Funcom has sent us an exclusive update about the new Tier 3 content in Age of Conan . They've released screenshots of the new dungeon, the first screenshots of Thoth-Amon (the arch-nemesis of Conan), and screenshots of some of the new tier 3 armor sets. Here are a few screenshots from the Tier 3 update: Here's a look at the background story for the Tier 3, Update 6, publish: Thoth-Amon has returned and is performing nefarious deeds in his stronghold. He has long been a thorn in King Conan's side and players are charged by Conan to battle through vicious demonic minions before confronting Thoth-Amon himself. In Update 6 Funcom has introduced a whole new raid tier. This includes a massive new dungeon known as Thoth-Amon's Stronghold, the home to Conan's arch-nemesis himself, as well as new enemies and new rewards such as new armor. And did we mention that you will actually be able to fight alongside Conan himself in Thoth-Amon's Stronghold? Horrifying enemies Every person in the stronghold...

Our friends at Funcom sent us a recent update about the new factions being brought into Age of Conan in their upcoming expansion, Rise of the Godslayer. There are twelve new factions altogether, two of which remain secret until the player actively seeks them out. Depending on which factions players choose to align themselves with, other factions might become hostile or friendly, providing countless hours of new experiences. All areas of the land of Khitai are inhabited by different factions; some groups choose to stay close to their local region while others roam through the land. Check out the full article over at MMORPG!

Our friends at Funcom have posted a recent letter from the game director of Age of Conan ! Craig Morrison highlights some of the coming changes, progress on the next expansion, plans for the game in 2010, and of course a season's greetings! Here's a look at what Craig had to say: Firstly I want to thank all our players for their support this year. Whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate at this time of year, it is a time for giving thanks and reflecting on the year that has passed and to look forward to the year that is almost upon us! It has been a fantastic journey this year and the entire team has worked hard to improve and build the game. Thanks to all of you who play the game and give us your feedback we have been able to keep pushing the game forwards. We have lots of cool new features and content coming up with 1.06 and the expansion so we hope that you all continue to appreciate the game and continue to enjoy your time in Hyboria! Expansion progress The expansion testing...

Funcom is getting into the holiday cheer by announcing a special promotion today called the Unlimited Free Trial campaign, which will allow players free acces to the 1-20 game forever, assuming you sign up by January 1st, 2010. "Our original seven day trial has been very successful so far," says Morten Larssen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Funcom. "But with the holiday season coming up this is the perfect time to shake up our trial offer a bit and try out something new. So everyone who downloads the trial before January 1st will be able to play the first part of the game for free, forever. We are confident that many of those taking advantage of this offer will choose to become permanent players, allowing them to experience all of what the game has to offer including all the additions and improvements introduced since launch." If you haven't yet had the chance to see what the world of Hyboria has to offer, now is your chance to do so risk free. Play through what is lauded as...

Funcom and Xfire have announced there will be a unique one-hour live gameplay demonstration of the upcoming expansion for Age of Conan! The new expansion is called Rise of the Godslayer and tells the story of Conans adventures in the orient! The one-hour live session, where the developers will be playing through parts of the content that will be available in the expansion, will be streamed live to Xfire.com where it will be freely available for everyone to access. During the live session, the developers will be talking about the expansion in general as well as describing what is happening on-screen as the developers fight their way through the world. To learn more about the expansion visit: http://www.ageofconan.com

Funcom has sent us an exclusive update about the new Tier 3 content in Age of Conan . They've released screenshots of the new dungeon, the first screenshots of Thoth-Amon (the arch-nemesis of Conan), and screenshots of some of the new tier 3 armor sets. Here are a few screenshots from the Tier 3 update: Here's a look at the background story for the Tier 3, Update 6, publish: Thoth-Amon has returned and is performing nefarious deeds in his stronghold. He has long been a thorn in King Conan's side and players are charged by Conan to battle through vicious demonic minions before confronting Thoth-Amon himself. In Update 6 Funcom has introduced a whole new raid tier. This includes a massive new dungeon known as Thoth-Amon's Stronghold, the home to Conan's arch-nemesis himself, as well as new enemies and new rewards such as new armor. And did we mention that you will actually be able to fight alongside Conan himself in Thoth-Amon's Stronghold? Horrifying enemies Every person in the stronghold...

Our friends at Funcom sent us a recent update about the new factions being brought into Age of Conan in their upcoming expansion, Rise of the Godslayer. There are twelve new factions altogether, two of which remain secret until the player actively seeks them out. Depending on which factions players choose to align themselves with, other factions might become hostile or friendly, providing countless hours of new experiences. All areas of the land of Khitai are inhabited by different factions; some groups choose to stay close to their local region while others roam through the land. Check out the full article over at MMORPG!

Our friends at Funcom have posted a recent letter from the game director of Age of Conan ! Craig Morrison highlights some of the coming changes, progress on the next expansion, plans for the game in 2010, and of course a season's greetings! Here's a look at what Craig had to say: Firstly I want to thank all our players for their support this year. Whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate at this time of year, it is a time for giving thanks and reflecting on the year that has passed and to look forward to the year that is almost upon us! It has been a fantastic journey this year and the entire team has worked hard to improve and build the game. Thanks to all of you who play the game and give us your feedback we have been able to keep pushing the game forwards. We have lots of cool new features and content coming up with 1.06 and the expansion so we hope that you all continue to appreciate the game and continue to enjoy your time in Hyboria! Expansion progress The expansion testing...

Funcom is getting into the holiday cheer by announcing a special promotion today called the Unlimited Free Trial campaign, which will allow players free acces to the 1-20 game forever, assuming you sign up by January 1st, 2010. "Our original seven day trial has been very successful so far," says Morten Larssen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Funcom. "But with the holiday season coming up this is the perfect time to shake up our trial offer a bit and try out something new. So everyone who downloads the trial before January 1st will be able to play the first part of the game for free, forever. We are confident that many of those taking advantage of this offer will choose to become permanent players, allowing them to experience all of what the game has to offer including all the additions and improvements introduced since launch." If you haven't yet had the chance to see what the world of Hyboria has to offer, now is your chance to do so risk free. Play through what is lauded as...

Funcom and Xfire have announced there will be a unique one-hour live gameplay demonstration of the upcoming expansion for Age of Conan! The new expansion is called Rise of the Godslayer and tells the story of Conans adventures in the orient! The one-hour live session, where the developers will be playing through parts of the content that will be available in the expansion, will be streamed live to Xfire.com where it will be freely available for everyone to access. During the live session, the developers will be talking about the expansion in general as well as describing what is happening on-screen as the developers fight their way through the world. To learn more about the expansion visit: http://www.ageofconan.com

This weekend we had a chance to participate in GameSpot's Age of Conan PvP Weekend , and I managed to capture a few screenshots of things I thought looked fairly cool. I've separated the thumbnails below based on what the screenshot contains / where it was taken, so read on to check them out. You can also find all 32 of them here . NOTE: AA and character shadows were disabled during many of the screenshots as I was troubleshooting a client/PC crash at the same time. It turned out later to be an issue with SLI, so I disabled SLI and the game ran fine. PC Specs CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Video: 2x SLI Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 384mb (SLI was disabled during most of the playtest, though) RAM: 2GB DDR2 Hard Drive: 150GB Raptor drive Resolution: 1680x1050 Classes and their Armor Lost Temple -- Capture the Skull Blood Ravine -- Capture the Skull Team Deathmatch Miscellaneous Check back later for a writeup of my impressions of the weekend.

In part four, our final coverage of the Age of Conan Community event, we thought we would save some of the most exciting news from the event for last -- especially for a website with a background like Curse has. During a special developer panel, Gaute Godager announced that the game will be shipping with the ability to modify the look of interface elements; changing the graphics and so forth. However, post-launch, Funcom plans to add the ability to interface with the Age of Conan UI API, allowing the ability to create unique and new UI elements, similar to what World of Warcraft currently employs. Funcom also graciously released their CES 2008 Tech Demo to the public. This video was created to show off the enhancements being introduced to the Dreamworld Graphics Engine with their "Cheetah 2" update, which we talked about here . CES 2008 Tech Demo Trailer var FO_293 = { movie:"http://dev.curse-gaming.com/static/flash/flvplayer.swf", width:"500", height:"350"...

It's only been two days now since we visited Funcom in Oslo, Norway to chat about and check out Age of Conan at their homely design studio. This is part three of our article series covering all of the information shared, and it contains details on armor graphics, animations, sound and mounted combat. One quick piece of information to pass along before getting started is that female character models will be in the beta very soon -- probably the next build -- so players will be able to create a female version of their class if they so choose. Funcom was adamant about wanting to do the Conan era female justice, and felt that players experiencing anything else would dampen the enjoyment of the game. They feel they've reached that point now, so they're prepared to unveil them to the beta populace. Armor Graphics In recent years, there have been MMOs released that lacked visual quantity -- keeping the number of unique armor graphics low and simply tinting them a different color. This...

While we work on compiling more information from Friday's Age of Conan Community event, we wanted to give everyone a taste of what can be expected from the Age of Conan Art Book; over 120 images, most of which have never been seen previous to today. Enough talking, though -- enjoy the pictures! A Taste of the Art Book Classes Monsters Magic There's a lot more where they came from, so head over and check out the Art Book images by clicking here .

Raiding Raiding in Age of Conan will be fairly familiar to players of previous MMOs, as the player cap is 24 members per raid, and the raid content will be designed to have players progress through multiple tiers of difficulty. Initially there will be 8 raid dungeons in total, with 21 raid encounters, as well as other events that may play out during the progress of clearing a dungeon. Gaute Godager mentioned that these are "encounters" that can be made up of multiple bosses per-encounter. These dungeons will be split up into three tiers of difficulty; three for Tier one, three for Tier Two, and two for Tier Three. There's also a bit of linear progression through the difficulty tiers; unlocking one of the dungeons in Tier Two will require you to defeat a Tier One dungeon, and unlocking one of the Tier Three dungeons will require the defeat of a boss in a Tier Two dungeon. Of course, there's also item progression that will require sticking with a tier of difficulty longer...

Enter Conan Recently we had a chance to visit the Eidos studios out in Redwood City, California. So what was the topic of the visit you ask? Oh, nothing much, just an Age of Conan Hands on experience where we had two hours to play through the game at various levels; a freshly created character, a level 13 character, and a high-end character. Take everything you've learned about MMOG combat and throw it out the window. I'm not kidding at all; it's of no use to you here. The only thing that you'll recognize is the fact that slicing your target with your sword hurts them. Funcom has completely revamped the way you play an MMOG from the ground up; there's no more auto-attack; there's no more tab-targeting. In its place is a new frontal-cone targeting system; while in combat mode anything you're facing becomes the target of your attacks as a melee character. Your primary target is the closest to your frontal heading. Essentially, it's the thing you're looking...

Funcom's flagship MMO Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures can now be downloaded via Steam.The cost is $44.99. The latest MMO to arrive on Steam is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. It will be available for an additional 10% off for one week until Sept 11. All games are available via Steam, a leading online platform for the delivery and management of PC games with over 15 million accounts worldwide. Age of Conan Steam Page

Comme à son habitude, le site anglophone Tenton Hammer nous a concocté une petite interview d'Evan Michaels, game Designer d'Age of Conan, qui nous permet d'en apprendre plus sur le Chaman Ours. Tenton Hammer: Dans une interview récente, vous avez déclaré que le Chaman de l'Ours serait probablement le plus orienté au combat de mêlée comparé aux autres classes clericales. Dans la forme actuelle des choses, comment fonctionneront les soins du Chaman de l'Ours et quelle sorte de capacité de guérison possède-t'il par rapport aux autres classes de Prêtres ? Evan: Tous les prêtes ont des capacités de guérison comparables, même si leurs méthodes de propagation des soins dans le groupe diffèrent radicalement. Les Chamans de l'Ours sont, comme vous l'avez dit, véritablement orienté vers le combat de mêlée et vers la facilité et le renforcement de leurs capacités de soin en infligeant des dommages via leurs attaques de mêlée et leurs combos. Tenton Hammer: Il a également...

If you thought part four of our article coverage was the end of the AoC Community Event frenzy, you were wrong! Today Funcom sent us a video from the Q&A Developer Panel held on Friday, January 18th in Oslo, Norway. This video is 24 minutes long and has quite a bit of information in it. Share your thoughts in the comments below, and remember -- this is part one. There will more than likely be more videos coming, as the entire Developer Panel lasted nearly two hours! Conan Developer Panel Q&A -- Part 1 var FO_289 = { movie:"http://dev.curse-gaming.com/static/flash/flvplayer.swf", width:"500", height:"350", majorversion:"7", build:"0", bgcolor:"#FFFFFF", allowfullscreen:"true", flashvars:"file=http://videos.cursebeta.com/stream2/premium/1037.flv&autostart=true" }; $("#flvplayer_289").click(function(event) { UFO.create(FO_289, "flvplayer_289"); $(this).unbind('click'); }...

This is a translated version of the interview with Funcom German CM Tarib on Age of Conan from the allvatar.com -TV program from 11/23. The questions were asked by community members in our allvatar@quakenet IRC-Chat after the show. Interview Question: Is the Age of Conan team the same as the one which worked on Anarchy Online? Tarib: Some Developers who worked on Anarchy Online, are working now on Age of Conan but the team of Age of Conan is much more bigger than the Anarchy Online team so there are also many new Developers. ----- Question: Is there any need of a DKP System for Raid Groups? Tarib: Raids will be included in Age of Conan and the maximum limit is 24 player. A DKP System would be really helpful to organize your Raidgroup. ----- Question: Is it possible to reach level 80 just with staying in the first level zone, for example Stygien? Tarib: To reach level 80 you will need to explore the whole world of Age of Conan, just staying in the first location won´t result in success....

Ten Ton Hammer is back this week to continue their bi-weekly series of Age of Conan class interviews. This week Funcom's Product Director, Jørgen Tharaldsen, talks about the Guardian class - one of Age of Conan's "tank" classes in the Soldier archtype. Jørgen Tharaldsen: The Guardian will be a fantastic tank that is for sure, but I definitively wouldn’t say that their greatest asset is “only” their armor. The armor of the Guardian is naturally very important since the Guardian is the only class that can equip Full Plate armor (for one example), but he also has many other strengths. For instance, in Conan the Guardians can also deal significant amounts of damage. In general, we have tried to innovate on several fields to make the tank classes more interesting than in many other MMO games, and I will expand on this a tad more in this Q&A. When it comes to the damage; the armor will mitigate the damage in most cases. I found this King Conan quote from one of the lore...

Do you think you've got what it takes to play with the best in Age of Conan? Battlegroup9.com is going to be organizing a server selection for a Free-For-All PvP Server in Age of Conan . Some of the best players in WoW and even many of AoC's top Closed Beta players will be joining the BG9 community to create a truly epic gaming experience. Don't forget to set your bookmarks because we will be announcing instructions on how to roll with us on May 10th , three days before the pre-release. We invite all those players and guilds out there who consider themselves exceptionally skilled to join with us and create THE place for AoC PvP. Go sign up over at our forums and post on our headcount thread . Tell your buddies, your guildmates and anyone else you think is an awesome player -- this is where it's going to go down. Want to know more about AoC? We currently have a few closed beta testers answering any and all questions over at our AoC Q&A thread. Not to mention, we have...

Auf der offiziellen Seite wurde am Freitag wieder ein Friday Update veröffentlicht. Diesmal gibt es 4 frische Screenshots aus der laufenden Beta inklusive Kommentaren, warum genau diese ausgewählt worden sind. Nachfolgend stell ich euch Auszüge aus dem Artikel inklusive der zugehörigen Screenshots vor. FridayUpdate wrote: Was mir unter anderem an Age of Conan sehr gefällt, ist der Umstand, dass man sich tatsächlich wie ein Gestrandeter nach einem Schiffbruch fühlt. Man muss jeden gefundenen Gegenstand einsetzen um zu überleben. Das sieht man auch an der bunten Zusammensetzung der Kleidung, die mein Charakter in den Screenshots trägt. Man schnappt sich mehr oder weniger alles, was den getöteten Feinden abgenommen werden kann und brauchbar aussieht. Es handelt sich hier um einen Charakter mit niedriger Erfahrungsstufe, der um zu Überleben einfach alles mit nimmt, was er auf seinem Weg in die Finger bekommt. Die Handschuhe und Sandalen nahm ich einem toten Pikten ab, die Hosen einem Wilderer...

Le Lead Designer de Age of Conan, Ole Herbjørnsen, a mis à jour son blog contenant sa vie palpitante et excitante de designer. Au menu cette semaine il est question de "ketchup effect", si vous êtes curieux de savoir de quoi il s'agit, veuillez cliquer sur le lien ci-dessous.

Une nouvelle sur le site officiel d'Age of Conan nous informe de la disponibilité d'une vidéo "journal de dév" (developer diary) dont le sujet concerne le monde des artistes graphiques et la direction d'art. Didrik Tollefsen, Directeur d'art (Art Director), et sa joyeuse bande d'artistes nous montres comment les graphismes sont importants lorsqu'il s'agit de restituer l'atmosphère de la virtuelle Hyboria. Bref, ça vaux le coup d'oeil, alors bon visonnage !

The Age of Conan website has a new feature piece today - the first in a series of letters to the community - from Game Director Gaute Godager. The first installment sees Gaute talk about his experiences as a gamer, and how the focus has shifted for many of the core aspects of an MMO in Age of Conan. Gone are the days of a plethora of meaningless quests; instead, Funcom hopes to usher in an age of quests that actually mean something, and are enjoyable, lore-packed stories. He also touches on combat, and mentions that Age of Conan will shift away from repeatedly watching your hotkeys for a handful of abilities to light up; you're going to be a lot more involved in combat, both as a melee class and as a caster. Head over to the Savage and sexy letter to read more - you won't be disappointed.