a lack of content immediately after launch had players leaving the game after a short period. Despite good initial sales, Funcom had to merge several servers, and rumours of the game's poor subscription retention were rife.

However, recently we've seen a tremendous amount of work go into Conan, and with the recent release of update 5, the game is looking stronger than ever.

We contacted Funcom's Erling Ellingsen to find out what troubles the company faced after launch, and what the company had to do to get the game back on track.

What went wrong with the launch of Conan and, with hindsight, what could you have done to prevent it?

Actually, the launch of Age of Conan was a huge success both in terms of sales and technical performance. We shipped a huge amount of copies and became the best-selling MMO of 2008, and in terms of attention it was a brilliant success. Of course, that's not really what determines if an MMO had a successful launch or not, so we were also very happy to see that we had very few, if any, of the technical problems that usually arises when launching an online game of this size. People flooded onto the servers, people had a lot of fun, and I think everyone - both developers and players - walked around in a state of bliss for quite some time after launch. So apart from a game engine that unfortunately had performance issues for some players - particularly among players with lower computer specifications - after launch, we believe the launch itself went very, very well.

However, we did not live up to the expectations in terms of content and advanced features. There were content gaps in the game, particularly at higher levels, and advanced features such as sieging and city building were simply not good enough. It took a while for players to get to that point, and when they did, we met some significant challenges. We realized that, we listened to the feedback we got, and our developers went into a period of intense work on the game post-launch. In the few months after launch the game things really started to improve, and now, after a whole year of massive updates, I think most players will agree to the fact that it almost plays like an entirely different game. We've also had to go back and radically change core design decisions - such as the non-item-centric nature of the game, just because it didn't work well enough for players over time. This wasn't a bugged feature, it worked exactly as we designed it, but it's one of the things that just didn't work out well over time and so, recently, we revamped the whole thing!

Can you describe the problems you faced immediately after launch and what you did to combat them at the time?

I think that's pretty much answered in the answer above, but let me go into a bit more detail. One problem we faced immediately was that Age of Conan ran very well on high-end machines, but many players without those kind of systems had an experience where performance simply wasn't good enough. There were also memory leaks and other issues that we had to correct in the client, so a lot of the work we did after launch was simply working on improving the performance and getting rid of the most significant bugs. I think this is something we handled relatively quickly, and soon after launch the game's performance had improved significantly across a wider range of systems.