Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (AoC) was a promising game: built upon an interesting intellectual property which doesn’t represent the n^th incarnation of Elves vs. Orcs vs. Dwarves, with a mature setting, an action packed combat system and excellent graphics it attracted many players and was considered a successful launch¹.

The game developed badly after its launch in May 2008: it wasn’t ready and players left en masse. In September 2008 Funcom appointed a new Producer and Game Director for AoC².

Nelson William’s blog entry called Age of Conan: How an MMORPG Dies resulted in a heated debate – there is no joint opinion on the current state of the game, but the commentators agree that the game launched in a bad state.

It is safe to say that people leave a game for many different reasons – I left AoC because new DirectX (June  2008) broke the AoC’s rendering for me on my Vista (32 bit) and I needed to upgrade DirectX. Back then, my investigation led me to the conclusion that the 3D engine of AoC was extremly error-prone.

I know that this is fixed now and since the new guy in “charge of AoC” seems to have done a good job at resolving the problems the game had and now starts to bring in new features, I’m inclined to ask:

Is Age of Conan back on track?

1. Funcom announcing one million shipped copies [↩]
2. Funcom appointing new Producer and Game Director for AoC [↩]