Hey to all the devs at Funcom that were involved in the EA process and thank you. In the spirit of Ying and Yang, I’m simply congratulating you on a great delivery and process. I see a lot of bashing going on, and of course X issue is important to many people, but at release, the game I’m playing with my friends is fantastic and I’m having a lot of fun! Everything that I personally reported during EA was cleaned up by release and most of the wishes i had were tackled, so in some way I feel your efforts were personal and my efforts during the EA cycle were not in vain.
The story as it unfolded was this battle to give people something between what you could feasibly do and what they needed. It was interesting to watch how you balanced the different corners, the PvE environment, building and aesthetics are world class and this has satisfied many players of that genre. I know you spent a lot of time on the PvP side, which is fraught and more complex to satisfy, but the fact that you attempted both different audiences was amazing.
As a testament, this is one of the few games that my wife could actually get on with and tapped into her psyche very well from a design point of view. She’s a good yardstick of measurement, she’s terrible at computer games and completely un-technical, but everything in the UI and game itself was understandable to her. At the other end I’m a player who looks for depth and in between the last few EA builds and release, the combat had leapt up a notch, the perk system and armour and weapon adjustments gave it something the player could really get into to add to their performance, with real choices on advantage and disadvantages between gear, which took Conan out of the fairly flat and odd progression and character development it began with.
There’s a couple of post launch tweaks to go through of course, aside from those which you are aware of i’m sure, I hope the launch success can meet with business approval to add a couple of features down the road to keep us playing and interested. I think you know what these are and what you would like to do, I just hope you get the chance, because the platform you created is so good and the community are already making awesome things for it.
Just one thing though… in the Conan Universe that guy is always rescuing princesses and I’ve not encountered any yet. I get the feeling that to meet Conan’s real destiny there should be more rescuing going on! 