age-of-conan posts

This week, Age of Conan players got to see the release of update 5, which adds all new content to the game. Game director and producer Craig Morrison takes viewers through a region a tour of Tarantia Commons, an area described as the underbelly of the kingdom. In it, players can choose sides in a riot and move outwards into the land, where plague threatens to infect them. This video provides a brief look at what players will be able to experience.

Download HD Age of Conan 'Tarantia Commons' Developer Walkthrough (123 MB)
Check out all Age of Conan downloads

Funcom's Age of Conan MMO title is continuing to hang in there after an up-and-down first year. Today the game got a new content update that Funcom is calling its "biggest and most influential update". Tilted "Gangs of Tarantia" the update adds a new area, the Tarantia Commons district, with a new storyline and new monsters to fight. There's also some gameplay features such as changes to in-game items and more.

If you want to try out Age of Conan, Direct2Drive has a new sale on the game. From now until Sunday they are selling the title on their download site for just $9.99.

Funcom was riding high a year ago this week with the launch of its fantasy MMO Age of Conan. The game shipped out a total of 1.2 million copies around the world and had high inital sales. However, keeping players in the game was a tad harder and Funcom was forced to cut the number of servers it ran for the game by over 50 percent last January.

However things seems to be improving for Age of Conan, at least according to Funcom. Today's press release marking the game's first anniversary states that Age of Conan has seen " . . . a significant increase in players and new customers per month." The developer has also released a number of free expansions to the game and added DirectX10 graphics support. Today Funcom stated that players in the game can celebrate it's first birthday with a number of activities and contests and a free anniversary gift. In addition players who have more than six months of game time in Age of Conan will get an additional character slot.

In the last 12 months, MMO developer Funcom launched their latest game Age of Conan but watched as many of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought the game didn't stick around in the months that followed. However things seem to have turned around for the company as their latest financial release announces that the company has returned to being profitable.

Age of Conan has been successful in both retaining its current subscriber base and growing with new customers in the first quarter of this year with Funcom stating that this has "led to a stable and solid subscriber base" for the game. While the development team continues to expand the game with new content they are also continuing to develop their next major MMO project The Secret World.

Funcom had a very successful launch of their Age of Conan MMO last May, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of the game's retail product. However it's been holding onto the monthly subscribers that has been the tricky part for the game since the launch. It has closed over half of the game's servers and Funcom itself has laid off a number of employees since the launch.

Today Funcom announced that it is giving folks a chance to download and play a free trial version of Age of Conan. The trial (which varies between seven and 14 days depending on the source of the download) does have some gameplay restructions but will allow folks to get a taste of the game. The trial version includes lots of new content, features and improvements that have been added since the game's launch. One thing that still isn't in Age of Conan is the long promised DirectX10 graphical upgrade althought it is supposedly in beta testing now.

Perhaps more so than any other game developer, Funcom had a truly up-and-down year in 2008. The company finally released its long awaited fantasy MMO Age of Conan back in May which sold a ton of copies out of the gate. However the game itself could not hold onto its inital subcriber base which has resulted in the departure of its design director, a number of layoffs, and the shutdown of over half its servers. And we are still waiting for the long promised DirectX10 graphical update.

Today Funcom revealed its latest financial numbers and, well, they aren't good. The developer lost $23.3 million in its last quarter that ended December 31. While Funcom won't reveal specific subscriber numbers for Age of Conan it did admit in its financial presentation that it had "a lower subscriber retention than anticipated before launch, leading to a reduction in subscriber levels in the months following the launch." In a semi-related story, Funcom's chief financial officer Olav Sandnes has decided to resign.

Funcom will continue to add new content to Age of Conan in 2009 while also working on new projects just as Java-based casual MMO projects and their next major project The Secret World. Funcom says they have 80 people working on the game which is set in a supernatural version of the modern world. They plan to begin a PR campaign for the game later this spring.

We are already thinking about the weekend (which for some people will be a three day weekend due to President's Day) and GoGamer.com has once again given out some special sales on a number of their PC retail games for their regular 48 Hours Madness sale.

This weekend you can get a number of PC titles for less at the site. These include Fallout 3 for $32.90 and the Collector's Edition of the game for $49.90. The Collector's Editions for Age of Conan and Warhammer Online are also on sale for $19.90 and $39.90, respectively. Again these prices are for this weekend only.

It was one of the most successful MMO launches in history with hundreds of thousands of copies sold in its first week back in May. Since then, however, Funcom has had lots of trouble keeping players from leaving Age of Conan. This week those effects will become more tangible as the developer cuts the number of servers it has running the game by over half.

Our sister site Massively has the full list of servers that will remain when the game completes the merge later this week. US servers for Age of Conan are being cut down to just six (it originally had 25 servers online) while the European servers will still have 12 servers remaining. Funcom recently cut a number of its US staff members but still has plans to expand the game with free updates including the long awaited DirectX10 graphical upgrade.

Our sister site Massively has been working with the social gaming network web site GamerDNA to compile data on players and their activities in PC games with an emphasis on MMO titles. The result is a new feature on Massively that shows the trends in player interest in various MMOs over the past year. According to their data (they used the gamer messager-chat service Xfire as their base) the last six months of 2008 shows that Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, Guild Wars, and of course World of Warcraft were always in the top 10 list of games played by PC games.

If you enjoy pouring over stats than this feature has it in spades. According to their data, the launch last September of Warhammer Online took players away from Age of Conan both otherwise had little impact on the MMO scene. Head over to Massively to read up more about their findings.

It's Christmas Eve which means if you haven't gotten your Christmas cards in the mail yet..well, you're a tad late to the party. Thankfully there's the Internet which can allow companies to release online Christmas cards for everyone to see.

Our sister site Joystiq has collected a number of game industry Christmas cards they have received in the mail and online. However, their gallery doesn't include everything so we at Big Download decided to collect a few other online Christmas cards in our own gallery. The images come from publisher Akella (promoting their game A Stroke of Fate), American McGee's game developer Spicy Horse, Age of Conan developer Funcom, publisher NCsoft (with cute versions of various game characters) and publisher Paradox Interactive who have not one but three different online cards promoting their upcoming strategy-sim game Majesty 2.