The Grief of Playing Age of Conan

Preface: The article is written in the form of a letter, with specifically stylistic references to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. It's not meant to be a journalistic article.

FunCom, the creators of Age of Conan sent me an e-mail today entitled “Ian, your 14 day re-evaluation of Age of Conan is now available”.–How curious–I thought! I'd only played the game for three days and they're already pining for my return as if I were their long lost childhood friend.

The e-mail went on to state, “Ian! Your level 18 Guardian awaits your return to Age of Conan!”–And that a “staggering number of improvements” had been added to the game in the past months–improvements which I readily ignored whenever possible.

I tell you, dear friend, when my senses are reeling all my tumult is allayed by the prospect of playing such a blatant failure of a video game whose developers calmly and happily follow the narrow circle of their existence, who help themselves from one day to the next, see the leaves fall and have no other thought than that their next paycheck is soon coming. *

F*ck off! I want my money back.–I say to them.

Dear friend, perhaps you are unaware of the source of my sudden outburst, so please allow me to elaborate–Age of Conan was a game like every other failed MMO of 2008; a product of its time. I tell you, it seems rather certain that FunCom, having supposedly learned from its mistakes with Anarchy Online, anticipated far too many players with an interest in the game and thus ended up dedicating far too many launch servers towards it, draining both their own resources and splitting the community into unmanageably tiny portions.

Released prematurely with a dysfunctional RPG system and barely featuring any content outside of the game's tutorial stage, Tortage–or “Tortuga” as its players often called it–it would seem that its placid developers learned scarce little from their prior experiences with their previous game.

Eventually realizing their mistakes, FunCom states in the e-mail that the game has been upgraded with “tons of action-packed content” including a “completely new item and RPG system”.–Too little, too late.–I would exclaim.

It is too little, too late.

Editor's Note: My apologies to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for paraphrasing him.