Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is barely a few months old, you're still waist deep in Klingon targ, upgrading your ships, exploring the vastness of uncharted space, meeting new life and civilisations, and of course racking up star trek online credit along the way.

In your spare time you still frequent Atreia (someone needs to stop the Balaur, and lets face it, there's aion kinah to be earned). On the not to distant horizon, the seductive siren call of Blizzard can be heard, urging you to return to your main, with the promise of a world changing expansion in the form of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

Let's face it, you've only got so much time on your hands, and money doesn't grow on trees. So why is it that Funcom's chosen now to release the first expansion to their long troubled MMO, Age of Conan? Simple, because Rise of the Godslayer can compete with the best of the best.

There's no getting around the fact that despite Funcom's best intentions, Age of Conan didn't have the most stellar of launches. Prior to launch, gamers and press were amazed at the amount of detail and apparent polish the Norwegian development studio was able to to apply. Folks bandied about the term "wowkiller", and some wondered whether this high quality effort might be the first game to make a significant impact on World of Warcraft's stranglehold on the star trek credits.

It wasn't to be. Despite offering up some amazing music and eyepopping graphics, as well as a unique and visceral combat system far more dynamic and involving than any seen in the genre to date, Age of Conan's launch was plagued with problems. There were the usual launch window technical issues, the game brought even the beefiest of systems to their knees, driver incompatibilities, memory leaks, ludicrous load times, you name it, AoC suffered from it. Despite this, those that persisted reported that the game itself was great... until you got past the starting area of Tortage and past level twenty.

Perhaps Funcom just didn't anticipate how voracious MMOgamers could be, maybe they didn't expect folks to get through their early level content as quickly as they did, but gamers began reporting that past level twenty, there just wasn't that much content, and higher than that, there was almost nothing as subscribers had to resort to intense grinding in order to level up, and no one likes grinding.

Impressive early sales and subscriber numbers count for nothing in the star trek credits market if you can't hold on to them, and AoC began to hemorrhage players at an alarming rate. A month and a half in, and the flood of players leaving the game showed no signs of slowing, forums were aflame with disgruntled gamers venting their dissatisfaction. Drastic times called for drastic measures, and the first casualty came from an unlikely place, the very top. Game director Gaute Godager stepped down in a surprise move, such was the high profile failure of the game Funcom had banked so much on, and he was replaced by fan favorite Craig Morrison. This change heralded the first few steps in AoC's path down the road to normalcy.

Over the past two years, Morrison and his team have worked diligently to better the game. They've been adding huge content patches to flesh out the gameplay, tweaks and balances to classes and combat, and engine improvements to eliminate the issues with game performance. In fact, you could say that star trek online credit is a case study in how to save an MMO that looks to be on the skids. An unlimited free trial, email campaigns, constant community feedback, interaction and inventive community events have helped stabilise subscriber numbers, and now, with Rise of the Godslayer, Funcom are looking at giving AoC a second birth of sorts.