A postmortem on Age of Conan's launch
MMORPG.com's Mathew Reuther offers up a retrospective on the recent launch of Funcom's Age of Conan. We've obviously been following the game's ups and downs here on the site, but it's interesting to see the whole sordid tale laid out in one fell swoop. Reuther actually starts his tale back in 2001, with a brief look back at why Anarchy Online's launch was so very bad. He then walks us through the different steps - the early start that almost wasn't, launch day itself, and the some of the more lurid post-launch issues.
The second part of his analysis decries the current state of communication between the company and the players. His view is that their limited discussion of bugs, patches. and bannings is broken only rarely by sometimes-confusing statements or blanket declarations. It's a nice walk back through the last few weeks of Conan's early lifespan, and should provide context to any new players who have just joined the Hyborian parade.
