As of 8am Monday May 12th, the Age of Conan EarlyAccess service is now live for United States players. So if you had been waiting on the ‘official’ word, make sure to check your mailbox and spam folder for the link. Alternatively you can simply login to register.ageofconan.com and the download link will appear under the header graphic.

This service for pre-order customers that opted to pay the extra 5$ for the download access and head start quickly spawned over 100 pages of trolling, flames, outrage, and fanboy defense of Funcom as the official start date was routinely pushed back due to ‘technical glitches’.

After 2 days of delays, many concerned subscribers on slower DSL or dialup connections were left to wonder if they’d even be able to complete the 12.1GB download plus patches by the 17th jump start date.

As an example, a slower suburban or rural DSL line downloading at 40kb/s would barely make the start date if started today with an aproximate completion time of around 5 days of 24/7 downloading.

This setback continues as just one more small glitch further marring the experience of this highly anticipated MMO launch.

-Scott

At the time of this post the Age of Conan forums are also down due to missing php files, whether this is due to a Funcom upgrade of the forums, or their being hacked is unknown. Update: Forums are back after an unnannounced upgrade.

Felicia Day (2nd from left) and members of the cast and crew of “The Guild” the Greenlight Awards winner for “Best Original Production”. DungeonRun would like to congratulate the Guild cast in their well deserved award!

In addition to receiving a cash award, the show will also have an opportunity to develop and distribute their shows through ON Networks and its worldwide syndication partners. This also includes an exclusive, one-month syndication deal on Xbox LIVE.

A follow-up report by Next-Generation has NCsoft’s response to what they’re characterizing as “sloppy” and “sensational” article. (To be fair with the criticism, some of their own subscribers may characterize Tabula Rasa as “buggy”, “hyped”, and lacking in the end-game too. -Scott)

While Swofford acknowledged that the game “could have done a little better” and that “there’s a possibility that there could be downsizing with the TR team”, he was keen to counter a number of the claims made.

“The Korea Times English edition story is full of inaccuracies,” he said. “No one at NCsoft said the product is a financial disaster. That came from the writer and is his opinion.

“The TR development did not cost $100 million. I don’t know where that came from. The price tag for the product was much less…a fraction of that cost. Tabula Rasa was not restarted more than twice. It had one overhaul and that came after 2-3 years of development.

“The article made it sound like the TR launch led to some sort of falling out with Robert Garriott. That is so far from the truth. In fact Robert has been promoted to work more with CEO TJ Kim on business development. Yes Robert is out of the day-to-day operations, but he’s still in the office and now travels much more for the company than he did before.

“Yes there’s a possibility that there could be downsizing with the TR team. Some of that is due to the cyclical nature of game development (product is out and the team downsizes). Some is due to the fact that the product could have done a little better. But there is a lot going on with the TR team. They are working on more updates. We are planning a Japan launch later in the year. And the company is planning on investing millions into the product, so it’s not going away and in fact we have plans to grow it.

“The Korea Times story was very inflammatory. The writer is notorious for writing sloppy and sensational articles about NCsoft. Also the Korea Times English edition is not the same as the Korea Times printed in Korean. It’s (the English edition) very low on the totem pole and is not any sort of high standard for journalism in Korea.”

Source: Next-Gen

Like a second bit sidekick tossed aside and forgotten the Marvel Universe MMO has been cancelled by Microsoft.

After months of rumors it simply came down to Microsoft not wanting to pursue investment in the MMO without subscriber and revenue projections on par with the only MMO they qualify as a success, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

“I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO,” Microsoft Game Studios VP Shane Kim told MTV Multiplayer at last week’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas.

“It was an amicable decision…. It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”

Rumors that Marvel Universe had been canned first emerged on 1Up. Shortly after, an industry insider told Next-Gen that plans to release the Marvel superhero-themed MMO had been terminated.

Microsoft had been strangely evasive about the fate of the MMO until now. The rumors originated in November 2007, and in the weeks following, the software maker either insisted that the game was still in development or wouldn’t comment at all.

Kim was hesitant to tell Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo that something “went wrong” with the development of the game. But Kim did say that Microsoft began development of Marvel Universe with plans to make it a subscription-based MMO. Microsoft eventually found the venture too risky.

“…If you really look at the data there’s basically one [MMO] that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success,” he said. “And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors [in canceling the game].”

This is certainly disappointing news to see yet another MMO project aborted early, but a typical decision by a large mega-corporation that doesn’t want to invest resources in a project that’s not guaranteed a very large obscene lottery sized return on investment. If only they could have saved many of us the agony and realize the same thing before releasing Asheron’s Call 2 - years ago before shutting it down.

I’m not the only ones left saying WTF at this decision either.

In any case, yet another super hero MMO that didn’t even appear to have a strong or firm grasp on its gameplay by its developers is probably better off being canned.

So on behalf of MMO gamers, thank you Microsoft for not recognizing that there are MANY successful MMO’s already in this market, you’d probably try to force subscribers to use XBox Live for PC’s to sign-in and play anyway.

Source: Next-Gen