October 29, 2009 – MMO Fallout

09NovemberPBEdit — This Article has nothing to do with naked women...

If Age of Conan could be transposed into a human being, it would probably call you up at two in the morning, drunk, and wondering why you dumped it so long ago. Whenever it phones up, it has brand new explanations for why we should take it back, new incentives we may not have had several months prior, and new tricks it learned that it can’t wait to show us.

But let’s keep this about the game, shall we? Recently Funcom launched a slew of price reductions on the game, and its subscription rate. The boxed copy currently runs you around twenty dollars USD, and multi-month subscriptions were slashed, up to 45% cheaper as you increase in time prepaid.

Is it working?

“I can’t comment on any numbers,”
-Erling Ellingson

Gee…Thanks, Erling, chief spokesperson for Funcom.

What Funcom can tell us, however, is that the updates have been a huge success at least with the current players. Funcom also launched a veteran system recently, where players accumulate points for each month of subscription, that increases incrementally the longer you sustain a subscription. Funcom is continuing to address concerns of content gaps, and the title has its first expansion pack in the works: Rise of the Godslayer.

Here’s hoping this helps Age of Conan’s subscriber numbers. Otherwise, Funcom can always make the title freemium, offer a free basic version with a paid upgrade, similar to that of Anarchy Online. Doing so might entice more people into putting a 30 gigabyte game on their system.

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It always pains me to see an MMO fail before it is even launched. As is the case with Mechscape, Jagex’s upcoming Science Fiction MMO, a spiritual successor to Runescape, as CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed to Eurogamer today that the title is indeed canned.

In an interview with Mechscapeworld.com, Mark Gerhard had this to say:

“Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew [Gower] is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn.” – Mark Gerhard

With the death of one comes the rise of another. Innovations brought about by the production of Mechscape have gone towards the production of Stellar Dawn, a different yet somehow similar MMO to the little guy who never had a chance.

Hopefully Jagex has learned the same truth that Richard Garriot learned with Tabula Rasa: Just because you are an established name, does not guarantee all of your products will succeed.

On that note, it is good to see Jagex catching up to the rest of the mmo world in terms of features. The company just launched a name changing service, and is currently beta testing a feature to see a log of your character’s activity, including amount of time played (see WoW Armory)