‘Age of Conan: Unchained’ offers players the option of playing the game for free, without obligation. The business model is a hybrid of the 'store only' free-to-play model and the tiered offering that includes a Premium subscription option.
Funcom is making an open-world multiplayer survival Conan game. It's called Conan Exiles and it's coming to Early Access on PC this summer, then PC and consoles in full after that.
You play an exile in an arid land and need to hunt, or grow crops, for food. You need to build a shelter to live in, and make tools and weapons to fight monsters and other players with. Or you can work together and build entire settlements and strongholds, which sounds interesting - imagine the politics!
The gods of Conan's world will have an influence and you can sacrifice other players on altars to them, brilliantly. Combat will be bloody and fast paced, apparently.
Conan Exiles is primarily a multiplayer game, with both private and public servers to be available, but there will also be a single-player mode.
All of which sounds interesting, but is it a bit late? The PC open-world survival scene is saturated and has been since DayZ, with Ark: Survival Evolved dominating at the moment. Ark is also now on Xbox One.
Whether or not there's any space for Conan Exiles remains to be seen, as does whether it actually materialises on console. Age of Conan never made it, after all, and even the best laid plans tend to warp with an Early Access release.
But Funcom knows online multiplayer games, although has been fruitlessly searching for a hit for years - missing with Age of Conan, The Secret World, and Lego Minifigures Online. It has meant tightened belts and a slimmer operation in recent years. Funcom even announced a single-player game recently, called The Park. It's a horror game and it's coming to PS4 and Xbox One in Q1 2016.
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61 with 47 posters participatingExactly 25 years ago today, NBC gave one of its coveted late-night hosting slots to a complete Hollywood unknown, with only a few TV series' writing credits to his name. That man, Conan O'Brien, celebrated the milestone on Thursday by posting his debut NBC episode on YouTube in its entirety—and promising more to come.
The 38-minute video, scrubbed of its original ads and apparently dubbed from NBC's master tapes, includes a brief caption that hints to a huge archive project. 'Coming January 2019: The complete online archive of Conan’s 25 years in late night,' the caption reads.
The announcement does not include clarification of exactly where this video archive will be hosted, which could prove slightly complicated since that 25-year span includes work for both NBC (a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast) and TBS (a wholly owned subsidiary of Turner). Whether that means the full archive will land on a network-specific video hub, on YouTube, or on O'Brien's own Team Coco site remains to be seen, as the announcement didn't include further details. [Update, 11:13 a.m. ET: O'Brien has since added that the archive will land on 'a brand new web site.']
Further complicating matters is the fact that many episodes of NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien and TBS' Conan include musical guests. It's unclear whether those performances will be posted in the archive or if licensing fees for song performances will restrict their sharing. The 1993 pilot episode in question, conveniently enough, does not include a musical act; instead, it features interviews with John Goodman, Drew Barrymore, and Tony Randall. (O'Brien himself ends the pilot by singing a bizarre and hilarious lullaby as a lead-in to the follow-up show on NBC at the time, Later with Bob Costas. Poor Bob.)
[Update 2, 2:27 p.m. ET: A Team Coco representative declined to answer Ars Technica's questions about the video archive, other than to describe the project as a 'work in progress' at this point. We were told a 'full announce' would come later this year.]
Still, this pilot episode landing on O'Brien's YouTube channel, complete with NBC's original logos and copyright notices (along with a ton of familiar faces) is a good sign that the 'complete online archive' promise won't be held up by a network brouhaha. The 38-minute episode also offers an interesting look at O'Brien and Andy Richter's immediate chemistry so long ago, albeit with a pinch of adorable anxiety. (Highlights include Tom Brokaw joke-threatening O'Brien's life in the opening bit.)
Few other TV series enjoy this kind of 'complete online archive' access, at least outside of paid services. South Park used to be the exception, but its formerly free full episode archive has become more restricted in recent years, as visitors to SouthParkStudios.com are now encouraged to subscribe to Hulu to get full access to the series' 21 seasons.Last year, musician Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) announced a similar surprise-online-archive project by debuting a new site dedicated to his recording output since his career began in 1991. That archive still includes unlimited free streaming access to any album, EP, and single recorded under his various monikers.