Blizzard Talks Age of Conan vs. WoW Rivalry

July 31, 2008 2:20 PM

Update: Later in the conference call, it was revealed that World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King will arrive between October and December.

Original Story: Blizzard Entertainment CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime today discussed the effects that the recent launch of Funcom's PC MMO Age of Conan had on World of Warcraft (PC).

"Age of Conan released with some initial success," Morhaime noted. "We did see some of our players leave, [but] about 40% of those players have returned to World of Warcraft."

According to the CEO, World of Warcraft has a key advantage as competitors are going up against "a product that has been continually enhanced, expanded and refined for almost four years now."

Morhaime refused to specify a release date for either StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3, merely noting that both games were "heavily in development" and that the studio is "committed to making sure [the] games meet and exceed high expectations of players."

As for the unannounced MMO Blizzard has in development, he noted that the studio was still staffing up for the project, but was "not able to share any additional information" due to competitive reasons.

He then reaffirmed Blizzard's commitment to the PC--"our primary focus is on PC"--and said that "there are no plans currently to bring World of Warcraft to any consoles."

"We will continue to be very protective of our brands and our intellectual property," Morhaime stated.

Chris Faylor

Chris Faylor was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

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stewballz123

 reply
July 31, 2008 2:23 PM

I was one of the players that came back.
AoC was a failure but it was a fun failure for me for 2 months.
- grosbouba
  
   reply
  July 31, 2008 2:41 PM
  
  My brother bought AoC and I played on his account up to level 22. Past level 20, the amount of quality content drastically goes down, and it's a gankfest everywhere. Some travelling high level on his high horse will kill you while you're doing this quest 20 miles away from town, and as you run back to your corpse, you'll get killed again by a ganksquad running around who are killing people for 'fun'. After a while, you realize that the game isn't really fun, and you just stop playing.
  
  At least, in WoW, running around Shattrath doing nothing but jumping around on your mount wasn't actually frustrating compared to running around a town in AoC. Anyway, I think that 80 levels is too much for the amount of time it takes to get 1 level. Tired of playing a game just to level and get that "Useless skill lvl+1".
  - Nicodem-X
    
     reply
    July 31, 2008 3:13 PM
    
    Don't play on a PvP server. It's far less frustrating unless you're one of those people that get off to ganking others like that, in which case you got what you had coming to you.
    - TheMongbat
      
       reply
      July 31, 2008 5:59 PM
      
      PvP is the entire point of the game.
      
      It's the entire point of everything actually.
      - italiano3d
        
         reply
        July 31, 2008 10:37 PM
        
        a few of us that are elft on wiccan have joined a hardcore pvp guild on wiccan which is a pve server. its interesting. and with the recent changes to gems, and items being boe/bop. its made for a nice boost to the economy.
        
        The pvp patch isn't to far off. And the next 2 content updates are the big ones. So the whole point of the game is pvp/sieging, and pve raiding/dungeons. sooo
- aznboysix
  
   reply
  July 31, 2008 3:15 PM
  
  Still wanna try AOC. Kinda stopped playing WoW.
- wytefang
  
   reply
  July 31, 2008 3:24 PM
  
  All you need to see can be found in the first 20 levels...after that it's nothing more than the usual MMO. Yawn.
  - italiano3d
    
     reply
    July 31, 2008 10:38 PM
    
    hmm i dunno active combat in pvp is pretty damn interesting.