Oh snap! That's gotta hurt...

[Zymun]

Out goes Funcom founder...

Nicely worded, but that must have been one unpleasant exec session.

[Muljaque]

Lets break down the article.

Gaute Godager, co-founder of Funcom, stepped down as a "consequence" of failures in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, according to the company's European product manager, Erling Ellingsen.

This is pretty much exactly what it says.

"We don't want to go into all the specifics on what he was dissatisfied with - it's sufficient to say that there were elements in the game that he was not happy with and he wanted to take the consequence of that," Ellingsen told GamesIndustry.biz. "The consequence was him leaving the company and allowing someone else to take over the project."

Yes. He wanted to take responsibility by quitting. That's our story and we're sticking to it.

"Right now there are hundreds of thousands of players and pretty much all of them have an opinion - that's good, we want everybody to have an opinion on what direction we can take the game in," Ellingsen commented.

Yes, everyone has an opinion that the game is very incomplete.

"In a post launch period it is very important for people to listen to what the players want and then acting on it and that adding more content at certain level ranges

Um... yes. Pretty much once you leave Tortage the amount of content starts plummeting. Having a couple scaling dungeons does not make for 20 levels of content.

Ellingsen said that what players are calling for the most is more interesting player vs. player and new content updates, and that is what Funcom will focus on.

If you didn't build it into the game when you first put it in, trying to glue it on afterwards is doomed. You have that many different classes and mechanics and all that, and if you try to balance them it wrecks how they worked with the environment, or you end up with some kind of glorified rock-paper-scissors mechanism. The whole siege town vs town thing had promise, maybe if that's what they're focusing on... but it never seemed like something that had gone through even basic stress testing..

"The first things will be that we are updating the PVP, we're adding new PVP features and that's something players have been requesting for months now, they've been screaming at us," he explained.

The ones who are screaming are the ones who want the PVP content.

Adding:"I think bringing more content, keeping people entertained, is one of the top priorities."

Keeping people subscribed is their top priorities. They had a ton of short term cash flow from the launch, then within a week of the date of WotLK's launch being announced (and Warhammer's actual launch) they see the writing on the wall.

They should really focus on what they did best, what grabbed people initially ala tortage, and have more areas like that. Even if they aren't new 1st level characters, they could have a PC wash up on some new locale and get caught up in a big plot of that area, instead of having a bunch of 'fetch me' and 'kill me' quests in a small area. The tortage quests were written by someone other than the person that did the following content, and it really shows, and even he noted his hands were tied by mandates that you not be allowed to screw up by your actions or so on (and its too bad, I think that would have made for an interesting game, don't wall people off, but let them go in entirely different directions for their own instanced content).

The graphics and music for AOC are still top notch, but so much of the rest of the game was incomplete, and they decided to launch anyway so they'd have center stage prior to other launches. Even so, they had time to fix things and quite frankly they did not.

Its kind of sad, the game seemed to have a great deal of promise at first, and a certain style to it, but just didn't hold up. That there was only one starting area/quest hub made rerolling that much more tedious, too. Games like this really make you appreciate the kinds of things WOW does right (even if they are filled with people telling everyone how much more they enjoy it than wow).