Why Funcom bad?

[Jaunty]

This will probably get deleted because its completely off-topic and will almost certainly attract the nefarious but please enlighten yourself and me as to why Funcom (who is not making this game btw just publishing) is "bad"?

I know they have made missteps so please try to skip those I mean who are we to judge a company that almost went to the the burner business wise but came back from the dead with Conan Exiles etc... And if you are gonna write an essay please have a tldr at the end cause otherwise no one except me is gonna read it.

[ULTRA]

Because AO is still buggy after 20 years, they may as well have not worked on Dreamfall at all, they turned Secret World into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ by deleting its only interesting features, Age of Conan melted people's graphics cards, their small studio games are near Shanzhai clones of better games, Exiles only rode the wave of survival crafters and in fact remains terrible, Unconquered was a totally embarrassing marketing faux pas and now they are busy extending development of this joke Conan game that has nothing to do with the character and everything to do with holding the copyright. Furthermore they are partially owned by Tencent, who helped develop the Chinese social credit system, which among other things enforces racism against Uyghurs and the delusional belief that Tai Chi is some kind of ultimate fighting system. They will probably be bought out later this year by Tencent after Conan Chop Chop fails to do anything for their finances.

tl;dr: just read it and go get some adderall if you're going to ask questions and ignore the answers

[ULTRA]

Most of the criticism on here is about how Funcom keeps dropping turds that they're calling "Conan" even though the Conan stories almost exactly describe something that sounds like an open world RPG, btw.

[Jaunty]

I believe they are wholly owned by Tencent now almost: “Tencent launches its recommended voluntary cash offer for all shares in Funcom at NOK 17 per share,” https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/20/funcom-is-rolling-out-a-launcher-for-all-its-games-including-conan-exiles-and-secret-world-legends/

[Konachibi]

Having read all of R.E Howard's Conan stories, I can say so far Funcom hasn't released a single Conan game that didn't fit in the world R.E Howard created. Conan has done all of these things, he's adventured across the world (Age Of Conan), he's been lost and fought to survive in harsh environments (Conan Exiles), he's commanded armies to defend cities (Conan Unconquered) and he has delved in to dungeons slaying beast and monster alike (Conan Chop-chop).
The one thing they haven't covered yet is the times he's been a pirate, sailing the seas, looting and pillaging from passing vessels and port towns, but hopefully that will come eventually.

Age Of Conan was and still is a beautiful game to look at, graphically it blows most other MMOs out of the water even by today's standard. It's biggest mistake was having too many servers on launch, so the playerbase ended up spread out, but then a lot of MMOs of that time made the same mistake, so enthused to try and defeat WoW that they never considered that the amount of players wouldn't be huge at first, it'd take time and word-of-mouth to spread before the sales came in. By the time Funcom realised their mistake, everyone had either moved on or went back to WoW.
Conan Exiles, in my opinion, having played many survival crafting games, is still the best of them all. The variety of things to do, the freedom crafting allows, the different kinds of enemies, sandstorms, thunderstorms, blizzards, thralls, dungeons, multiple biomes, mounted combat, tamable beasts... it has everything, and it runs far better than Ark: Survival Evolved could ever hope to achieve. The only other game in the genre that I feel competes is Dragon Quest Builders 2, but that game uses the minecraft-style blocks, so creativity gets suffocated a little.
Conan Unconquered I will admit isn't great, but it is a very challenging RTS game in the vein of They Are Billions. It's nothing amazing, but it's fun to play, and I have no complaints about it.

So why do people hate Funcom... no real reason. Funcom mostly tend to follow trends, they see a genre is doing well, and they make their own with their own flavour mixed in. They've never been chart toppers, but they've never really made a bad game either.
That's what some people seem to hate about them, they don't make smash hits but they also don't create drama, they're just a quiet little company that goes along releasing reasonably good games every few years. There's nothing to hate about them, and some people hate that.

[AwesomeHero]

The way they treated their playerbase. That's what lost them a ton of former believers when they kept ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up with conan exiles. there was 0 commitment like you would feel from a lot of other studios. Pretty clear most people there just turned up for their paycheck and had no clue.

Game breaking exploit ruining everyones experience? "Ye sure there is an easy fix but we will wait and push it out in the next update in 4 weeks."

Peoples buldings suddenly gone ? "oh sorry we pushd out unfinished mechanics with this patch by mistake"

Servers on launch down for 2 weeks after 1,5 days of laggy mess ? instead of saying they have no clue when they will be up again it was : "soon" "any moment" "keep checking"

People pointing out such things , as dupes which didn't really get fixed on forums? "here you go get banned for trolling"

[Marceline]

Funcom has always had a lackluster reputation, but as of late this has been the experience for many of the people who play funcom games and give them money. They literally ignore customers for months. Go to their forums, like TSW, AO, or AoC, you'll see numerous cases of Funcom taking peoples money and not giving them the points or sub time they paid for.

When a customer rightfully refunds the charge after weeks (if not a month or two) of noone from Funcom responding, Funcom bans their account. And if you're free to play on any of their MMOS (Exiles not included), you don't get customer support at all.

For this single reason, I feel its fair to say that they certainly aren't a good company.

[ULTRA]

Originally posted by Marceline:

AO..., you'll see numerous cases of Funcom taking peoples money and not giving them the points or sub time they paid for.

Haha is this literally true? AO wasn't able to meet traffic demand on launch and they had to refund peoples' first months since access was so bad, back in... What, 2001? Or whatever. That'd be hilarious if they had actually degraded over 20 years.

[Marceline]

Originally posted by Anarchist Jurisdictor:

Originally posted by Marceline:

AO..., you'll see numerous cases of Funcom taking peoples money and not giving them the points or sub time they paid for.

Haha is this literally true? AO wasn't able to meet traffic demand on launch and they had to refund peoples' first months since access was so bad, back in... What, 2001? Or whatever. That'd be hilarious if they had actually degraded over 20 years.

It's true. And rather pathetic. I know they have only a small team for customer support and that they have to cover every funcom game, but its a poor excuse,

[Diarrhea Blaster]

Age of Conan-great game, but as soon as they made end game pvp involve resource farming, a pve concept, the game died

Conan Exiles-never delivered on promises like Sorcery and initially lied and said horses can't work with the game because they couldn't program it correctly only to eventually magically have horses come.

This game- Could be a cool rpg in 3d with good graphics instead they make this ugly game

Basically, Funcom takes great ideas with great IPs then fails to deliver them.

edit: OH and 2 years+ into conan exiles and the AI is still atrocious and randomly stops fighting or doesn't attack at random times.

[Jaunty]

O.O boi howdy this has turned into a thread and a half what is wrong with you people. Game dev hard, sometimes you just make poor decisions. And imo they've been making poor decisions since the AOC mmo. They released AOC too early, the rework of the combat in TSW seemed like a misstep, Conan Exiles being more PvP centric than PvE, Bloodline Champions Link [www.gamasutra.com] All but one of the previous comments seem like personal gripes to me and you know what I get that. Funcom to their credit make/publish amazing games but in the end don't seem to be able to manage them properly, once again game dev hard. But all this said if you don't like Funcom just don't buy their stuff. It's literally that simple. I know, I know, we are on the Steam forums so I should expect a lot of informal negativity but the fact this isn't even a game developed by Funcom and Funcom are now backed financially I cannot see them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this one up. I would hope this one is gonna be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to it, very much so.

[ULTRA]

"Backed financially" lol pretty funny way of saying they were bought out because they kept making dubious business decisions like the game whose forum we're posting on right now.

[ULTRA]

I don't even know why you made this thread since you seem to have walked into it with the preconception that Funcom is a totally fine company because you are undiscerning when it comes to their games. Is this just a troll-trolling thread?

[Marceline]

Originally posted by Jaunty:

O.O boi howdy this has turned into a thread and a half what is wrong with you people. Game dev hard, sometimes you just make poor decisions. And imo they've been making poor decisions since the AOC mmo. They released AOC too early, the rework of the combat in TSW seemed like a misstep, Conan Exiles being more PvP centric than PvE, Bloodline Champions Link [www.gamasutra.com] All but one of the previous comments seem like personal gripes to me and you know what I get that. Funcom to their credit make/publish amazing games but in the end don't seem to be able to manage them properly, once again game dev hard. But all this said if you don't like Funcom just don't buy their stuff. It's literally that simple. I know, I know, we are on the Steam forums so I should expect a lot of informal negativity but the fact this isn't even a game developed by Funcom and Funcom are now backed financially I cannot see them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this one up. I would hope this one is gonna be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to it, very much so.

Just a minor update to my original post. Now people are having issues coming back to their older games and are unable to get into the games, even after resetting their passwords. As of today, a quick browse through the Age of Conan forum has shown.... 7 threads revolving around "Paid for premium, money taken, premium access not given and no support has helped" and two "cannot get into game even after password resets" along with one "i can log into game, but cannot access account information" and a couple of "paid for sub, account frozen after a few days"


Average wait time from customer support seems to be anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months.

If I were to give my "personal" grudges against funcom, they would probably sound like many of the other people who responded. A lot of the issues people have with funcom are due to personal grudges of Funcom dropping the ball or doing something haphazardly. I do feel those are legitimate reasons. But I also think that if they continue outsourcing their games to other studios to develop, and they simply stand back as producers, that their reputation might improve more.