Age of Conan is consistently mentioned as one of the most anticipated PC games in development. It has received more than 25 covers on high-profile gaming magazines across the globe and more than 15 major awards, including numerous "Best MMO of E3" awards and the official "Best Online Game" award at the Games Convention 2007. Age of Conan is a key title in Microsoft's Games for Windows line-up, and a showcase title for nVidia. The game is set to launch in several territories on May 20, 2008.

The unique PvP weekend marks an escalation in the stress testing for Age of Conan, and aspiring barbarians can now sign up on GameSpot's website. The 15,000 lucky winners will be then contacted by email on Wednesday the 16th of April, and then they can then start downloading the game. The servers open at 4 p.m. EST Friday the 18th of April and close at 4 p.m. EST on Sunday the 20th of April. Funcom would like to point out that the PvP weekend is still part of the beta testing process, and that it is a part of the planned stress test escalations towards launch. As such, it is not fully representative of the final product, and players are asked to treat it accordingly. Stress traffic issues may occur.

Age of Conan's PvP minigames include: * Capture the Skull You will join one of two teams with the goal of capturing the opposing side's skull as many times as possible. They will, of course, not take kindly to this and will try to stop you.

May 20, 2008 - The U.S. servers for Funcom's long-anticipated Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures are now live and, based on our experience so far, things seem to be going fairly well. Launch periods are critical for any massively multiplayer online game, as there are plenty of other alternatives out there. Nobody wants to stick with something that's broken.

We won't have a review posted for quite some time since it's a gigantic game with myriad facets to consider. Over the coming weeks we'll bring you impressions of our experience as we check out the content after level 20, the open-world exploration, free-for-all player-versus-player [PvP] combat, arena PvP, and trade skill systems.

If you're unfamiliar with how combat works in the game, set to release next month, we already went over the basics in yesterday's article. Before we get into the remaining six classes, though, we'll give a little more detail on character creation. In Age of Conan, you can pick a racial type of character before selecting a class, though doing so doesn't actually affect your statistics. Instead, it limits your class selection. Picking a Cimmerian restricts you to picking between guardians, dark templar, conquerors, bear shaman, barbarians, and rangers. An Aquilonian get access to guardians, dark templar, conquerors, priests of Mitra, barbarians, assassins, and rangers. To get access to the Mage-types you'll have to be Stygian, whose available classes include tempests of Set, assassins, rangers, demonologists, heralds of Xotli, and necromancers.

Continuing the trend of hybrid classes in Age of Conan, none of the following are strictly limited to their primary role. The Rogue-types are basically meant to be lightly-armored damage dealers, but all have ways of strengthening themselves in other areas. Same goes for the Mage-types, whose classes' strengths range from straightforward ranged damage spells to demon forms to commanding hordes of pets on the battlefield.

There are corruption and lotus branches of the feat tree. Assigning points to the corruption branch give the assassin unholy DoTs, life and stamina leeches, and they shore up his armor rating to a degree. Abilities triggered from this branch will require varying numbers of soul fragments, which are gained by successfully completing combos.

Your first quest is given to you by a fellow refugee, who speaks to you in an interactive cinematic sequence complete with camera close-up and branching dialogue options, reminiscent of single-player games like Knights of the Old Republic and The Elder Scrolls IV： Oblivion． As we soon learned from this conversation, another survivor from the slave galley has washed ashore--the head slaver, who has fled to the nearby town and must be slain before he can alert the authorities to your presence． Along our path, we also found a half-naked Stygian woman bound to opposing trees by her wrists--we spoke with the woman in another cinematic dialogue to find that in order to free her, we'd have to forcibly convince a scavenger to part with the key． We readied our splintered oar and went hunting．

The early version of the game we played already has a working interface that nests most major menus (such as your character's inventory and skills) along the top of the screen, while including a mini-map in the bottom-right corner of the screen and your combat menu at the bottom center of the screen． In the PC version of the game, by default, you use your W, A, S, and D keys to move as you would in a first-person shooter, and you also use your Q, E, and your number keys 1 to 3 to perform melee weapon attacks, which include a forward thrust (the 2 key), overhand diagonal slashes (1 and 3 keys), and horizontal slashes (Q and E); all five buttons are also represented onscreen as labeled icons． When you begin your career, you'll have no real skill in combat, though your enemies will also be weaklings．