Living Hyboria

Although the Benny Hill part is due to the music, which is taken from the British show with horny little Benny Hill looking for booty.

PvP is a bitch…!

Funcom blabbermouth Erling Ellingsen said that Age of Conan will tie in with the upcoming Conan movie, produced by Lionsgate, due next year. The two companies are talking to each other, and Ellingsen even ventured to say that the movie is a $100 million affair, although not much is known about it. This from the Leipzig Games Convention, where a lot of Age of Conan stuff was shown. Images and movies are expected tomorrow.

Funcom will release a teaser image for the upcoming Age of Conan expansion, due in 2009, tomorrow, but Eurogamer have seen it:

The concept art shows three ninja-like warriors wearing green masks with a strongly oriental look. In the background are green banners decorated with dragons, and pagoda-like buildings.

I agree with them, it sounds like something from Khitai. Interesting.

Funcom’s Q2 financial papers reveals that Age of Conan has got 415,000 subscribers, and have sold over 800,000 copies. Not too shabby. The same papers points to World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King, and Warhammer Online, as the major competition. The latter looks really good, by the way.

At Games Convention in Leipzig a couple of days from now Funcom will present a lot of new stuff, both for press as well as consumers. New features, locations and content will be brought to the table together with tons of swag like trial accounts and limited edition game DVDs for some of the lucky visitors and Conan fans.

All of this will be presented by Funcom live on the stage and you can have a chat with the developers afterwards or in between. Plus you’ll also see a demonstration by Blue Orb Inc. on how to use a regular control pad for the game with their software.

And for press only, there will be an exclusive behind-closed-doors display of coming DirectX10 features.

Funcom’s Morten Larssen sums it up:

We are very pleased with the tremendously successful launch that we had, but this is where the real journey starts for Age of Conan. In the months ahead we will be putting a lot of effort into expanding and improving on the game, and we look forward to using the Games Convention to unveil some of the locations, content and features we have in the pipeline.

Interesting, to say the least. You’ll find them in Hall 5 at stand B10. If you’re in Germany, that is.

Getting ready for your first mount in Age of Conan, or perhaps it is time to get another one? Then IGN’s mount guide on the Age of Conan Vault website is a nice stop to get some information on what to get, and where to get it, as well as how much it’ll cost you.

Most male and female characters will do the same amount of damage in melee, and a bunch of balancing stuff, that’s the more important things from the July 31 update. No PvP revamp yet though, that one’s still in the Testlive forums.

Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, president Mike Morhaime, said the following to Edge in a conference call the other day:

Age of Conan released with some initial success a couple of months ago, and we did see some of our players leave to try the game. However, we’ve seen about 40 percent of those players return to World of Warcraft.

He then goes on talking about how huge World of Warcraft is, their service and such.

However, the key is this: 60 percent of the players coming to Age of Conan from World of Warcraft stays. Since this is from the Blizzard head honcho himself, and no Funcom PR machine, I’d say those a pretty reliable figures.

World of Warcraft is still the dominating MMORPG however, with 10.9 million subscribers. Funcom reported 700,000 a month after launch.

Funcom and Russian game company 1C Games have signed an agreement to bring a localized version of Age of Conan to Russia in Q4.

According to the agreement 1C will fully localize voice and text and operate local customer service, communities, websites and in-game support for Age of Conan in Russian, while Funcom takes care of back-end technology, server infrastructure and continuous development of the game. A dedicated Russian realm is to be created, giving the Russian community an opportunity to stay together and communicate with each other in their native language.

Read the press release for more, but beware of the PR hype machine, it’s a nasty beast hiding in texts like this…

The short answer is no, they are not. However, WoW Riot is claiming it is, trying to tell us that Funcom is desperate, that they dropped the ball on Age of Conan, and whatnot. The news is also reported by Rawcool, who shared the link in a comment to a previous post here on Living Hyboria.

While I’m certainly interesting to know how Age of Conan really fares, and I am wondering about the attachment rate, I believe the whole presumption of the story reported to be wrong. The stock decline, which we’ve covered previously, is what is backing up the whole “Funcom goes bankrupt” argument, but that decline is really the result of a temporary high after the games release, and the impressive sales. All in all, the Funcom stock more or less doubled what it was traded for, and then it went back to normal. This isn’t all that uncommon with games companies having a small portfolio, them being very dependent on a few key titles.