In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.