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Daily Column

Loading... it did the Kessel run in less that 12 parsecs (Thanks Joe)

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

1. Age of Conan - 200 BPM
2. World of Warcraft - 32 BPM
3. Lord of the Rings Online - 15 BPM
4. EverQuest 2 - 10 BPM
5. Lineage 2 - 8 BPM
6. Warhammer Online - 7 BPM
7. EVE Online - 7 BPM
8. Guild Wars - 7 BPM
9. Vanguard - 6 BPM
10. Pirates of the Burning Sea - 5 BPM

I apologize for not have an Age of Conan first impressions piece up for you. The client continues to trickle across the Internet to me in dribs and drabs. I should have it just in time for the store to open tomorrow and sell me a copy.

The good folks at Funcom did grace me with this bit of information this morning.

"Durham, USA – May 19, 2008 – Funcom is proud to announce that the Collector’s Edition of Age of Conan is now completely sold out in all markets. The exclusive edition was announced in January, and has since topped retail charts at numerous retailers. In some markets, the Collector’s Edition has been sold out for weeks, and as a result additional boxes were made. These are also sold out, and the total print run stands at 111.000 units. Lucky customers may still find some copies on retail shelves, but no re-orders are available.

Additional retail figures for the standard edition of Age of Conan are also highly impressive. In total, Funcom is shipping around 700.000 copies of Age of Conan on day one. This impressive figure for a PC game is powered by equally impressive pre-order numbers. As a result of the tremendous interest and recent order increase, Funcom has not been able to fulfill all orders of Age of Conan in several markets due to current server capacity limitations. Extra orders of servers are now in place to facilitate for handling of more customers.

“Everyone in Funcom is delighted and humbled with the historical pre-order numbers for Age of Conan. If the information we have is correct, they represent the highest pre-order number for any global launch of an original PC game, ever, including the original World of Warcraft launch,” said Morten Larssen, Funcom’s VP of Sales & Marketing.

More than one million unique visitors visited the Age of Conan websites last week, and as a result of the great interest in the game, Funcom's early access offer was swiftly oversubscribed. The three day early access program was a limited offer reserved for pre-order customers. While Funcom scaled the servers above anticipation, player demand surpassed expectations. As the Early Access servers launched last night, the servers and game held up exceptionally well. As the game launches properly later this week, Funcom expects additional large numbers of customers to enter the game.

All the positive signals are naturally not equal to eventual success, but early indications from the press points out that the game boasts unique qualities. The very first review for the game gives it a 9 out of 10 score from Game Reactor, the Nordic regions largest gaming magazine.

While Funcom is thrilled with the early success of Age of Conan, and proud of the game launching this week, the company regrets to inform gamers that the DirectX 10 version of the game will not ship with the initial launch. As Microsoft’s DirectX 10 is undoubtedly the future of PC gaming, Funcom has decided to ship only the DirectX 9 version at launch, giving the team more time to focus on building a DirectX 10 version worthy of Microsoft’s great vision for the future of PC gaming. This postponement will let Funcom include even more features in the DirectX 10 version of Age of Conan than originally planned.

The DirectX 10 version will be premiered at the German Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, August 20 – 24, 2008. A special preview showing off the advanced graphics made possible by DirectX 10 technology will be unveiled this summer at nVidia’s NVISION event in San Jose, California, August 25 – 27, 2008.

Age of Conan launches 20th of May in North America / Oceania and 23rd of May in Europe. More information about the game can be found on www.ageofconan.com"

Congratulations Funcom team! I'm not sure how a site could review this game yet, but hey...to each their own. We will be in Leipzig to report on the DX10 version when it is shown in August. 700,000 shipped copies is an enormous number. It doesn't say if those are shipped and purchased or simply shipped to retail, but either way it is impressive.

Fortunately for you, my slacking is not contagious as the rest of the staff have been hard at work on various projects.

Jeff has been diligently crunching and editing video from the Conan event in Oslo. I can't count the number of questions that I have answered about raids and sieges. I won't have to answer any more. Here is the scoop direct from Funcom in our Live Raid and Siege Presentation from the Age of Conan Launch Event.

If you are looking to poke fun at me and want to see me do an interview while freezing my extremities off then this interview with Knug Avenstroup Haugen, the composer of the Age of Conan soundtrack might be for you. You have no idea how many jokes went through my head and had to be held back when said I was a pianist. I'm six feet tall and Knut is a short Norwegian, so imagine what it was like trying to see through a crowd at this event. As a side note, they say that the camera ads 10 pounds. I had about seven cameras on me I think.

As a reminder, the Ten Ton Hammer guild will be forming on the Wiccana server which apparently is the unofficial roleplay server. I'll be roleplaying a Priest of Mitra (drunk and evangelical) and a Necromancer (where I'll be pasty faced and sullen).

Tony Jones got intimate with John Smedley of SOE where we learned about the real money trading (RMT) plans that they have, that The Agency is going 'M' rated and more.

"Another announcement we saw during the keynote was that The Agency would be SOE's first M rated product. When asking about the demographic he states "With the Agency we are going after the core gamer audience." He continues by explaining there is shooter gameplay and that SOE is looking to push some limits you wouldn't find in other games. Calling it an evolution of their game design, the development team is just going out to make the game they want to, and tell a specific type of story. When mixed with Free Realms this type of title will allow SOE to get more people into the market by using what he referred to as a "funnel strategy" and broaden their reach."

Cody Bye snuggled up to Brandon Reinhart to discuss Blackstar.

"So when our relationship with NCsoft ended that put us in a position where we couldn't work on our game anymore because they owned our IP. We owned the tech, but they owned the IP. We actually had to strip all of the IP out because there was a point where we had to do that because we play everything right legally. They owned the IP, so we had to strip everything out.

We got to keep some of it for demoing purposes, but we couldn't actually actively develop on the game. We spent three months figuring out new plans, but at the same time we knew we were planning on buying back our IP. Once the negotiations were finished we could go back and keep moving forward on the project. It was great for the team, because we really love the visual style and what we'd done for the game."

Cody also put on his Superman pajamas to chat with Ken Morse, the Senior Art Lead for City of Heroes/Villains. The topic was Creating Cimerora for Issue #12.

Then it was into the phone booth (try finding a phone booth in Seattle) and back into his Clark Kent clothes so that Cody could interview Joe Ludwig, the Director of Development for Pirates of the Burning Sea about the upcoming 1.5 patch.

"When Pirates of the Burning Sea was launched a few months ago, many players were clearly interested in the game, but a fair number were disappointed by some of the systems that weren't thoroughly completed before the release of the game. However, over the last few months the developers at Flying Lab Software have been retooling a number of the in-game systems along with merging the servers to increase the player economies in the game. At the ION Games Conference, Cody "Micajah" Bye sat down with Joe Ludwig, director of development for Pirates of the Burning Sea, and discussed what's been happening to the players in the game and what players should expect from the newly unveiled patch 1.5. "

Danny Gourley, our resident prize distribution robot has another contest for our readers. This time we have a Torque Me Giveaway for those of you who enjoy getting prizes for free or just like mailing Danny over and over with questions. As always Premium Members have a better chance to win. If you aren't familiar with Project Torque then check out this teaser trailer.

Until tomorrow. The Loading Forums await you. Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

--
[A big thanks to Karen Hertzberg for putting together the links today. ]

17 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 147 in May! 1166 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

Images/Video

• AoC: Live
  Raid and Siege Presentation Video from Launch Event
• Project Torque: Teaser Video
• Chronicles of Spellborn Screenshots: Quarterstone and Parliament
• City
  of Heroes Issue 12 Video & Screenshots
• Legend of
  Golden Plume Images

Interviews

• SOE:
  Exclusive ION Interview with John Smedley
• Blackstar:
  Exclusive ION Interview with Brandon Reinhart
• Pirates
  of the Burning Sea: Patch 1.5 Details Unveiled in Exclusive Interview
• AoC
  Composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen Interviewed

Editorials

• WoW:
  Editorial - Death Knight Takeover?

Guides

• Game Page Updates at Ten Ton Hamster
  
  • Dofus
  • Runescape
  • Mabinogi
• AoC: Necromancer Class Portal
• AoC:
  Updated Assassin Combo List
• WoW: What's
  Changed in Patch 2.4.2
• WoW: Distinctions
  in World of Warcraft - Guide to Titles

Community

• Dalmarus'

  Vanguard Chronicles: Dead Horses and Phoenix Ashes

• Project Torque: Torque Me Giveaway
• AoC:
  Clan Soup Issue 10 - 5/19/200

Real World News

• Man Says JetBlue Made Him Sit On Toilet [Thanks Kim]
  In other news, drinking JetBlue gives you the diarrhea.
• Hubby Tries To Flog Wife on Ebay [Thanks Bill]
  Complete with picture of wife picking her nose.
• XBox and Hookers on Dad's Credit Card [Thanks Bill]
  They could have saved a lot of cash and just played GTA IV
  
  

Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com. Thanks to Karen Hertzberg for doing the heavy lifting with the links.

- John "Boomjack" Hoskin and the Ten Ton Hammer Team