Funcom has released new info for players looking forward to PvPing in Age of Conan. This short info piece tells us about PvP mini games, siege PvP and more. Age of Conan sports a number of choices for the PvP player, everything from casual, instant fun minigames to massive siege battles to an entire PvP server with friends to make and foes to kill.

Funcom has posted the update notes for the most recent expansion for Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures.

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.

Barbarian play style with a two-handed weapon centers more on knockbacks and crowd control whereas the dual-wielding focuses on extremely high damage per second (DPS) on single targets. His high-end combos will consist of chains of attacks up to around 10, though you won't actually have to enter 10 attack inputs to pull them off. When activating a combo skill in Age of Conan, a small user interface (UI) screen pops up, indicating which attack buttons need to be pressed to successfully execute the attack and the benefit from whatever special effects it triggers. In a 10-hit barbarian combo, Funcom is referring to the amount of times the on-screen avatar will swing at the target, not the number of attack buttons needed to pull off the combo. After all, this isn't Tekken.

The barbarian is meant to be a raging, out-of-control fighter class, but is grouped under the Rogue archetype simply because he won't have the number of hit points of the tank classes, and therefore can't last as long as Soldier-types on a fight's front lines. But, for a Rogue-type, he's pretty survivable. He's also capable of affecting more targets than the assassin (listed next), who deals in large part only with single targets. A few armor breaks and damage-over-time (DoT) effects are available to him, as well.

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．