Age of Conan - Gaute Godager leaves Funcom

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SasqWatch
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Eurogamer state that Gaute Godager has left Funcom and will hand the design role over to Anarchy Online's director Craig Morrison.
"I have done my very best making this fabulous game, but I have concluded there are elements which I am dissatisfied with," said Godager in a statement.
"I have decided to act on this, and as a result I have chosen to leave Funcom. It is time to get new, fresh eyes on Age of Conan, and I wholeheartedly support the appointment of Craig."
Craig Morrison has outlined his top priorities as listening to and acting on concerns made by the players of the mature, fantasy MMO.
"I have a clear conviction I can lead the further development in a good way, evolving Age of Conan into something even better," said Morrison.
"My main priority now is therefore to listen to, and act on, player concerns, while ensuring we add additional great content to the game.
"At heart I will always be a gamer, and the coming changes and additions to Conan will always be done with the gamers in mind. Together I am certain we will shape an amazing future for Age of Conan."
More information.
 
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Yow, mighty early in the game's life to have the lead developer leave.
 
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Was it his decision to rush Age of Conan out before Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online are released (kind of reminds me of EQ2's release right before WoW)?

If not, Gaute probably left because they didn't let him ship the game "when it's done" and now playerbase drops are proving him right.

However if he was indeed behind that decision then he perhaps got fired for that.

Because really 99.99% of the criticism I'm hearing about that game is "feels unfinished: lots of bugs, not enough high level content". Ironically, AoC shipped in a more complete state than WoW... people just have short memories.

WoW at release had extremely unstable servers, horrible queues, no auction house, no battlegrounds, no honour systems, barely any HL dungeons, broken classes (apparently people forgot how druids warlocks and paladins were at release), and so on.

I don't know whether it's people got too picky now, or just Blizzard that's been damn lucky with everyone in the world remarkably forgiving towards them, but imo AoC doesn't deserve at least half of the criticism it's getting.
 
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Its human nature - short memories combined with the tendency to shade events more in one direction or another.
 
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Well you didnt play AoC Hedek. I did and the difference between wows launch and AoCs was immense. It didnt help that the patching was the worst I've been through in any genre so far.
 
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Ive heard that wow had different launches. US launch (the first launch) was horrible but i.e in europe wow was launcher much later and by that time they had fixed most of the problems and so the EU launch went much smoother than the US one.
 
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Well you didnt play AoC Hedek. I did and the difference between wows launch and AoCs was immense. It didnt help that the patching was the worst I've been through in any genre so far.

You're assuming. I did and still am.
AoC isn't perfect. Far from it. But imo it's not as bad as the internet is claiming. A lot of people have been expressing very valid complaints about it. What I don't understand and what I question is why the criticism has been so harsh and unforgiving? And to back up that opinion I used WoW's release as example reminding people how horrible it was and how everyone seems to forget so fast.

You're saying that AoC's launch was far worse than WoW's. Please give me some examples.
This is what I said on WoW's release: "extremely unstable servers, horrible queues, no auction house, no battlegrounds, no honour systems, barely any HL dungeons, broken classes (apparently people forgot how druids warlocks and paladins were at release), and so on."

AoC on the other hand had a decent launch, and most promised features were implemented except DX10. The main issue is that while almost everything is indeed there, there's just not enough of it: not enough polish, not enough content, not enough areas, everything becomes boring quite fast. And of course there's dreaded memory leak issue preventing from playing the game several hours in a row without complete system reboot.
Yet it took WoW several months before it had nearly everything that was promised implemented and it took several other months to at last have decent HL PVE (BWL, Naxxramas, Al Qiraj, etc.) and PvP (Honor system, Warsong Gultch then Alterac Valley).

So seeing how WoW started and seeing how it is now, I see great potential in AoC. In 6 months it can possibly be a great MMORPG. Would AoC been better had it been released 3 or 6 months later? Of course. But that can be said of any other MMO. Imagine if AO had been released the way it were 2 years after its release, what an amazing release that would have been.

I mean that's a real debate we have here: how to determine whether a MMO is ready for release or not? I mean all MMOs at release look incomplete when you compare them to what they become 6 months later.

I'd say the only MMORPG that was "complete" at release is Guild Wars (since subsequent patches and extensions didn't bring any fundamental changes, just tweaks and more content) but it's not even a true MMORPG.
 
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What I don't understand and what I question is why the criticism has been so harsh and unforgiving?

My personal peeve with AoC and its lead designer is that 90% of the live game problems were pointed out by beta-testers and successfully ignored in September 2007. And it wasn't "wha-wha-wha" criticism. It was grown-up criticism with solutions to problems or ways to improve something. But HE had a "vision" of the game.

Oh wait! there was another great visionary Brad McQuaid. We all know how that vision ended up, don't we?

Anyways, you have valid points about how "horrible" other games were at the beginning, compared to AoC. Times changed, competition is stiff in MMOs, we as consumers generally benefit because of this so we can demand quality. Who would ever agree to the less after LOTROL flawless start?

IF they bring AoC to senses and stop screwing around with classes breaking them once in a while it has a potential. The same way EQ2 became a great game 2 years after the botched launch.
 
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