For those of you thought that the open beta for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is going to be a cruise in the beach, well think again. The confusion during CES 2008 about this is now being clarified by Funcom.

According to the company, a registration and an application process will still be necessary to join the open beta. To know more about this, head on over to the full article via the "read more" link below.

It's been a long standing rumor whether or not the best selling World of Warcraft will be hitting the consoles ever since its release in 2004.

During a recent interview with Chris Ansell during the CES 2008, he talked about the next step in online gaming for the consoles and was quoted saying that their latest game Prototype will be taking a page from the world renowned MMORPG. For more details, read the full article after the jump!

Sony Online Entertainment's going to the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with demos in tow. Among other titles, SOE's bringing The Agency for the PlayStation 3, and two of its upcoming MMORPGs, Free Realms and Pirates of the Burning Sea. Read more in our full article.

Hell hath no fury like a barbarian drunk, so probably sayeth Funcom about Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventuresfor the PC... and Xbox 360. Funcom reps at CES 2007 explained to MMORPG.com many of the game's mechanics and gameplay, running on Windows Vista PCs.

One of the more unique aspects of the game they showed off was using the Xbox 360 controller with the PC. It will be one of the cooler features of Vista that devs will simply love to abuse, and it should make interplay with Xbox 360 players easier.

Connected to that is the Real Combat system of the game. You can target specific parts of an enemy in battle. You can hit multiple enemies with a wide swing attack, you can ride mounts and ram a lance through someone's barbarian behind, and there's no auto-fire with bows, necessitating a busy trigger finger.

From combat, PvP battles is the next logical step. There will be three variants of player-vs.-player, says Funcom. First is the Drunken Brawl, where levels and equipment do not matter, but the skills at hand and the beer in your belly count the most. And the bartender is calling the sheriff - again - as we speak. The second is the Mini-Game type, more traditional and arena-based, with in-game matchmaking. Finally, there's siege/massive PvP, with entire guilds clashing on the field to take over or keep each guild's... keep. That should prove quite the interesting end-game PvP.

Outside of PvP (and perhaps in PvP as well), there are many ways of interacting with your environment to deal with NPC enemies. Like in Metal Gear Solid, each NPC will have a radius of sight and hearing, and will react to movement or sounds within that radius. Distracting guards with thrown rocks or projectiles is one way of unbalancing them. Another way, revealed by Funcom, is to poison their drinking wells.

You bad barbarian, you. Yet another sin you can commit in the chaotic world of Hyboria is to cast dark spells. "If you draw too much dark magic, you could end up in hell, tormented by demons." Tsk, tsk. Wrath, after all, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. You could fight your way out of hell, though, they say. But with all the killing and getting drunk on the field, who knows if you've just punched a return ticket for your character?

What happens when MMORPG and Turbine's Adam Mersky meet in CES 2007? Lotsa new info on how The Lord of the Rings Online will work. Starting with the fact that it will run on DX9, thank Eru. After costing out the needs of a massive Last Alliance of Men and Elves (again), including all the lembas bread being made in Gino D.'s Cooking Mama (we're making them right now in time for Helm's Deep), there is no room left in the budget for a Vista-D3D10 upgrade.

It will still look beautiful, though - next! What is Hope and Dread? It's a LOTRO-unique gameplay concept that works like this: the closer you get to the blasted lands of Mordor where shadows lie, the greater the chance your character will pee his pants. Literally. He accumulates Dread the longer he stays in the blighted lands. The only ways to combat this is (a) get the heck out of Mordor, or (b) start beating up on some Mordor denizens to gain Hope and combat Dread. Talk about the Light of the Evenstar encouraging violence...

You already know "Monsters" as Monster Play, from a dev journal a while back. Here are the more specific deets: the only way you can have a PvP in the Lord of the Rings IP is if one of you guys plays the bad guys. Which is what Monster Play is all about: take over the avatar of a bad guy, beat the crap out of the player good guy, earn experience that is used on your own original good-guy character.

And then Adam brings up a unique (potential) social event in LOTRO. "Player jam sessions!" Create-your-own-soundtrack? Spend your hard-earned gold on instruments, gather all your friends and acquaintances one night under the Party Tree in the Shire and... Are you ready to rock tonight, Bag End?! Guitar solo, Frodo! Good night everybody!!! (Smashes instruments on stage... methinks they are possessed by the One Ring). You get the idea, right?

One word to all those planning to hold their own LOTR jam sessions, though: you guys better have the talent these guys have. Oh, and this brings up an old joke from an old teen flick: "And this one time, at band camp..."

It didn't take a squad of Roman legionnaires from MMORPG to pin down Perpetual Entertainment's Richard Zinser, VP-Game Services, and ask about Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising. CES 2007 was an opportunity for Perpetual to show off the squad battle system of the game, and for MMORPG to ask Perpetual about the squad battle system of the game.

There are three basic classes of minions to round out your squad: the hacking infantry, the run-and-gunning (or arrowing) skirmisher, although he does have limited melee skills, and the healer/caster spell caster. They can be grouped together or commanded separately. You can command them to stand down or stand on alert. If you leave them, you can regroup them on command, or they will return to home and await further instructions if you go too far (although it seems that you can go quite far before they go home).

They will also belch, on command, "This is my gladius. There are many like it, but this is mine. And I named mine Shirley!" Kidding. This ain't Full Iron Scabbard.

You, as squad commander, are responsible for their care and needs. You have the responsibility of equipping them with the latest in Roman butt-kicking and butt-protecting technology. You, as squad cdr., must choose which of your minions will accompany you in a quest - the size of your squad depends on your level. You, as squad cdr., can set the aggression level of your squad AI using sliders, so they can either focus on offense or defense. You, as squad cdr., will be trained and expected to understand the mechanics of using minions and squads - one of the beginner-level quests revolves around getting your first minion.

And you, as squad cdr., pay their salaries. Zinser says free minions will be few and far in between. Great. We wonder what the minimum wage policy of the Roman Army is...

MMORPG.com managed to catch Sony Online Entertainment's Scott Hartsman during CES 2007 in Las Vegas. Not that Scott needed any cornering, as he's quite pleased with how EverQuest II: Echoes of Faydwer is turning out afterall. As for the meat of the cornering interview: the return of the Estate of Unrest.

Which is to say, it ain't returning... yet, since it didn't make it in time for the Echoes launch. BUT it will be provided for free in the next scheduled update of EQII this February. Okay, so when the Estate opens up in February, will it be as homey and familiar as it was in the first EverQuest? "The biggest hurdle we have to overcome in defining the old zones is how to re-introduce the zone in EverQuest II without copying EverQuest," Scott tells MMORPG. Beyond a few (and obvious) similarities, such as the hedge maze, the entire zone itself has been expanded for its EverQuest II appearance.

The Estate will be "a playground" for those levels 65-70, so to the lower-levelled: you have been warned. There will be a number of mini-bosses in the zone, as will be trains, but they won't be as epic as in the first EQ and not as aggro (at least not through floors).

Finally, speaking of meat, we now quote the MMORPG writer who says thus:

Well… there’s the matter of a really buff, manly-man drool-worthy Fae male… but when Scott puffs out his chest and tells me how buff his Fae is, how can I gainsay him?

Okay, too much info.

Despite reports that Perpetual Entertainment's alleged employee lay-off, and rumors about the actual reason for the move of the ship date of their MMORPG, Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, community response still seems to be very much positive.

General sentiment is that players prefer a polished game. So how's the "polishing" been going so far? Here's a trailer for the game that was released in this year's CES 2007, see for yourselves:

Yep, it's a game filled with Titans, Medusa, Hydras, and... zombie Minotaurs?

We reported yesterday that Hellgate: London's multiplayer component would be a subscription-based online service. This statement came from a Bill Roper interview with Shacknews at CES. Well, Roper is now out to clarify things about that.

In a Shacknews update, he clarified that the monthly fee subscription model is just one of the many options being evaluated by its studio and its publishers (EA and Namco Bandai). Bottom line - for now there is no concrete plan as to how they would go about this aspect of the game.

Aside from that clarification, he also noted that the game would have a "kind of free" online mode that gamers will be able to access. This one will not include the full MMO features and Roper and his team are still looking for a solution that would be acceptable to players, but at the same time, would bring revenue to the development side. Well, having the best of both worlds is no easy feat, that we are sure of.

As to what kind of service you would be entitled to if you get the full Hellgate: London MMO, here's what Mr. Roper said:

What you're getting with that service is you're getting 24/7 customer service, secure servers, databases, and the biggest thing is that you're getting continuing content...We'll have a full dev team that's on the project from day one. Actually, right when you buy the game, when it launches there will already be content available that you can't get in the single-player--additional monsters, areas, all the community and economy things, you'll be able to form guilds, auction houses, all those things you expect from MMOs.

Based on the movie that made pirates uber-cool again, Pirates of the Caribbean Online is now almost visible on the horizon. During his recent keynote at the CES, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced what every Capt. Jack Sparrow wanna-be has been been waiting for - the arrival of the Black Pearl on the MMORPG scene.

The game's Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) given by Iger isn't exactly solid - sometime later this year - but it will do for now. The important thing is the ship is getting closer to shore. Before you know it, the air will be thick with adventure. Ahoy, ye mangy seadogs, ye best brush up on your pirate lingo!