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'...

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.

Much like the Chains of Olympus teaser ad included in God of War II's retail box (if my memory serves me right), God of War III for the PlayStation 3 is also being hinted as "coming soon" inside the package of the new PSP chapter launching this week. This time, however, there's not even a vague release timeframe like that "2007" initially announced for God of War: Chains of Olympus... which, as it turns out, was completely wrong anyway. My guess is that if they didn't even bother to write "2008" on the GoW3 ad now, they sure won't manage to launch it this year. Or simply put: God of War III coming in 2009. I dare Sony to prove me wrong.

Destination Playstation is a nice and cozy meeting between Sony representatives, retailers and 3rd party developers, which takes place in Arizona, every year. If you are a console freak, then you probably know about all this bullshit, and even more, if you are a proud owner of a Playstation, be it a handheld, be it a PS3, or be it a PS2 for all those juicy bishojou games out there, you’ll be pretty interested in this.

First off, we’ll get a Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots PS3 Bundle in Q2 2008, which will include a nice 80 GB Playstation 3, a retail version of Solid Snake’s upcoming adventure, plus a Dualshock 3 controller, all for only 499.99 USD. The price is good, I must say, the only thing that I do not know for sure is the presence (or absence) of the dreaded backwards compatibility.

Secondly, PSP owners will get a huge boner when this pretty God of War PSP Entertainment Pack hits the shelves, for a mere 199.99 USD. The bundle will include a nice custom red PSP, with Kratos’ face forever carved into the handheld’s back, the upcoming God of War: Chains of Olympus, plus the voucher to freely download Syphon Filter: Combat Ops from the Playstation Store.

Last, but certainly not least, the much awaited Dualshock 3 will finally get its ass on the North American market, starting with April, 2008. It will be charged with no less than 54.99 USD, and it is said to be compatible with over 100 PS3 games. Frankly, I still think Sony lost a LOT with delaying this launch, but, hey, better late than never.

Ah, the distinguished Game Developers Conference... now there's an event we won't be attending (although we might hold a prolongued "editorial" meeting at the local pub tonight). But no worries, that's why we have the internets, to bring us various stuff from this week's GDC 2008 in San Francisco. Such is this new pack of screenshots from Age of Conan issued by Funcom. I'd rather not comment on them, though - we might lose our last two Conan-fans readers who drive our earnings through the roof.

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 Continue reading 'GDC 2008 - Age of Conan Screenshots'...

God of War: Chains of Olympus went gold a couple of days ago, and today we have some bloody new screenshots from this divinely brutal PSP game - the second one completed by developer Ready at Dawn (after Daxter, and ahead of Okami for Wii). You can also watch last month's trailer here, by the way. The final version should be out in the US on March 4.


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 Continue reading 'Golden God of War PSP Screenshots'...

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.