General Discussion

At Comic Con San Diego, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood caught up with Funcom's Erling Ellingson to talk about the game since launch and the direction for the future.

Comic Con Funcom Interview At Comic Con, MMORPG.com caught up with Erling Ellingson, the Product Manager for Funcom's Age of Conan.

good job putting some of the more difficult questions to him - even if he did squirm his way around some of them.

cheers.

:)

The guy conducting the interview did a very good job.  Usually interviewers throw these guys a bunch of softballs. 

Fantastic questions from the interviewer.  It's unfortunate he didn't follow up with Erling's replies though, he basically flat out lied on so many things.  PvP experience was not a "big feature" for launch? WHAT? 

I'm fuming right now.  What a terrible terrible company.

hello.

Jon,  

Excellent job with the facilitation of tough questions.. I myself would have ripped him a new one.  Its a very delicate skill to "milk" at the very least a decent response to a hard question, and the questions you asked were spot on and well managed.  cheers .

Erling,

YOU should be friggin embarrased my fail friend.  Its one thing to be a paid fanboy of failcom, but its completely different to stand up to personal professional ETHICS and at the very least ADMIT there was some serious "unplanned" issues.  By that I feel that even if funcom has lost the respect of MANY mmo vets and even new players introduced by this rabble, some sort of admiration for HONESTY would help to possibly turniquet this gaping gash of dignity.  YOU lied.  I congratulate you on your ability to twist and squirm out of some admirable questions of which you had a chance to redeem your name as well funcoms.  Dissapointing, much like your and funcoms excuse to make money.

ps.  I was in your beta, and to be quite honest, your "miracle patch" did little more than make an already craptacular game that was unplayable to marginally playable at BEST.  As for high end content, sieges, DX10, voice dialog past Tartage and on and on.... you should be ashamed.  And this is coming from a player that was IN your AO beta and participated (or tried to , couldnt even MOVE first day) release of Anarcy online.  Back then folks were forgiving, or did you forget you had to shut down the game and offer free sub times later on to recover.   This market is unforgiving and it will cost funcom a hella lot more time and resources to recover from your embarrasment than if you would have simply done it right the FIRST time.

or at least man'd up and took some responsibility for what will become another SOE dead game.

done

d 

yeah im angry, my appologies if anyone other than Erling/Funcom is offended.

BURN EM ALL!!

Hardly think they are a terrible company - terrible companies dont even try and address their game issues -  there are problems with AoC but nothing that cannot be fixed - its not like they set out to steal money from children or something... people need to take a deep breath or go for a walk or something.

from release to now the game has had huge content fixes, which shows imho that they are serious about addressing the primary concerns of their players - and what company wouldnt be?

all the big mmo's had rough releases (appart from lotro maybe) but there is still a lot of fun to be had in AoC and I'm sure it will get better as time goes on

am i a fan of all these companies releasing without the polish we want, no Its been a disturbing trend but its been going on in software dev for a very long time, release, patch, patch the patch..

heck on release we called everquest2  everpatch2, it was down more than conan has ever been - but after 4 years that game as a good solid base of people who love it..

wow was the same, server crashing, quests bugged, nothing to do at 50 etc etc

if you get upset by the raw game off the shelf then  do yourself a favour and wait 6-12 mnths from release before trying a game.

Although I dont play conan atm (im waiting another few mnths of patchs before i resub) funcom is not the criminal outfit, evil empire that some people are bemoaning.

Grats to the interviewer too, they were really great questions!

Originally posted by mylin1

Hardly think they are a terrible company - terrible companies dont even try and address their game issues -  there are problems with AoC but nothing that cannot be fixed - its not like they set out to steal money from children or something... people need to take a deep breath or go for a walk or something.

 This is at least debatable because as I hear it the answers were mostly sugar coated as mentioned above not answered honestly or directly-sir I'm certain they set out to sell as many of these game boxes as they could including to children and I'm fairly certain there are children who have them...people need to demand a better end product for goods they pay for .

from release to now the game has had huge content fixes, which shows imho that they are serious about addressing the primary concerns of their players - and what company wouldnt be?

 Fromrelease to now it also seems to have had lot's of added bugs stealth nerfs and an overall strategy that has not pleased most of the people who play the game and it's also debatable if they are in fact addressing players primary concerns becuase there own forums seem to point otherwise.

all the big mmo's had rough releases (appart from lotro maybe) but there is still a lot of fun to be had in AoC and I'm sure it will get better as time goes on

 Ok Vanguard horrible realese and it's suffering as it should LOTRO wonderful release and is doing fairly well and in fact is a joy to play and runs smoothly by my experienceand the last two I can recall before them are COH/COV by my experience a pretty smooth release of course every game will have some bugs but there needs to be an acceptable standard which is lowered by some of your viewpoints though you are entitled to them no matter what and I want toalso mention WoW's relase I often hear those who want to tear it down say it had a horrible release when the worse thing about it was the wait times before they had enough servers so in conclusion another decent launch.

am i a fan of all these companies releasing without the polish we want, no Its been a disturbing trend but its been going on in software dev for a very long time, release, patch, patch the patch..

I've pointed out in my last reply why I think this is a mostly moot point as all these companies amount to two SOE and FunCom

heck on release we called everquest2  everpatch2, it was down more than conan has ever been - but after 4 years that game as a good solid base of people who love it..

And do you notice a pattern? SOE who has a pretty bad reputation with MMO gamers is the other company you can name that has the resources and every reason not to come out with a horribly borken obivously beta game but does it anyway

wow was the same, server crashing, quests bugged, nothing to do at 50 etc etc

I played it from launch I won't say you are wrong but will challenge you to compare the content WoW offered in it's as you say broken state to what is available working and apparent in AoC

 

if you get upset by the raw game off the shelf then  do yourself a favour and wait 6-12 mnths from release before trying a game.

Or do as I hope more will do stand up shout and demand that these companies not treat your entertainment dollar as any less valuable than the movies they through hundreds of millions of dollars at.

 

Although I dont play conan atm (im waiting another few mnths of patchs before i resub) funcom is not the criminal outfit, evil empire that some people are bemoaning.

I lean towards your view here I don't think they are an overtly criminal outfit I do think they try to b.s. their customers and themselves though and think that if people looked at things logically they'd see how similar this scenario is to Anarchy onlines launch and realize this company needs better management as does SOE.

 

Grats to the interviewer too, they were really great questions!

Well done Stradden!  You asked those tough questions that had to be asked. 

Mabye this will stop the people who think MMORPG.com is getting paid by Funcom..?