Age Of Conan Producer Opines On TOR’s Potential

Craig Morrison is a long-time producer with Norwegian game studio Funcom, credited with work on Anarchy Online and more recently, tasked with triage on Age of Conan. (which to his credit has found new life, even before the free-to-play business model adoption.)

So Craig is no stranger to MMO development, and he occasionally writes about his thoughts on MMO design on his personal blog. This week, he wrote up a piece on our favorite upcoming MMO about why he thinks it will be a success, but also the state of the industry and twisted expectations of what “success” is.

The game will most likely sell extremely well out of the gate, almost certainly the most successful first month sales of any MMO ever, and probably by a wide margin…it will then possibly even retain over a million subscription customers (something it should be remembered no game other than World of Warcraft has managed)…truly massive numbers…unless the game somehow collapses it is going to post seriously impressive numbers…yet…you can already read many comments across the net which indicate that there is a sizable number of people who are referring to that as a potential ‘failure’.

Craig mentions that the inherent WoW comparison and while it can’t (and shouldn’t) be avoided, that was a different time:

The cornerstone that drives a lot of the definitions that fans fall back on is of course World of Warcraft…and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. It is natural that people will compare other games to the indutsry leader. What they often fail to acknowledge however is that even World of Warcraft launched in a very different gaming environment. 

Morrison also makes an interesting point on perhaps why many MMO releases seem to carry the stigma of perceived failure:

The other notable factor playing heavily into comments amongst the MMO communities is that veteran players, many of whom have been playing these games for over a decade now, and yearning for the next advance in technology at a time when the industry itself is still refining the experience offered by the first generation of games. 

You could argue that while those veterans yearn for more complex communal experience, developers have been refining how we can succeed at pleasing the individual in a multi-player world. It wouldn’t be an unfair accusation either. These games are expensive, in particular with the requirements of today’s production standards, which makes it less likely the bigger budget games will take risky game-play choices. 

If you’re interested in game design theory, this is a great read. Head over to Craig’s blog for the rest of it!