There rest of the new updates are more general enhancements, including: improved player-made villages, adding new NPCs and additional choices and benefits; new social features, such as a "combo-based dancing system" motion-captured by real professional dancers; plans to add up to 60 additional quests with full voice acting; and a continued effort to improve customer relations, and listen to and implement community feedback.

When questioned, Rock Band distributor Electronic Arts provided Shacknews with a response that neither confirms nor denies claims of a Rock Band sequel and Turbonegro's involvement.

Top that off with the usual quest updates, and your schedule is pretty heavy for the rest of the year. For more info about the Bounty System and the eventual ASnti-Greifing Prison System, check out The MMO Report: Age of Conan Special. They got an interview with Funcom developer Jason Stone back when the game launched, and he talked about some elements of the game that haven't been "officially" announced yet.

Let's hope Funcom smoothes out these technical issues with downloadable updates and new servers added to handle the traffic, because those interested in an epic, open-ended online fantasy adventure will find Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures worth the price of admission.

Of course, shipping a million units is one thing, getting players to subscribe for more than a month or two is the real success metric. I've been playing Conan for a couple of weeks now and while the more involved combat and character physicality are welcome MMO innovations I won't be subscribing just yet. For a start my laptop - a decent ram-packed high-end one bought about a year ago - may have finally met its match with Conan. Unlike WoW, which could probably run on an Atari ST* Age of Conan demands the latest hardware to play smoothly at any kind of decent resolution. More importantly Conan is full of zoning. These loading screens between areas, buildings and cities are hugely annoying immersion-breakers.

click the back button into the main Conan directory and double click the ConanPatcher.exe file. This will run the patch again, and replace the corrupt file that you deleted. If you get a different error code after this, there may be another issue that will force you to play the email tag game with funcom, but this is a common problem and will work in most cases.

Rumors and complaints were fueled by FunCom's initial silence on the matter, but the company issued a statement earlier today indicating the gender difference was unintentional. "There should of course be no difference between a male and a female character of the same class (other than the looks)," FunCom Community Manager Oliver Kunz said in a forum post.

Our review of Age of Conan will be coming very soon, but in the meantime we've already written up a set of mostly positive impressions on the title.

The rest of the top mainly went to either Electronic Arts or Blizzard, with armies of Sims and World of Warcraft dwellers fighting for each step.

Depending on which race you selected, you'll be sent to one of three kingdoms coming out of Tortage: mountainous Cimmeria to the north, scorched Stygia to the south, and Aquilonia sandwiched between. Each kingdom has its own zone for leveling between 20 and the mid to upper 30s and offers plenty of quests for the player. Overall it's the same kind of questing structure seen in role-playing games for years, as you move from NPC settlement to NPC settlement and pick up kill, collection, or delivery quests, but it works well within its predictable patterns. Funcom tried to mix things up a bit by making all quest discussions with NPCs take place in dialogue cut-scene form like you'd see in a BioWare game, which at least gives you a close up view of the NPC so they're not quite as faceless as quest givers usually are.