Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Age of Conan: State of the Game Address

Gaute Godager put out a memo to the community today. Basically it covers how they're coming along and also detailing the cuts they've had to make to the game. Basically it boils down to the usual "We're nearly there, just polishing and getting everything working", plus he lets loose with his reasoning behind why some features are cut from the final release.

Namely: why we're down to 12 from 14 classes (4 weren't strong on their own, so they merged them into 2), why forced player formations are out (not fun to lose control of your character if you're stuck in the formation), and why spell-weaving ended up being too complex to keep (too much reliance on spell-weaving equalled bad situations for party-play).

I can't say this sways me either way towards faith or losing faith, but rather that it reaffirms something I've been thinking about MMOs for a while: Focus on a select group of features and fine-tune them. Don't try to do too much. Gaute and crew know this as well as anyone it seems.

Now if only I could get that spot in General Beta...

Here's a link to his full update for those interested. Some interesting stuff aside from what I've mentioned.

Gaute Opens his Trap and Lets Loose a Fury of Info

2 comments:

Keen said...

Hey Bildo, are you the TTH AoC CM yet?

Bildo said...

I'll be an ACM come early March, the main management position went to Machail who also runs the VG portal there.

It was going to be earlier that I started, but the delay slowed down the need to get me in so quickly. ;)