For all those five people out there who give a shit about Age of Onan Conan, Gaute from FunCom posted a huge wall of text (100% chance to crit) on the upcoming MMORPG’s official website, sharing with us mortals some juicy details about the game’s progress so far. Here are a couple of his random thoughts:

Prestige Classes - It was a great idea those many years ago before we got into the depth of our character progression, but as we moved deeper and deeper into development and our internal alpha testing we found that the prestige classes were not giving the experience they were supposed to. In fact, the prestige classes were doing the opposite of what we wanted them to do when they got into the mix. It didn't give more variety or more solid character progression, it rather cornered the player. We wanted character progression to be about choice, and not about running down a small corridor to a given end. The end result was something people weren’t used to and upset them too much.

You will excuse me now while I go check the cyb0r status in Goldshire.

- Super Smash Bros. Brawl sales top 1 million in Japan, making it the fastest selling Wii game to reach that sales figure over there. We should start stocking up on booze early, for when it launches over here (next month?). An insane Wii session is sure to ensue.

- Devil May Cry 4 demo hits 1 million downloads on Xbox Live, through some questionable math (25,000 downloads a day since January 24 isn't even remotely close to 1 million). No wonder Capcom's game owns the UK charts.

- Sam & Max Episode 203: Night of the Raving Dead launched on GameTap today. Tomorrow also on Telltale's website, along with a demo.

- Darkeden free vampiric MMORPG launched by Joymax, along with a new Daden Market (the item mall of Darkeden). From the communique, "players can log in today and slay vampires, fight humans, or crush oysters". Oysters?... Oh, I'm sorry, ousters.

- Need for Speed ProStreet has a new Porsche demo on the PC, featuring the Porsche GT2 and GT3RS cars, and Porsche's Leipzig test track. No use, there can be only one NFS: Porsche Unleashed!

- WorldShift beta up on FilePlanet for 5,000 gamers. "Subscribers only". F.U.

- Dynasty Warriors 6, now armed with the Gold status, will invade US retail on February 19.

- Battlefield, Halo veterans form Tyrant Studios in Seattle, setting out to "change the way games are made" with their combined tyranny experience. I don't suppose their motto is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"?

- "More churches" in Resistance 2! I loled.

The poor thing has been rumoured as dying for too long, so Microsoft's Shane Kim finally took pity on it - and its potential fans - by confirming the cancellation of Cryptic Studios' Marvel Comics MMO, in an interview with MTV Multiplayer.

"I'll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision... It's just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions."

In other words, the game sucked fireballs. Besides, you'd have to be insane to launch another MMO game in the next five-to-ten years. With WoW still going strong, what's the point? (yes, I'm gossiping about you, Conan!)

As if it weren't bad enough that NCsoft's E3 2006 line-up was somewhat lacking in quality titles, their most promising MMO project - Aion: The Tower of Eternity - was first announced for the Asian market only. Fortunately however, even though the game is being created by NCsoft's Seoul studios, it will actually be aimed at a worldwide market. A most logical decision, given that none of their other titles managed to attract an excessive amount of attention: nor Dungeon Runners (give me a break), nor Tabula Rasa (a second re-design wouldn't hurt), nor Exteel (mecha just ain't my thing), nor even Soccer Fury showed any big potential, like the titles they presented a couple of years ago (Lineage II, City of Heroes, Guild Wars). And so, all we're left with is the high-fantasy, oriental-styled MMORPG, Aion.

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