Details on Age of Conan

As the release day for Funcom’s Age of Conan, the company’s self-acclaimed champion as an opponent to World of Warcraft in the MMO-market, is getting closer, some interesting details have finally surfaced. I found this on a norwegian business news-site, and I translate:

The details

• Funcom wrote that they’re using the next four weeks to do some marketing steps, in addition to do bug-fixing and preparations.
• They’ve rigged up a server park that’s supposed to be able to handle from 500 000 to 600 000 players at the same time. (I’ll bet the server park will struggle when it’s finally put to the real stress test of release)
• The game itself is costs $59,99 for US/Canada, and €49,99 for Europe. It didn’t say if a month of free play was included, though I’d reckon it will be.
• The subscribtion is set to $14,99 (US/Canada) and €12,99 (Europe). Similar to World of Warcraft and other MMOs

Source: Funcom kjører opp til lansering (NA24.no)

My opinion

First of all, the price of the game itself. If there’s one thing to do if you’re supposed to be competing for subscribers (players) against World of Warcraft, you should not have such a high initial price. I know Funcom has to earn back production money, but you can get like 3 copies of WoW (classic) for the same price.

Second, the subscription should be competitive at release. It should not be the same as WoW at all. The price could be reduced by 2-3 dollars (~€1.50), and then alot of new players would compare prices and go “Hey, this one’s newer and cheaper!”. As a game production company, you don’t want to give the customer a choice of two equals.

Third, if they haven’t had any real stress testing yet, they should do it now. As in right-fucking-now. It won’t be pretty if 100 000 customers decide to buy the game at the same day, then log on to find that the connection to the server park is down due to amount of players. I remember WoW had the same thing for quite a time, but then again they still do have that weekly maintenance thing.

It’s four weeks till the release of Age of Conan, and I’m really looking forward to it with excitement. I haven’t decided if I’ll buy the game during release-week and try it out, or not. Heck, I don’t even know if I’ve got the CPU enough to do so…