Funcom Responds to Age of Conan Delay

Funcom community manager Shannon Drake stopped by the official Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures forums to offer some reasons why the MMORPG has been delayed until 2008.

Hello everybody,

As you saw from the press release, we’ve decided to delay the game until March 25, 2008. As you all understand, this is obviously one of the hardest decisions we could’ve made as a company, but this is done to ensure that you all the get the best possible experience when the game is done next March.

While we have seen that the overall reactions to our game has in general been extremely favorable, we as a company can only go for the best possible experience for our users. We are a MMO company, and we know that the only thing which matters when building a long-term community is the quality of the game. When our beta testers have come back to us with concerns in a couple of different areas, we have therefore been listening. The feedback has especially been on the entry barriers to the game, and how people are learning and coping with the combat system in the first few hours of gameplay. While most are having a fantastic time with it once they learn it, we also see that it is new and different to a lot of people, and that it takes longer to get into than what we have anticipated. This means that we need to ease the barrier, and make the first few hours of gameplay more accessible.

After careful consideration we have therefore decided that this must be improved for the overall good of the game. We are now putting considerable extra efforts into improving the game, despite the fact that a whole world is raving about the qualities of what we have shown them. It was not an easy decision to make, but we felt it was necessary, both for you and ourselves.

We would also like to point out that the pushback does not affect the beta. General beta is currently ongoing, it will still go on in the weeks and months to come (and escalate) and invitations will continue to go out. As a part of this, rest assured that Funcom will continue to listen to our beta testers, who are an invaluable source of honest feedback, and that we together will create a special game.

A lot of you have shown an incredible amount of patience with us through the production process and we appreciate it tremendously. These next few months will give us time to deliver to you what you want as bad as us; a great MMO game.

Thanks,

The Funcom Team