Editorials

Funcom released the early access server list. The early access is "sold out" and is set to begin on Saturday, May 17th.

The gates to Age of Conan open in just a few days from now and legions of adventurers can hardly wait to set foot on Hyborian soil. Many want to chose their future home (also known as 'Server') beforehand and we know the list below has been eagerly awaited.

Since we know how important those server names are we ran several polls on all our community forums to find out which names each territory prefers the most. We then distributed those names among the different territories/languages.

These servers are the ones that will be available on 17th of May when the Early Access play starts. The servers are scaled to modern industry standards, and will hopefully serve as your home for years to come! During Early Access we will closely monitor the number of players on each server to find out which types are the popular ones. Additional servers will then be made available for launch.

Check out the server list after the jump.

Crank up "Immigrant Song" and take a look at these great pictures from Age of Conan's launch party in Oslo, Norway. There's dudes eating fire, girls juggling flaming sticks and wenches. Wenches, man! Wenches!

We had an inside guy at the Age of Conan party, and he emerged with these 13 screens, hot off the press! Hit "Read More" to check them out!

FunCom has announced that Early Access sales have been sold out in in North America, and for the most part Europe. FunCom had originally allocated only a limited amount of users to opt into the Early Access program and apparently the demand has exceeded their expectations. As such, the programs capacity has been filled as of Wednesday, May 14th.

Since the announcement, Senior Community Manager Oliver "Tarib" Kunz has followed up with an additional statement regarding the development:

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.

The official announcement can be found here and you will find Tarib's follow up comments at the official boards.

Age of Conan and Funcom have released a new video entitled "Femme Fatales" all about the women of Hyboria. Check it out by clicking the link above.

As game worlds become more and more advanced, they also grow larger and larger. The by-product of this improvement is the long distances that must be traveled between locations. For some reason, with this increase in world size, there is not a corresponding improvement in traveling systems. Indeed, there seems to be almost a perverse joy in sending players on quests that involve running back and forth between two distant points with no other objective but carrying a bickering message between a pair of NPCs.

Gamespot's Australian bureau recently got their hooks into senior systems designer Andrew Griffin and picked his brain about AoC's 'wrap activities'. Here's a snip:

GS AU: Another common complaint of MMOs is grind. How will you go about making sure that monotony is out of the game?

AG: We have a relatively fast leveling speed--it's not slow, and it's more in the WoW type speed. We do give out a significant amount of XP via quests. So pure grinding with monsters isn't the most efficient way to level up. If you get a quest which takes a certain amount of time, you'll get the same amount of XP if you were just pure grinding at 100 percent efficiency for the same amount of time. You won't be sitting there just doing mindless grinds--you'll be doing interesting quests.

There's lots more so head over to the link above.

Age of Conan devs have announced an event for fans to attend. The conference will feature a chance to view the game in action and to participate in some head rolling that night:

As some of you might have heard, we're kicking off the launch for Age of Conan with a barbaric gathering here in Oslo. We're doing this in two stages on Tuesday May 13th .

During the day, at 12:00 CET, we're doing a presentation of the game at Latter Aker Brygge where we will show the game's exclusive features and content. Seating is limited and is reserved for journalists, but we will have quite a few extra seats for some of Oslo's Age of Conan fans. We can't guarantee a seat, but if you meet up outside Latter on Aker Brygge at 12:00 CET, there might be a chance for you to get in!

In the evening we're hosting a huge party in Holmenkollen - one of Norway's key national wonders - where we're building an entire Cimmerian war camp to honor the release of our game (and possibly wage war on the evil wizard inhabiting the tower!). And guess what? Those of you who actually get into the presentation during the day will have a chance of also being invited to the party in Holmenkollen!

Again, seating at the presentation is limited and so is access to the party. But with some luck you might be one of those who get to send Age of Conan into history!

By Crom! This will rock!

Sounds like an event to remember. Now...where did I put my passport?

Mitra's Method is giving you the opportunity to ask your questions about Age of Conan!

"The NDA has been lifted for press members, so if there is anything you desire to be answered, then be sure to submit a question!"

'Read More' to find out how to submit your question, and the steps you need to take to do so.

A coworker of mine really wanted to play the Age of Conan beta. When he heard that FilePlanet subscribers would have the chance to download the client and play it themselves, he jumped at the chance. But 24 hours and dozens of gigabytes later, his will faltered. Have you had a similar experience? For this week's discussion, we want to know:

Are system requirements, hard-drive space and download times preventing people from playing MMOs?

Tell us what you think in the comment thread!