Wikipedia says “The pre-production of the game started in 2002, but in mid-2003, most of the working team was transferred to the development of Dreamfall. The work on The Secret World was resumed after Dreamfall shipped, with many of the latter’s designers (including Ragnar Tørnquist) playing key roles in the former’s development. TSW is being produced at the Funcom studios in Oslo and Beijing. In August 2008, it was stated that the development team consisted of people previously involved in the development of Dreamfall, Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, EverQuest II, and The Longest Journey. In November Funcom stated that 70 people were working on the project.”

So yeah, people from AoC (and AO) are working on it, but it sounds like the core of the team is from Dreamfall. Might be that you should worry more about horrible combat and lame puzzles (I liked Dreamfall a lot, for what it’s worth) than crashes, cookie-cutter MMO design, or incomplete content. Without a D&D/WoW-style class/level system, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about rushing through a grind or wanting for endgame content, either.

I think however that my difference of opinion about FunCom’s track record comes down to the fact that my first job in the games industry was, by strange coincidence, working with Valve and Blizzard, so my expectation of release quality could be somewhat skewed!

Anyway, to those complete strangers who have clearly taken great offence at me pouring bile on FunCom, I apologise for not taking the “glass half-full” view. In the case of AoC, my glass is empty, and I’m annoyed that I paid for a full one.

I’m amazed that I hadn’t heard about this anywhere though, but I suppose I just haven’t been reading RPS long enough yet. The idea excites me, but as others have said, the screenshots do not.

Thus far, the only MMO I have any real fondness for is Planetside, because the levelling was secondary to the gameplay, rather than being a primary element. (Oh, and Lord of the Rings Online, for its attempts at story telling and most of all, the artistry that went into the soundtrack/score).

I liked the way AOC has done its combat system, however the fact that they promised full on guild PVP at release and failed to deliver (Not something I personally cared about that much) will inevitably cast them in a negative light in future, though I hope Ragnar (And his reputation as a game designer/writer) will mitigate that at least in part.

I am also not quite sure which games people compare AoC to if they call it a disaster. Certainly not any other MMO that has been released since WoW.

Some money ill-spent, and times had that weren’t really fun, doesn’t amount to ruination.

Also, you don’t get “genuinely excited” about something “without the hype.” Here’s how things work: 1) You hear things about a game, and 2) you build an expectation of what the game is going to be like, and 3) you decide if you’ll like it or not. Step #1 there is what “hype” is.

The game was overhyped, and unfinished upon release. I’ve been following it for a while, and I’m pretty sure that the latter happened because they had to redesign their entire combat system in the late stages of development, because all of their good ideas turned out to be just too different from what everyone was expecting in the Post-WoW age of Fantasy MMOs.

But in the real world, with real money and people who need real salaries, you can’t just say “Okay, lets put this game off another year.” Delays happen, all the time, but each time you do it you dig yourself deeper and deeper into a hole.

If the people at Funcom were the cackling, malicious band of scammers you’re painting them as, then they wouldn’t keep spending money and employing people to keep trying to fix and tweak the game even after they’ve netted their customers and their money. If anything, that shows a tremendous amount of goodwill: they’re saying “I know you paid for something that wasn’t all it could be, so we’re going to try and turn it into what you were expecting.” The problem is, game development actually does happen in the real world, so companies just have to, you know, do the best they can. There are realities companies need to live with, and they tend to involve money, and unless you’re Valve or Blizzard “Until we’re happy with it”-long development cycles really aren’t an option.

Also:

…(sign up with your credit card for the free month and forget to cancel when you realise(sic) what you’re buying is a steaming pile)…

Yes, I know it happens, but do you think they really built a business model of people forgetting to unsubscribe after quitting the game in disgust? That’s a little silly.

Now, I’m sympathetic to the feelings of bitterness when you feel like you’ve been the victim of a game company’s bait-and-switch. Hell, I bought an X-Box for FABLE, because I heard it was going to be a really deep open-world game where every choice you make has actual consequences! Instead of a couple hours of 3rd Person Hack-and-Slashy punctuated by striking poses in front of swooning ladies. And I can go on for hours about how much utter crap Oblivion turned out to be.

But in cases like these, you need to mitigate your ire with a little bit of salt. Maybe a pinch, if a grain is too little. As pointed out above, Funcom DOES have a track record of trying to produce the best game they can given the realities of the business they run, and the financial success of AoC will likely allow them to do just that. Contrast to Tabula Rasa, which I mentioned before, which won’t get a gradual overhaul and is apparently in the long slow process of petering out. Or Hellgate:London, which collapsed and took it’s studio with it, including embryonic game Mythic which might have turned out to be pretty good.

Those are disasters. AoC is the result of a bunch of people trying desperately to avoid one.