Can Age of Conan survive is Open Beta?

Age of Conan really dropped the ball on its open beta through Fileplanet. While there had been rumors about the game's performance being spotty on some computers, it wasn't really confirmed until last weekend. It's a shame since the game has some interesting game design behind combat and skill training. None of that is going to produce any positive buzz though if 10% of the testers are crashing every hour. Just by the nature of the internet the portion of players who did have problems are going to get their experience posted about the most.

Now Funcom has admitted they pushed some patches right before the beta which made the client unstable and caused some poor performance. They have assured gamers that the problem will be better by launch but of course this sounds like the same crap every developer has said when pushing out an unfinished product. Everyone says that World of Warcraft has set new standards for launching a MMO but in my experience most games still release unfinished. I mean can you really call it an industry standard if no one follows it?

It's not that Age of Conan is the next Vanguard which some gamers are starting to say on a lot of forums. I beta tested Vanguard before release and in general it was much less of a finished product then Age of Conan. Also I don't think Funcom is being forced to release early because of monetary concerns. The more likely scenario is that they are releasing early to take advantage of Warhammer pushing back their release date. It’s not like Sigil where they are desperate to raise funds by releasing with a ton of bugs.

Age of Conan is going to be worked on and patched by its development team at a decent rate even after launch. I don't expect mass firings if they don't sell 400k boxes or to end up in the SOE all-access pass graveyard. I do expect them to get about 300,000 initial players which will slowly increase as more time without Wraith of the Lich King and Warhammer passes. I thought that Season 4 being timed around Age of Conan's launch might help prevent some players from switching games. But I think Blizzard has made some recent changes to Season 4 which is going to make PvP less popular in the game.

I really think that Age of Conan has been handed a very opportune time to release. Most of its competition only has old content at the moment and Warhammer/WoW seem content to duke it out later in the year. While their game play is unfamiliar I don't think it’s enough to alienate players unless it's accompanied by bad game performance. The intensive button hitting to execute combos is going to appeal to most casual players I think. Its might cause some problems with raiders and other players who stay on for long periods of time but you can expect macros to be created to help alleviate the problem.

As long as Age of Conan can keep their servers up on launch day then I fully expect them to pull off a successful MMO. I pre-ordered it myself and I'll probably be playing as soon as I can login despite some so-so reviews about the open beta. The one thing about Vanguard was that a lot of people broke the NDA to scream "stay away". I mean people were breaking the NDA so often that it made the Warhammer beta look airtight. This stands out from Age of Conan where most of the so-so reviews for it have been based on the open beta/pvp weekend. This probably means that the people in closed beta still care about not getting banned for breaking the NDA. This seems like a good sign to me and I'm keeping the pre-order. If I'm wrong then I'm sure we'll hear about it from around 5 billion blogs on May 17th.

Summary: Yes