In 2006, Electronic Arts (EA) nabbed Mythic Entertainment in an effort to diversify their product output beyond the usual console mix. In a traditional corporate environment, actions such as these are looked upon with scrutiny due to their financial implications. In an entertainment-oriented corporate environment, customer experience holds stock majority – so to speak. Do actions such as these benefit the consumer directly, or do they simply fuel advertisement funding and other business-related functions?

Continue past the cut and decide for yourself!

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Hello dear adventurers. This week in Hyrkanian Insight we’ll be talking about getting to know your class while leveling your “toon” in Age of Conan; and doing that during the process of leveling up and getting to the maximum level, (rather than speeding up to 80 and then having to learn everything about the class while, probably, messing up pulls, heals, or aggro in groups doing an instance or maybe even a raid.)

So, let’s have a look at the possibilities, come with me to the tavern for a friendly chat…

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Hello my barbaric friends. I’ll start wishing Merry Christmas to all of you who follow the festivities and, if you’re not among the group, let me at least wish you… interesting dates. I will not follow the general idea of making top lists, or making balance of what’s already gone with the fading 2010, maybe another time. This week though, I bring you something I hope you’ll find as interesting as I do.

Have you ever wondered where the developers of a game get their ideas? I think I’ve stumbled across one of the sources that served to shape and give color to FunCom’s Age of Conan. Come sit with me and let us discuss this statement…

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Good news, dear barbarians and other species; First batch of 2.1 patch is now live in FunCom’s Age of Conan, and with it a new seasonal event: A Bloody Solstice, where players get to help the Aesir with their Solstice festivities which have been disrupted by the Vanir. At first I thought of making this a special, but since the event is much shorter than I expected, we’ll be having a look at the rest of the patch content, some of which has already been revealed in previous posts here at MMOCrunch.com.

Walk with me, stranger, and let me tell you of all this.

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Oh, hello there. Here you are, yet another week; welcome once more to the world of Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer (formerly Hyborian Adventures.) That’s what expansions do to game names. This week I would like to introduce you to Delinor, ex-“Lord” of a guild in AoC. No, don’t be mistaken, she is not a man; little Deli is a girl, a bird, a woman, a lass. Call her what you want, she definitely is not male. So why on earth do the titles of the different guild government types not change when gender does? It doesn’t make sense at all. Particularly when the tips and tutorial of the game clearly specify that ranks can be customized when, in fact, they can’t be.  But we’ll come back to this point later.

Let’s follow Deli in her ordeal through various events where the words that gave this article its title kept springing to mind…

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Welcome to another chapter of Hyrkanian Insight where we’ll go over more RP (role playing) for yet another week. No, don’t panic, this won’t become endless, as part III will be the last of this series. Or at least the last for now; being a role-player I won’t discard the chance of talking about it more in the future. Raiding, instancing, crafting and almost every other area of game content calls me with equal strength, (except maybe PvP, but that’s mostly because I’m terrible at PvPing and the people I tend to play with prefer the PvE content over PvP, but that’s another story.)

This week I want to talk you about RP Events, which was what I originally had in mind when the Behind the Scenes series started; taking Age of Conan as my base, as usual. Walk with me after the cut and let me guide you through backstage of RP.

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As November comes to an end,  another Age of Conan monthly development update is published.  And this month it brings surprises that hadn’t been released yet. It seems more and more obvious that they’re making an effort to try and introduce something for every gaming style, we’ve heard about the 12player mini game, the social content, the Guardian class revamp and the introducing of the Dreamworld engine, but what hadn’t we heard of yet?

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Well met once more, dear gamers. Last week we talked about the basic concepts of Roleplay (RP), what’s to be avoided and generally accepted rules of behavior while interacting with other fellow RPers. This week we will go a step further and get knee deep while wading into more subtle and delicate matters because, after all, everything is the eye of the beholder and fun is a very personal subject.

As always, Age of Conan will be the base theme, for that’s what’s all about in this column: Hyrkanian Insight. Keep your wits and follow me after the jump for more.

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I’ve been trying to write about roleplay (RP) from the first Hyrkanian Insight but, as some of you may already know, it’s such a complex subject I was not certain where to start or how. I am aware that there are many ways to approach RP and that every RPer will have a personal and particular view of things, that being one of the main problems but at the same time one of the best things about Roleplay. So I’ll start from the beginning despite the risk of some of you shaking your head at the basic RP concepts we’ll be reviewing today, nonetheless it is not bad at all to be reminded of some facts because, it is not that uncommon to forget this and that after a few (or more than a few) years of RP.

Usually in every MMORPG there is an RP server. This means this server will have special rules in order to encourage and ensure the immersion in the game atmosphere. I was surprised to discover that FunCom’s Age of Conan only offers PvP-RP server for the US servers, while there are PvP-RP and PvE-RP for the EU version of the game. Ride with me after the jump to read more.

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When was the last time you actually did laugh out loud while gaming? And when was the last time you got angry? We all play to have fun, but in many occasions the game becomes something more, providing many good moments but also frustration and even stress. Are we really aware when a game becomes an obligation? It usually is a slow process of which we won’t be aware until it has affected us so much that we need to take a break from the game, or even makes us quit for good, sometimes not to come back again despite having friends there.

Let’s have a look at a different approach to the gaming world of MMOs, and to the world of FunComs Age of Conan in particular.

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