Funcom's Craig Morrison Comments by Rob Fahey

Too little, too late. Probably Craig will steady the ship enough for another low level AO success, but for a game with this much potential its tragic that it has failed to live anywhere near up to it.

Improving itemisation for raiding is a fucking weird decision when the game should be focusing instead on its pvp content. My favourite parts of Conan were the more complicated pvp combo system, the lack of factions leading to FFA fighting and the pvp endgame of keep fighting (sadly unfinished and bugged to fuck).

Why they insist on continuing to follow the WoW path when that lead them in the wrong direction in the first place is beyond me...

Er, First!

"we're shooting to patch every 28 days"

Nice one!

Is it me or is Morrison sugar coating everything? I'll quote him "So our estimations, and when we speak to the public - when I'm talking to people on the forums, and we talk to people about delivery dates, we're a lot more realistic about what they are."
I'm sorry but all he has said since he started talking on the forums is "It's ready when it's ready", it's a standing joke in our guild, So far we have seen squat fromt he new game director and whilst he does endeavour to post on the forums he might as well not bother as he tells us absolutely nothing.
Many of us could care less about the second PVP update, we've been sat at level 80 in a content barren wasteland amusing ourselves by raiding bugged encounters for loot that sucks, FC are just too darn slow, they promised Ymir's Pass for summer and we're heading into winter now, and the fact remains that Ymir's pass is level 55-60, they told us they were concentrating on levels 55-60 because there studies showed that as being were players would benefit the most, a casual player can level to 80 inside a month, who in their right mind would still be at level 55 5 months after launch? He also stated they prioritsed itemisation at an early stage, if that's the case why have we seen no changes whatsoever? Funcom if you release content/patches any slower you'll start going backwards.

His response on featurews that didn't make it into launch is another example.

"All MMO games have some features that developers talked about during launch as wanting to have, or that they were working on, which didn't come to fruition or never came out. Even the biggest games in the genre have features that they talked about pre-launch that never made it in the game."

The fact remains that Funcom lied about features such as DX10 right up until launch, all the way up to launch they responded with "It will be in at launch" and only on the very first day of the official US launch did they make a statement stating it wasn't ready, it's even printed on the box, that's were AoC differs from other MMO's that cut features, the other games informed players in advance of launch. Frankly that's just downright dishonest, far from not being ready it was obviously no where near ready as five months later all we've seen is a few screenshots from Liepzig.

Now whilst DX10 isn't a high priority to many of us the fact remains that Morrison is putting a PR spin on everything, he stated in an interview recently that he gets on well with the community, so far the sum of his posts include requests not to ask for responses from him by name and posts stating everything will be released when it's ready.

Nothing new being posted here. Same old BS lines being spouted by Craig "Noncommittal" Morrison.

Since when do they listen to players? People said that Ymirs Pass is too late and that a lot of the population are at level 80. Did you listen? No. So now the L80's on PVE servers are STILL waiting for something to do.
Feedback is a two way communication device. It's all very well to say that they listen to people, but it they don't ACKNOWLEDGE it then people wonder if they actually are.

So Craig thinks that its ok to ignore things that were discussed prior to launch as that's a fact of life. That's all very well, UNTIL YOU PRINT THE BOXES WITH IT ON! How exactly is AOC "Enhanced for Dx10" considering it doesn't support the Dx10 specific features? Sure it plays on Vista, but you could have just printed "Enhanced for Directx 9c" and there would be no difference in the game and FC wouldn't be called liars.

Itemisation? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why itemisation plays a big factor in other MMO's. Because it attracts people to play!
Sure, it doesn't have to be the extreme of WoW. But it has to mean SOMETHING! An AOC tank class is able to fight a raid dragon in the nude! If that was intentional why have items in the game at all? This sort of stuff should have been pretty evident BEFORE launch.

Crafting update: Nice but consider that the crafted items are supposed to be better than ANY blue item in the game, I wonder about the impact this will have on attracting people to go into the dungeons other than for the recipes. Bang, another reason to log in becomes redundant. Well done.

Ymirs pass: Lol. Seriously FC, how long is THIS going to take you guys to do? You've told the community about the Commons District and the 2 high level dungeons in the past. At this rate they'll be just about ready for an expansion pack in 2010. Can Funcom really afford to lose any more time considering that WotLK is due in less than one month?

I notice that there's no mention of server merges YET AGAIN. What is it with even ACKNOWLEDGING that they are working on it to anyone outside the forums? Or are FC under the delusion that they're not needed? If that's the case THEN READ THE POLLS!

Stop being so bloody non commital about deadlines. Give people hope for gods sake. And that reminds me of one word.......VANGUARD. Telling everyone "It will be ready when it's ready" might appease a few people, but others are becoming very tired of hearing this BS to keep people playing. Stop blowing smoke up peoples asses. Meanwhile more and more updates and tweaks sit on the Test server because YOU refuse to release even the SMALLEST of update. Case in point, changing the countdown for logging out from 30 seconds to 15. Seriously, does it take you guys as long to test this as it does to test Ymirs Pass?

Forgive me for being cynical. But the current situation is causing me to lose hope that this game will reach its potential this side of the New Year. And given their refusal to even try to adhere to "regular" updates, I'm not going to hold my breath for the update appearing next week. Which fits perfectly with their current principles.

By the way, word of mouth is powerful, that much is true. But as SWG, VG and others have found out, negative reviews are like tar, it's very difficult to get rid of them, once they've stuck.

Lastly, the longer you keep holding things back, the harder the critisism will be when things don't work. This WILL bite you in the ass if you're not careful. People will expect EVERY aspect of that patch to work flawlessly.

Problems I had with aoc,

-There game was so bugged. It kept on crashing between instantly loading the game, up to 2 hours. Most of the time it was 45mins. When it crashed you had to restart your computer. It was so fucking annoying. Everyone was trying different drivers. Resetting their drivers. Re-installing windows.

-Their customer service was atrocious. It didn't exist.

-They never talked to us about what was going on.

-Stupid amount of instancing. Want to walk into a house? Loading screen. Loading screen. Loading screen. Jesus..

I never got to experience the missing content as I quit 2 weeks after starting, by 25. They basically stole my time and money. The game was unplayable. I bought a defective product. Why is it acceptable to release half baked games when its a mmorpg? An absolutely shocking mess.

Another thing, I don't know why they're trying to sort lower levels? They should be prioritising end game content. i.e. looking after the people that have stuck with this piece of crap so as they as well don't leave. Then working back.

Before i read the end of the interview, his first comment is outlandish and disconnected with reality to the EXTREME.

It just seems like he's trying to keep face far too much.

Launch was a disaster, Funcom's reputation has been dragged through the mud, and now it seems like they're dodging taking any responsibility over what was easily one of the whackiest launches ever. The game was totally unfinished.

They're just pulling a sony and are trying to appear far too invincible for a company that has so much bad feeling associated with them.

I hope Morrison is reading this.

AoC was and no doubt still is a stinking pile of fly ridden shit. Funcom lied to and then subsequently ignored everyone that bought it. They strung people along for as long as they could in order to get at that first month of subs.

Even now...approaching christmas AoC is empty...the best they could do? Half of a patch we were promised we would get some time in August.

Quite frankly i find it disgusting and Morrisons interview full of half truths and evasions is a further nail in the dirty shit filled coffin that is AoC and me.

I would be inclined to give Funcom a little more respect if one of thier members of staff came forward and apologised for the massive fuck up... yet all we have had is pathetic face saving jargon... we misjudged but are working on it... we didnt understand but we are working on it...we could have done better but we are working on it....

Hows about you give me my money back instead? Your game was awful and although i reached 80 (more fool me) i didnt once take part in any of the bullet point activities on the back of the box in any meaningful regard and believe me...i did try.

I am only sorry i didnt quit sooner.

"we're shooting to patch every 28 days"

WAR patches sometimes twice a week. Full marks for laziness, I guess.

Are you getting paid to make these articles? I dont see how else you would choose to report on that failure.

Who the f.. cares about that shit game, how about you give us some articles on innovative upcoming mmorpgs like Darkfall.

@Khael: Because players of AoC (all four of them) are presumably somewhat interested. Hell, I found it interesting as a vague post-mortem into what the hell they thought they were doing and what promises they're making to try to hook people in now.

By the way, you wouldn't happen to be working on Darkfall, would you? I mean, looking at your profile and past posts and everything.

its the itemization that killed it for me, made no sense, there was no oh look what I just got, because all the gear did not work or make any sense, 0.6 on this and 1.1 on that what were they thinking?

I am shocked at how quickly this game has failed, sure there will be a dwindling hardcore community who play but as they say first impressions last. WAR also needs to be careful as it seems to be slow to address some serious bugs and issues of realm imbalance and performance etc. I don't see many people returning to this lame horse with Lich King hitting in a couple of weeks, I could be proved wrong of course but it seems unlikely.