Modern Gaming Hobbyist

Another victim of the monster known as World of Warcraft, Funcom’s Age of Conan MMO has been slowly but surely dying since its release. Despite the hope that there could be a game to co-exist successfully alongside WoW, Age of Conan failed. In order to consolidate what few players still play the game, Funcom is merging servers across all its regions. The North American servers are seeing its twenty-five launch servers being cut to six. In Europe, their thirteen servers are going down to four, Germany is going from six to three, and the four French servers are going down to three.

Funcom has assured its players, however, that the game is not being abandoned. Content is still being produced, in expansions or otherwise. Meanwhile, Funcom will try to revive what’s left with an Xbox 360 version of the game. It’s a sad story indeed and if history has taught us anything, server merges are the beginning of the end for an MMO. Take a look at NCSoft’s and Richard Garriott’s brainchild, Tabula Rasa. Despite its decent reviews it managed to fall only a few months after its release in October 2008.

I, for one, am not sad. Age of Conan was a game that focused on graphics and violence instead of fun gameplay. Not that I don’t like pretty models and cutting people up, it’s just that I won’t have it at the cost of the gameplay. Well, here’s to Age of Conan. Cheers to frontal nudity and ultra-realistic graphics. And now I’m gona go back to leveling my Death Knight. ^^