Today, developer Funcom and publisher Eidos have made a joint mediatic effort to lift the veil on what they call Age of Conan's "promising future", revealing selected new features which are now in production - including a massive new PvP update called "To the death" (going live near the end of June), followed later this year by a MASSIVE (ed. - notice the CAPS) free update called "Kingship!". Which will basically be a guild alliance warfare system.

During autumn, a reward and character evolution system called "Powerpoints" will also be introduced, along with the mandatory new areas and dungeons in the months ahead, improved player-made villages and Battlekeep systems, social updates, and the generic "more adventures". You'll find all of these detailed below. (...)

 Continue reading 'The Future of Age of Conan'...

The self-professed, made-in-Taiwan future of free-to-play MMOs, to be more precise. This is how the German publisher Frogster announced its latest acquisition, Runes of Magic - a fantasy MMORPG originally developed by the Taiwanese studio Runewaker Entertainment under the title Radiant Arcana, which is already completed and currently in open-beta phase in China.


This definitely lends credence to Frogster's plans of releasing it before Christmas 2008 in Germany, and "soon afterwards" in English-speaking territories. But the rest of their communique isn't too convincing in regard to their earlier claim, about Runes of Magic being "the future". Just the usual set of features, topped by the promise of a "free2play, no monthly fees, free download" MMO. You can find them all listed on the Runes of Magic website, along with the game's story, various artworks, and a "beta infoletter". The first screenshots are just below this abstract from Frogster's announcement: (...)

 Continue reading 'Runes of Magic, The Future Of Free MMOs'...

As Age of Conan launches today for all North American players (not just those with a 3-day early access), it does so with another decidedly positive PR news. The game's Collector's Edition, totalling 111,000 units in its initial prints, has "completely sold out in all markets". If you've been meaning to get your bloody hands on one, the only advice Funcom can give you is to look on retail shelves, cause there sure aren't any re-orders available.

All in all, Funcom is shipping around 700,000 copies of Age of Conan on day one. This may not seem like a record-breaking figure - considering that World of Warcraft's expansion, The Burning Crusade set a record of nearly 2.4 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of availability last year. Nevertheless, Funcom's Morten Larssen is confident that their pre-order numbers for Age of Conan "represent the highest pre-order number for any global launch of an original PC game, ever, including the original World of Warcraft launch".

So, shipping and sales figures are looking good, the servers held up "exceptionally well" during the early access period, the first Age of Conan review rated it at 9 out of 10 (in the Nordic magazine Game Reactor)... looks almost perfect. Almost, because there was some bad news after all: the DirectX 10 version of Age of Conan is not shipping with the initial launch. They're still working on it, apparently, and they plan to premiere it at the Leipzig Games Convention (August 20-24). Also, a special preview showing off the advanced graphics made possible by the DX10 technology will be unveiled this summer at nVidia’s NVISION event in San Jose, California, August 25-27.

And finally, fellow Europeans, rest assured you're not forgotten: Age of Conan will launch in Europe in just a few days, on May 23.

All's looking good for next week's public launch, as Funcom and Eidos proclaimed that over 1 million people have signed up for the Age of Conan beta, a figure shadowed only by the 5 million unique visitors tracked on the game's official website during 2008. They even believe this represents "the largest ever beta sign-up figure in the [Western] history of the genre", thought admitedly they're still not sure how these figures will convert into sales and, most importantly, subscriptions. I know plenty of people are going to give it a try, at the very least.

And if that's no clear indication of the game's short-term success, World of Warcraft's population is already starting to take a hit, as half of my betraying guildies will tell you. As far as I can tell, no other MMO has triggered such a large exodus of WoW players, over the past three years since Blizzard launched it. LotR Online came close in 2007, but it was a very, very short-lived distraction. The question is, will Age of Conan last long enough to threaten WoW's undisputed reign?

I still have my doubts.

P.S. We have a new Age of Conan 'femme fatale' trailer added yesterday, in case you didn't notice.

- The 360+ MB Crysis patch 1.2 is finally up for download. But it has issues. And also some dedicated (albeit beta) nVidia drivers.

- "We have no plans to have in-game advertising in StarCraft II", says Blizzard via Blizzplanet. Well, they have no plans for announcing the next Diablo game today, either. But that doesn't mean it's not there...

- Dark Sector has just gone Gold, and is now ready for releasing in North America this March 25 on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

- Capcom dismisses Resi 5 date rumours, the ones placing the release of Resident Evil 5 in October 2008 (just before Gears of War 2). So it might only come out in early 2009.

- Huxley, that MMOFPS nearly gone vaporware, was featured this week in an IGN preview saying that Webzen plans to release the PC version by the end of 2008, followed about six months later by the Xbox 360 version (which will take place 50 years later, but will still have "cross-platform interaction" with the PC version, oddly enough).

- Each game from the Orange Box package - Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode One + Two - will be available as separate PC titles at retail on April 9, as confirmed by Valve on Joystick. Too little too late.

- Europa Universalis III: In Nomine announced for this summer (or some time before it). It's like an expansion for another expansion, since it will require the Napoleon's Ambition add-on, and the idea for it was born on Paradox' forums. Sounds... promising...

- Various WiiWare games were announced lately, but the vast majority of them look like pure, double-distilled shit. One exception is LostWinds (which we covered last month), and another one will hopefully be Lit - a 3D horror action-puzzler coming from WayForward (Contra 4, Shantae), which I found out about on Gamasutra.

- The U.S. Air Force wants 300... Spartans? Moonkins? Nope, PlayStation 3 consoles. Awoo! Awoo! Awoo! They're supposedly "conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors", and the PS3 is perfect for playing while on-duty their top-secret research.

- The Sims 3 website is now up, hinting at - you guessed - The Sims 3. More information is coming on March 19. I just love how everyone is making a full-blown "news" out of this.

- The Chronicles of Spellborn is being delayed again, according to a project update on the MMO's website. This time they expect to release it in Q2 2008. I beg to differ.

- Audiosurf was the top selling game on Steam in February, pwning the likes of Orange Box and Peggle Deluxe. I only found out about this cool little indie game last month, but too bad I was busy with a WoW raid at the time, to give it a try.

- Ziff Davis Media announced tonight it has filed a dreaded Chapter 11 (a.k.a. bankrupcy protection) petition, hoping to somehow pull out of the financial asshole they're stuck in, with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt... that's some heavy shit! If the name doesn't ring a bell, they publish the EGM and Games For Windows magazines, and the 1UP network of websites which also includes FileFront, GameVideos and GameTap. Mwhaha... here's our chance to take over the gaming world!

- Dragonball movie delayed... Wait, what the fuck is this doing on a gaming website!? Time to switch to Animekon for the full story.

There I was, getting my hopes (and other things) up that Blizzard will be allowed to carry on with its own franchises, after the merger with Activision will be complete. Well, me and the others who thought about that were tremendously stupid, to say the least.

Having a nice chat with some hungry for gossip analysts, Bobby Kotick, Activision’s almighty CEO, pointed out the “possibility” that Call of Duty, Infinity Wards’ awesome FPS, could receive the MMO treatment in a near future.

He started by taking a look at the MMO market as we see it today, and what he saw was a bit grim: after the dreaded World of Warcraft launch, most other companies that tried to fit in the market only managed low-selling titles, canceled titles, or failing titles. Of course, with some little exceptions. Now Kotick looks down into Blizzard’s yard, hoping that his team(s) will learn a good deal from their veterans, plus the fact that Activision has a chance to “borrow” some of Blizzard’s subscriber base.

In short, Kotick kinda said: “Fuck Blizzard’s projects, ours are more important.”

Which would explain why the vast majority of MMOs in recent years were relative failures, and why the situation won't change much for those upcoming hot-shots, either (I'm not giving names... *cough*). After all, who on Earth is so filthy rich to afford spending up to $1 billion, just to make a WoW-killer MMO, instead of buying a couple of African countries and playing a real-life war-game.

The billion-dolar figure was estimated by Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium 2008 Conference this Tuesday, as reported by GI.biz.

"We don't think that even if we made the USD 500 million or billion-dollar investment to get a product out [to compete with WOW] that we would even be successful doing it. (...) When you... Look at all the money that's already gone to these businesses that have failed (ed. - EA, Microsoft, Sony & co.), there didn't seem a likelihood that even a well-managed company like Activision would have the prospect for profit any time soon in this category."

When you look at it that way, Activision were really the smartest guys around. Honestly, why spend a crapload of money and waste people's time trying to develop a WoW-killer, when you can just merge with Vivendi-aka-Blizzard-aka-WoW itself. Kind of makes you wonder how much Funcom is investing in Age of Onan...

Excellent. According to this here press release, the girls at ArenaNet are proud to brag themselves with more than 5 millions copies of Guild Wars, sold worldwide. Congratulations, it sure is a big chunk o’ players stuck in their virtual world.

Let’s see now… World of Warcraft – 10 millions registered users. Guild Wars – 5 million games sold. Lineage – a couple of million dudes getting spanked by big breasted Dark Elven chicks there, too. This sure leaves some gaming space for upcoming MMORPGs… Yaright. Call me a grumpy and hateful old bastard, but I bet my (second) WoW account that some extremely hyped online games that are supposed to hit the market soon, will get totally pwned.

While some companies have such a massive income that they can afford to purchase almost anything, others are, like... dying. Literally. And this seems to be the case of Perpetual Entertainment, also known as P2 Entertainment, the San Francisco based game developer that used to work on the already canceled Gods and Heroes.

Well, we all knew they had problems. Big ones. The said MMORPG got trashed like hell, in favor of some sort of Star Trek Online game. Then, in January, Perpetual announced that it will sell all their Star Trek things, including the last remains of Jean Luc Piccard’s hair, to another company, only to focus on it’s MMO software, called Perpetual Platform.

If this is true, companies like BioWare, that licensed this product, will probably be affected in one way or the other.

Warcry scoop.