Recent Forum Posts [more...]

• • New Footage from Spellweaving

  • Nice, but that one is an NDA break because it is from the Beta.

     

     

    Now, who Spellweaving wont be in game along with no sieges? huh!

  • Posted: 5/16/08 8:06 AM
    Age of Conan
• • Funcom announced "nervous" Q1 financial report

  • Still nothing nervous about these results, in fact opposite, same expected trends for past few yrs. $3.13 loss is still better than E.A. loosing $400+ million.

    Funcom: Everything going 'according to plan' Age of Conan developer not concerned with pretax losses, boasts 1 million signups for the game's beta. By Emma Boyes, GameSpot UK Posted May 13, 2008 8:25 am PT Norwegian developer Funcom has released its latest set of financials along with an update the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures beta. Like the company's previous quarter, the results for the first quarter of 2008 shows losses before interest and tax at $3.13 million, compared to $1.21 million in the same quarter in 2007. Revenue dipped slightly to $1.64 million, compared to $1.79 million in Q1 2007. Earnings after tax came out at $919,000, which compared favourably with last quarter's $223,000 "mainly due to currency fluctuations, and tax income." As of this week, the company has a cash balance of some $47 million. Despite the continuing losses, Funcom maintains the negative numbers are exactly what it expected given an increase in the cost of sales and marketing for the upcoming Age of Conan game. According to the report, more than 1 million people have signed up for the Age of Conan beta, which has now gone gold in anticipation of its launch on May 20 in the US and May 23 in Europe. Weighing up what could go wrong with the launch of Age of Conan, Funcom identified that a "key risk" would be the stability of servers, and it has to make sure servers are stable at launch and able to cope with the "unprecedented demand" likely when the game is finally released. As for other projects, the Norwegian firm revealed sci-fi MMOG Anarchy Online now has a new rendering engine and that work is being carried out on a booster pack. Upcoming MMOG The Secret World, which has a modern-day setting with massive monsters and secret societies lurking beneath the everyday facade, is being built with the Funcom proprietary engine DreamWorld. According to Funcom, "four playfields are well underway towards completion." The company adds that some of the staff from Age of Conan will be moving over to the project once the game has been released. There are also plans for a series of casual MMOs, which are in the "technology development phase."

  • Posted: 5/16/08 7:56 AM
    Age of Conan
• • SERIOUS: WoW-Killer

  • Originally posted by Leucent
    

    OP, you have to be kidding me. X Mas time will be all about WAR and WOWLK, AOC will do well then will dip in subs at that time. The amount of people that hate WOW is WAY less then the amount that love it. WAR will be 2-4 times larger then AOC is subs and it won t even get that close to WOW. Bottom line is this game can t run on alot of comps, they made a stupid business move by doing this. 1 Mill beta sign ups isn t going to be close to what WARS will be when it hits or gets close to OB. Anyways i guess you can dream.

    
    Lets wait to see how each game is recieved after a short time :)

    Doesnt matter if a game can run on a lower end machine - still has to have long term appeal. AoC is more traditional in that way, healthy amount of a bit of everything and plenty of content to sustain a hardcore player. War possibly might be 2-4 times bigger, but I would wait until the world has reset for the 3rd time personally, and thats just my opinion.

  • Posted: 5/15/08 9:14 PM
    Age of Conan
• • Salt In The wound... Great job Funcom

  • Tarib vbmenu_register("postmenu_2128115", true); Senior Community Manager     Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Switzerland   Statement regarding sold out Early Access Program Funcom has been working very hard towards setting up gaming server capacity to launch this game comfortably for all the people who want to play Age of Conan. We are estimating that on Day One, a very high number of gamers will want to enter Hyboria. The Open Beta finished on Sunday and we have been prepping those servers to be used as Live game servers, with the first ones to be used for the Early Access Program. Once those are set up and ready, we’re doing final adjustments to the other servers to prepare for full launch. We measured how much capacity we thought we would need for this program and registrations have been on pace for this capacity – until two days ago. On Monday the registrations spiked and on Tuesday they increased even more. Early on Wednesday the capacity limit was reached and automatically shut off. The entire program is now mostly sold out globally, with some local variation. We had no way of anticipating the spike we saw at the end. Our goal for Early Access was always to provide the best possible gaming experience for the ones who would get into the program. We scoped servers and download capacity for the 15gb client for a set number, based on our best projections. Those have been soundly surpassed. We are of course extremely humbled by the fact that so many players can’t wait to play the game. We understand that there’s been some unfortunate confusion about the pre-order keys in some markets. Early Access has been a special limited offer that was exclusively available through the Age of Conan billing pages once you registered your pre-order key. Just to clarify there are no ‘Early Access keys’, and all pre-order keys do of course give the exclusive mounts and item benefits to your account as intended. Now we have few choices. We could shut down the Closed Beta and reformat those servers to set them up for Early Access instead, but the fact is that the Closed Beta is supplying extremely valuable information that we would not want to miss. Quality is always our first goal and we would not want to compromise that but rather focus on the experience for all of you at launch. Our best course of action is to move as quickly as we can to finalize the adjustments of the full range of launch servers, and to concentrate on being completely prepared for launch. It is only a matter of days even for those who are not in the Early Access program to set foot in Hyboria. We are looking forward to greet you there! Yours sincerely, Funcom Development Team __________________ Oliver 'Tarib' Kunz Senior Community Manager

    A little word on the matter from today.

  • Posted: 5/15/08 8:17 PM
    Age of Conan
• • Funny Quests Experienced: The Bearded Clam! : Whats yours?

  • The Chicken Handler and the Cock Handler - AND the quest reward!  :P

  • Posted: 5/15/08 7:54 PM
    Age of Conan