14 DAY TRIAL // Age of Conan was one of the three big MMO launches of 2008, together with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. The game sold very well at retail initially and most players rather enjoyed the first part, which was more like a single player action adventure.
The problem was that Funcom did not count on how many of those initial levels could be completed by players and did not create enough content outside the starting areas. Players were quick to complain that there was little to do in the game, while various glitches, most involving combat, became important and remained unfixed for quite some time. The declining number of people subscribed and playing the MMO meant that Funcon needed to merge game servers in order to maintain a reasonable population of players on each of them.
Despite all these issues, Craig Morrison, the game director for Age of Conan, told Eurogamer that people were still working to bring the MMO to the Xbox 360. He said that “There is a small, dedicated team working on the Xbox platform at the moment. We still plan on having a 360 version of the game at some stage but I'm afraid I can't go into specifics beyond that at the moment. It is a very technical task for a game like ours.”
Funcom was also said to be working on an expansion for Age of Conan but no details are known about that project. With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, Age of Conan is surely seeing some players abandon it; it would not come as a surprise to see the MMO from Funcom become the latest casualty of the very tough MMO market, after the closing down of Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London.