Jun
23

AoC – Lots O’ Patches Mean What?

16 Comments

When we see a game patch this much, what does that tell you? Well, it tells us one of two things:
a) The game was not ready to launch and Funcom is having a bunch of “oh shit” moments fueled by Mountain Dew.
b) “man…are these guys ever dedicated to the enhancement of the AoC experience”

Those are the responses that I’m getting from reading various articles out there about the frequency of the patches. The last time I saw this type of patch frequency was in Vanguard. I really hesitated typing that for a minute because, gawd Darren, AoC is NOTHING like Vanguard was at launch.

I think it’s a combination of the two actually. They probably did release a bit on the early side. Reports of the first siege came in last week and they weren’t that good. Also, if I hear of one more Necro fix/nerf/improvement, I think I’ll scream. I would have had no issues if they would have held back a couple months…but these fixes wouldn?t have guaranteed I?d stick with AoC. Actually…I doubt it would have. I am positive that they are 120% dedicated to their game and I equally as positive that the success (…yes, I think we can call it that now…) of AoC is only fueling that commitment even further.

I am concerned about their people though. At the rate they are going, their designers are going to resemble something out of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video soon (…Woot! First Thriller reference on the site…./high five). You need to let designers run out and play every once and a while. You know, throw the ball around…frolic with the females and all that jazz.

D out.

Posted in Age of Conan
16 Comments Posted by Darren

16 Responses to "AoC – Lots O’ Patches Mean What?"

  • Jack Ratched says:
    June 23, 2008 at 11:52 am

    Personally, these weekly (and sometimes twice-weekly) patches tell me that the game was just released recently and that the developers are working to whack-a-mole a bunch of bugs, some major game mechanic improvements, and some balance issues. I don’t read that much into it. Red flags for me would be the wholesale scrapping and re-introduction of major game systems. I like the direction the game is moving, but it remains to be seen how long they can keep up the pace and how successful they are at creating a compelling endgame.

  • Hudson says:
    June 23, 2008 at 11:57 am

    Alex, I’ll take “What is a ?oh shit? moment fueled by Mountain Dew” for 200 please

  • Hudson says:
    June 23, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    “wholesale scrapping and re-introduction of major game systems”

    There were enough class adjustments done I think to almost warrant that thought. Like Necros for example. Was this stuff not realized in beta?
    I wonder if necros consider todays patch a boon or a bust

  • Scott says:
    June 23, 2008 at 12:13 pm

    Great example of not only releasing too early (taking advantage of a small window of opportunity between upcoming “big” launches) but also of beta issues. We didn’t get the chance to actually test a lot of this stuff in beta, and there are tons of complaints from long-time beta guys who constantly submitted “Houston, we have a problem!” feedback only to have it ignored. That’s common though.

    Here’s a possible train of comparison to Vanguard, Darren: each was designed for PC’s that did not exist at the time of launch. Seriously… AoC wants to have next-gen graphics *and* huge end-game battles? If you run into a heavily populated city on the weekends in WoW, how much does your frame rate drop? And that’s low-poly-count WoW ffs… Funcom is going to have to not only kill the eye candy in seiges, they might need to come up with all new last-gen models as well to make this work.

  • Bildo says:
    June 23, 2008 at 12:14 pm

    @Hudson: We all know that though stuff can be realized in beta, it doesn’t mean changes will make it in for release. A company like Funcom was lucky to get so many delays from their publisher, and while things could be better with Conan given more time, I think they’ve done an admirable job keeping the game (for the most part) in a playable state. Despite bugs, big or small, the game’s playable and fun for lots of people.

    The sad truth is, often developers are just not given enough time before the publisher says, “Press it, now”.

    The patches are mostly good though, and often fix a lot of needed things… but then there’s stuff like the reported “Alchemists opening their crafting book will crash the client” bug that make you shake your head and wonder how many QA people they have on payroll.

  • Darren says:
    June 23, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    @ Hudson:
    “In 1991, James Martin introduced this term…”

  • br3ntbr0 says:
    June 23, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    I don’t think we’ll be seeing any fantasmagical press releases from Funcom about box sales and subscriber numbers for a while…if ever again. The free month is up, and I’d bet we’ll see an exodus of all but the truly dedicated players. There’s the “typical” new mmo pain, then there’s this, which is an untested game. Every time I read about AoC I’m glad I jumped ship. Too bad that by the time they rectify these problems either WoW’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion will be out, or EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online will be available. When either of those happens I predict AoC heads to the MMO graveyard if things are not completely fixed and the endgame is magically made better…which I doubt, considering its intense system requirements.

  • Beauis McMaximus says:
    June 23, 2008 at 1:11 pm

    That’s why we will buy the new game, try it out, and then give it some time without us. Then we return like 5 months later. I don’t feel like doing the research, but I’m sure most MMO’s have a decent amount of patching to be done from the beginning. Maybe they are just going gung ho and gettin’ em all slammed out while they the dev team and cash?

    Oh well. And Darren, AoC’s launch was NOTHING like VG’s!!!! :)

    Beau

  • Beauis McMaximus says:
    June 23, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    GAWL!!!

  • Scott says:
    June 23, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    This is only a small part of the picture since many, many people don’t use Xfire, but it’s tracking is showing a steady decline in people playing AoC…

    I’d also read that AoC was no longer in Amazon’s Top 40 game sales list, but I’m showing it at #19, assuming I’m looking at the same list and keeping in mind they update that list hourly.

  • sid67 says:
    June 23, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    I feel like I was just rickrolled … an entire blog entry fixed to get in a Michael Jackson?s Thriller reference. Ahh? my eyes!! My eyes!!! What?s next Captain EO?

  • Rog says:
    June 23, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    I’m going to come out and say again, I like MMORPGs which release “early”. I think bug free polish, stability and Endgame are unlikely for any game in this genre. It’s par for the course. If any game of this size and scope can release better, then kudos to them, but we haven’t seen it much, have we?

    Funcom is stuck in the position that there are a whole lot more critics around for their launch than even a couple years ago. If people want to be critical, they’ll find a way. If they didn’t patch often right now, what do you think the topic would be then?

    Are there a lot of bugs? Sure. There are some particular ones I’d really like to see fixed sooner. But I’m damn glad most of them are client side, because it’d be far worse if I don’t know, the servers were unstable for months on end? That describes most of these games at launch.

  • TickledBlue says:
    June 23, 2008 at 8:55 pm

    I expect lots of patching in any new MMO, those who’s only experience is the WoW 2 month patch turnaround are obviously in for a shock though.

    What concerns me is how little this process has changed or improved over the years. The only gracefully patching MMO (although there are those who claim its not one, and I wont argue that) is guild wars. AoC’s patch schedule means I can’t play for 2 nights out of the week. In my timezone the patches happen at 8pm till 12pm, just after dinner and before I go to bed… when I’d normally have time spare to sit at my PC and play. My month of included gametime suddenly became a lot less valuable than yours.

    Why 4 hours of downtime? Why can’t I get a simple ‘log out and back in now please’? I don’t mind if it means I have to download a patch before I get to log in, but why do I have to suffer 4 hours of downtime because they didn’t think to develop an effective patching strategy. Oh… and while we’re at it, why do I have to re-accept the damn EULA after every frickin’ patch? It annoys me when WoW does it too, does it actually change after each and every patch. Fine, show it to me if it’s different from the last time I looked – but don’t assume that its my first time playing the game and I need to agree to stuff which the courts are, even now, uncertain whether is actually legally supportable or not. Damn, second blog post on this subject I’ve ended up ranting on… sorry sorry

  • TheRemedy says:
    June 23, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    It’s probably something as simple as they ran out of money and had to launch. Infinite dev time is only a reality when your name is something like Blizzard.

  • yunk says:
    June 24, 2008 at 8:12 am

    TickledBlue the last few hours of uptime are the most expensive. For instance keeping a system up 95% of the time is not only 105.6% more expensive than keeping a system up 90% of the time, more like 150%, keeping up a system 99.999% is hugely expensive. Banks have an incentive to be up 24×7, as any service that sells goods or handles monetary transactions does, but the downside of a subscription model is they already have your money for that month, and only competition will force them to make that investment.

    I remember a little over a year ago Blizzard tried to change their patching (server side) to be more like hot-patching, where it could go on in the background. They wanted to have zero down time. But it only lasted about 2 weeks and they quietly scrapped it and went back to shutting down tuesday mornings. Well it’s not every server every Tuesday anymore at least. It’s just too expensive to do it right unless you have to.

  • TickledBlue says:
    June 26, 2008 at 11:32 pm

    @Yunk – yeah I know *sigh*. I’m not at the hard face of server tech but I’d bet that a lot of that decreasing returns issue is down to poor design/architecture of the server side of the equation.

    I guess my question boils down to, if guildwars can do it with no subscriptions and a huge player base then why can’t AoC? I remember watching a making of dvd that came with one of the guild wars collectors pack that talked about how they designed their server solution from the ground up. AoC seems to have exactly the same set up as every other MMO under the sun, my gripe is that I feel (unjustly maybe) that this is laziness on their part to simply go with a prior solution (for all I know they are reusing a lot of AO server code, and we all know how wonderful AO was at launch).

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