Is Age of Conan a PvP-Focused Game?

The editors at Massively ask themselves the titular question in a piece on their Age of Conan-dedicated column and come to the conclusion that, while the title was initially marketed as such, right now it has taken the backseat to PvE content.

While AoC was initially marketed as a PvP title in 2008, its development history since 2009 indicates a sizable shift in the opposite direction. The Rise of the Godslayer expansion (May 2010) added a huge amount of explorable area to the game world, all of it in service to PvE. Thousands of quests and dozens of dungeons were added to the original areas (which already boasted some of the more highly praised PvE dungeons around — Sanctum of the Burning Souls, Kylliki’s Crypt, and the Cradle of Decay, to name a small fraction).

More recently, the Refuge of the Apostate solo dungeon and the Ai and Tian’an group dungeons made their way to the live servers, and the next update is bringing several new 40 – 80 auto-content generation dungeons for solo players as an alternative to the Tarantia Noble District instances that are based on similar mechanics.

By way of comparison, Age of Conan’s PvP updates since the Godslayer expansion can be summed up in a single phrase: The Call of Jhebbal Sag. Yep, aside from one minigame map added last winter, there have been exactly zero PvP-centric content updates in the last year (and Funcom has also been a bit slow to address existing PvP class balance issues). Prior to that, PvP was already showing signs of becoming an also-ran, first with the sweeping (and PvE-centric) changes wrought by the 1.05 update in the summer of 2009 and later with Craig Morrison’s public forum debates with hardcore PvP types dissatisfied by the game’s about-face (not to mention the fallout over the Shrines of Bori rock-grinding fiasco).