14 DAY TRIAL // There are many voices claiming that Ago of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is the title that could take the throne of best MMORPG from World of Warcraft. Although a few years behind and with a different, more "mature" approach to the game, Age of Conan really is a competitor to the throne. It will probably remain like that since the WoW-mania seems hard to beat at the moment, but that does not matter too much.
What matters is that Funcom's MMO will be officially, fully released tomorrow, on the 20th of May (with a 23rd of May release date set for Europe) and the game is already sold out almost everywhere. In a press statement earlier this day, Funcom proudly announced that all the Collector's Edition had sold out weeks ago and extra copies had been ordered - only to sell out, as well. Also, the regular pre-order campaign is working great and the developers are having trouble already due to server limitations and lack of physical copies of the game!
All in all, 111,000 Collector's Edition units have been sold since January and no less than 700,000 regular units are expected to be sold only in North America on day one. No matter if we're talking about a MMO or an offline game, these numbers are really impressive. And, since they're probably going to grow as soon as people start talking about the game, Funcom has decided to order extra servers in order to facilitate handling more customers.
"Everyone in Funcom is delighted and humbled with the historical pre-order numbers for Age of Conan. If the information we have is correct, they represent the highest pre-order number for any global launch of an original PC game, ever, including the original World of Warcraft launch," said Morten Larssen, Funcom's VP of Sales & Marketing.
So, it seems that battle is on! Might good old World of Warcraft lose in front of the Cimmerian?